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What singing has given me over the time I have been involved in it is a huge sense of both enjoyment and inspiration. The enjoyment comes through doing something well and giving other people pleasure through your music. The inspiration that singing provides is a desire to get better and aspire to achieve a goal. Whether this goal be singing in one of the world's great concert halls or opera houses or simply performing in a local church or school, the feeling of direction that singing provides is something that I feel no one should be deprived of.
Young people, particularly boys, who become involved in classical singing often get teased to a certain extent by friends, who think that because it doesn't involve violence, physical activity or a heavy bass line, it is not 'cool'. This might be acceptable to some people, but to me it is simply a simple way out of something that many people, whether they know it or not, really do enjoy. Many of the world's most famous people are singers, idolized and analyzed by countless numbers of children and adults. What makes them so different from those singers who sing religious music or opera? Of course the genre is different and so therefore the sound is different but ultimately its still singing. They are still making a sound using their voice and so why is the truly incredible music that has encapsulated the world for many hundreds of years being shunned by today's youth?
Taking music, in the form that we might understand, back to its absolute core involves looking at the earliest of Gregorian chants. These simple, tranquil melodies, that filled buildings for decades are the foundations of all music to date. After this monophonic music came the early harmony, using 4ths and 5ths, then the triad was developed along with a unanimous system of notation. The polyphonic masses of renaissance composers Byrd and Palestrina, then came Bach, the shift into the Baroque era, dominated by Handel's scything melodies, the classical and romantic eras, Schumann to Debussy, Beethoven to Verdi, then the likes of C.V Stanford, William Walton and C.H.H. Parry, so many wonderful composers, formulating and developing styles and modes of music, all leading up to the popular music of today. The technical intricacies of the music accepted today as being 'cool', have been formed and moulded, shaped and reshaped, over many hundreds of years. And the interesting thing is that all of this stemmed from the simplest, one line chant, sung to worship God. Sung by people who could not even dream about the music of today. Music may have changed, and culture may have changed, but singing is something that has remained an absolute constant. How can people frown upon the singing of music, without which we would not be ' living the vida loca'?
