{"id":109025,"date":"2019-12-17T10:19:48","date_gmt":"2019-12-17T16:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/?p=109025"},"modified":"2025-12-23T12:29:42","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T18:29:42","slug":"the-lost-pleasures-of-group-singing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/featured\/the-lost-pleasures-of-group-singing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lost Pleasures of Group Singing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Vintage<\/a><\/p>\n

To look through the photographic archives of bygone eras is to notice the prevalence of a common scene: people singing in groups. People singing in pews at church and with their families at home; people singing in bars and barracks, campgrounds and community gatherings.<\/p>\n

Such scenes have largely faded from our cultural photobook.<\/p>\n

Maybe you sang with your classmates as a child (though even this experience has been curtailed along with cuts to school music programs). But when was the last time you sang in a group as a grown-up? Maybe it was the national anthem before a sporting event, \u201cTake Me Out to the Ballgame\u201d during the seventh inning stretch of a baseball game, \u201cSilent Night\u201d at Christmas Eve mass, or \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d at your niece\u2019s party. As you search your mind for such experiences though, chances are good that those you can conjure up from the past year are fairly few and far between.<\/p>\n

There are numerous factors behind the decline in communal singing. The first is that we, of course, spend less time in groups in general, and are more isolated in the modern age. Then there\u2019s the increasing heterogeneity of society; for communal singing to happen, a culture has to have a communal stock of music \u2014 songs that everyone, from every walk of life, knows the lyrics to. Hymns used to make up a large part of this collective songbook, but people are statistically less apt to attend church these days, and when they do go, it\u2019s frequently to a non-denominational, megachurch type congregation, in which the music can feel more like something to be spectated than participated in, and the songs often change each week, disappearing from the line-up before everyone\u2019s learned the words.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve also become more preoccupied with looking cool, and singing in front of others can make us feel insecure and dorky. And we simply have more forms of entertainment available these days than in the past, when gathering around the piano in the parlor was considered a good time.<\/p>\n

Yet, while communal singing has gotten more infrequent, we arguably need it now more than ever.<\/p>\n

The Benefits of Singing in a Group<\/h3>\n

\"Vantage<\/a><\/p>\n

In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing<\/em><\/a>, Daniel Pink muses that communal singing ought to be seen in the same way as physical exercise; that is, as \u201cone of the few activities in life that is [so] indisputably good for us . . . People would be silly not <\/em>to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, the research-backed benefits of group singing are numerous<\/a>, and extend to both body and mind:<\/p>\n