23/06/2025 Monday Nones Summary: Music is disappearing from our way of life. Communal music-making as a cultural practice is being supplanted with the musician-audience configuration of art music’s concert culture, as exported wholesale to other genres over the 20th century.

1. Communal singing in Slovenia

True informal, communal music-making is not a concert. There is no silent designated audience whose job is to politely absorb the performance. There are no designated performers, trained experts who are required to perform for the entertainment of others. Rather, there is no stark delineation between these roles. Everyone is in equal parts performer, and listener. The entertainment comes not from listening to the music, but from the act of making it. It’s like playing sports for fun: while we think of professional sports as entertainment to be observed, playing sports for fun is done for the enjoyment of playing the sport yourself, even though those around you may indeed derive some extra enjoyment from watching.

And notably, this kind of communal music-making almost always stems from an oral tradition – these are not professionally trained musicians. This is the setting in which some of my most formative musical experiences took place. My mother is Slovenian, and when I was a child growing up in Germany, 2-3 times per year we would fly/drive down to Slovenia to visit my maternal family. We would spend every day at my grandparents’ house, and of course given that they were retired, the daily schedule was structured around meals and not much else. And when there were guests, after the multi-course meal (salad then soup then main then supermarket cookies) my grandfather would grab a guitar and everyone would sing songs together around the table. This was no big, cheesy sing-along, no structured group activity; everyone sat with their cookies and coffee and wine, relaxing, chatting, singing along for a few seconds when it suited them, then going back to their cookies. My grandfather is originally Croatian, moved to Slovenia at around 20 years of age when he met my grandmother, so when his brother Mladen would come to visit the selection would lean towards the Dalmatia klapa songs of their youth; otherwise, it was a mix of Italian, Spanish, and Yugo pop from the 50s-70s, some American country music (he’s big on Willie Nelson), and a few folk songs sprinkled in. When my dad (Greek Cypriot) married into the family, my grandfather learned some Greek songs to bust out when father dearest deigned to join us in Slovenia. But the best nights of my childhood were always when Stric Mladen was around, because him and my grandfather had been singing together since they were little kids. Their non-verbal communication was inspiring. Musically, they knew each other like the back of their hands.

It was in the context of this kind of music-making, when I was about 10 years old, that my grandfather shoved a guitar into my hands and told me to keep up. It was sink or swim. I learned guitar by being thrown into the deep end, through watching, listening(!!!!!!), and imitating. I internalised my grandfather’s DIY strumming patterns, weird metrical quirks, his approach to bass notes. This is the nature of an oral tradition in music. A few years later, when I finally began to get some real music theory and composition/improvisation training, I came to see my grandfather’s playing as defective, untrained, amateurish. But now I see that those features of his musicality which would be labelled “incorrect” by regimented music education are executed with a remarkable consistency across everything he plays; the rules are there, but they’re a different set of rules. The way he randomly shaves off a bet at the end of a cyclical progression, or starts a phrase half way through the bar rather at the downbeat – that’s just how this music works. That’s the rules it’s playing by.

Easily the biggest boon I received from this music was what it did for my ear. Prior to that I had had kiddie piano lessons that involved exactly zero ear training. By being put in a position where I had to learn by listening, I trained my ear entirely by osmosis and by the end of the summer I could identify all the chords of any diatonic and most simple chromatic harmonic progressions (involving simple secondary dominants etc). So while this form of informal music-making is justified on its own terms as an oral tradition, it also offers a unique opportunity to build skills that are applicable to regimented academic music! When I finally went off to university, I tested out of the entire ear training programme at McGill although I had never done any formal ear training in my life, simply because of the skills I built by playing guitar with my grandfather.

2. One Take Tisch

I’m not Jewish, but I do stumble into being the only gentile in the room with improbable frequency. A lot of this was owing to my Jewish ex-boyfriend, through whom I made a ton of friends who were all Jewish. So one place where I have found something similar to the custom of my Slovenian relatives is at Shabbos dinners among Montreal’s Jews. Once the dinner has been eaten, everyone continues to sit at the table or moves to the living room to sing. At Montreal’s now-defunct chapter of Moishe House in Côte-des-neiges (possibly the only chapter of that organisation anywhere in the world that was run by transgender anti-zionist Jews) I spent many Friday evenings basking in the joyous revelry of their singing. Knowing how much I enjoyed it, a friend recommended to me an album that is now easily one of my absolute favourite recordings of all time, and possibly the only one I’ve ever heard that truly captures the spirit of communal, social, traditional music-making in the home. The album is called “One Take Tisch”, and it is a recording of a group of Hasidic men singing at the table after Shabbos dinner, recorded in one take, no rehearsing, no gratuitous editing, just a pristine, unspoilt snapshot of what it means to make music together for entertainment. Even if you stop reading this blog post right here (I can be long-winded), I urge you to go listen to the album in question. It gives me chills every time I listen to it. The singing is beautifully rough around the edges, and the traditional harmonies totally improvised, in a manner that is orally transmitted. Sometimes some of the singers mess up, and it’s right there in the recording. This album is a total work of art.

But it’s not all noble savagery and unspoilt tradition in the world of the Jews. This cultural practice, too, is in decline. I occasionally attended the Shabbos dinners of the McGill Chavurah, where one very particularly active member was always the one to spearhead the singing. He had a great, booming voice, and he would always shepherd everyone into one room so we could sing together. Everyone present (except for yours truly, the expatriate of Christendom) knew the songs from attending Jewish summer camp as children. But the participation was lacklustre at best. The boy who always leads the thing would be forging ahead full steam in his big booming voice and everyone else would be sort of half mumble-singing along. It appeared that they saw it as an annoying, childish group activity, and in particular there seemed to be something of a feeling that the guy was doing it for his ego, out of a desire to perform. This is more Art Music Trickledown Brain Rot. They immediately assume that the motivation to make music is a desire to perform to a passive, receptive audience rather than as a social activity in which everyone can take part. Another symptom of this can be seen in the way we perceive a very common type of guy: the guy who gets out an acoustic guitar at house parties. This guy is regarded with universal contempt, and generally for good reason (annoying) but part of the reason why we hate him so much is his perceived ego. We see him as doing this for himself, performing, so everyone will look at him and give him attention. The fact that this is the truth of his motivations in the vast majority of cases does not help the point I’m trying to make here. But regardless, there is little chance that the people will join in with the singing as a communal activity, as the singalong is seen as a childish summer camp activity above all else.

3. Alex and Jesse

We all have embarrassing moments that keep us up at night, and though every instinct in my body is screaming not to, I’m gonna share one of mine with you. I was around 13 years old, living in Germany, wildly pubescent and awkward. Having learnt the guitar some years prior, I eventually bought a ukulele, which I spent a lot of my free time playing in my bedroom. It was in this context that my godfather’s son and his girlfriend came to spend a few days with us in the autumn. His girlfriend was a fairly established jazz singer who was about to embark on a tour of Europe, so they decided to kick things off with a week of holiday, which they began by staying with us. The outermost outskirts of Düsseldorf aren’t exactly a holiday destination but having a relative whose basement you can sleep in free of charge will bring you to the ends of the earth. That first night my dad made a big show of cooking a rack of lamb for everyone, the wine was flowing, we were generally having about as good of a time as you can possibly have in a bland, IKEA-furnished rented duplex in Kaiserswerth. After the dessert plates had been cleared and the supply of wine was becoming alarmingly short, my mum, no doubt recalling the musical sobremesas of her own family, excitedly told me to get out the ukulele so we could sing some music. Ever the nasty little diva since even the lamb-white days of my childhood, I sprang into action, eager to entertain. I sat back down at the table with my ugly little sunburst Mahalo uke and began to pluck idly. I asked people what they wanted to sing. Crickets. It wasn’t looking good. To cut the tension I started playing some of the old favourites from singing with my grandfather, which of course these people had never heard before in their lives, and they didn’t understand Croatian, or Italian, so that just wasn’t working at all. Finally my mum suggested that I play “What’s up” by 4 Non Blondes, something that everyone was likely to know and could sing along to. It seemed like a good solution at the time. And so I start, and yet still, nobody is joining in, but we settled on this one and I have to commit now, I can’t just trail off. So there I am, awkwardly, lacklustrely strumming the ukulele, my cracking, scratchy, pubescent voice a ridiculous contrast to my mum’s smooth and mature but completely out of tune tones. And they’re staring at me. They’re all staring at me. “Heyyy-eyyy-eyyy-eyy ya, Heyyy-eyyy-eyy”... the silence in the room was physically painful. Jesse coughed uncomfortably and looked down into her lap. You could see the gears in Alex’s head working overtime, desperately trying to come up with a plausible reason for why he and his girlfriend had to excuse themselves and head to bed. The song seemed to be interminable, but it finally did come to a whimpering end. After the strings stopped ringing, nobody seemed to know what to say. “Great”, Alex managed to say feebly. We elected to adjourn very soon thereafter.

Some days later, when our psyches had sufficiently recovered, my mother and I debriefed on the incident. We both had the same analysis of what went wrong. Those two did not understand what it is to sing communally for enjoyment. They were expecting a performance. They were a model audience by the standards of Western Art Music’s fossilised romantic-era concert culture, which has now trickled down to all levels of music-making in our society. They sat quietly and attentively, taking great care to do nothing that would distract from the music. But of course, in Slovenia, when the singing is happening everyone is drinking, eating dessert, smoking at the table, and most importantly, SINGING ALONG. There is no expectation of a virtuosic performance. The people are not expected to attentively listen to the music. What’s more important is participation – it’s something fun to do, a group activity, akin to Westerners’ after-dinner favourite, the oh-so odious and loathsome board games.

The one thing that’s missing here is that if I want to bemoan the loss of a particular cultural artefact, I do need to justify why that cultural practice is a good thing that is worth preserving. So people don’t make music for fun anymore – what’s the big deal? Of course, I could drone on for hours about all the studies your middle school choir teacher would tell you about that show that singing in a group is more effective than antidepressants or how playing an instrument gives you cognitive superpowers or whatever. But as much as I do believe in all of that, I think that a much more persuasive justification is that making music is simply an integral part of what it means to be human and as our culture moves towards a sterilised state of affairs where artistic practice is a profession reserved for academy-trained professionals, a greater chasm is drawn between us and our own humanity, the part of our humanity that lives in music. We are no longer authorised to make music, because what it means to “make music” or “be a musician” is so laden with baggage of training and qualifications and artistry. The average person doesn’t sing anymore. Maybe, a little bit, embarrassedly, shamefully, in the privacy of their own bedroom as they tidy up their cluttered floor, taking great pains to hide it from the prying ears of others as though it were as vulgar and shameful an activity as masturbation. And in the oral transmission of folk songs, we inherit stories as heirlooms, the history and identity of a culture woven into sound like an aural tapestry. And in the traditional transmission of instrument playing and singing, we get the unique evolution and development of a musical tradition over time – a man teaches his son, who teaches his son, and through a great generational game of telephone the tradition changes and grows, developing a shape and identity that carries within it on some level the unique fingerprint of all its practitioners. That’s something worth preserving.

4. What is to be done? Burning Questions of My Musical Crusade

Last month, Stric Mladen died in his sleep, and with that, my grandfather became a solo act. Mladen must have been 84 or 85 years old. My Dedi is slowing down. He still plays his guitar every day, but he doesn’t remember all the lyrics anymore. I’m across the world in Montreal. My mum is in France. My aunt and all of her kids and grandkids are still in Slovenia, but they're not interested in keeping that tradition alive. In Cyprus, my paternal family doesn't dance zeibekiko at family gatherings anymore, the way they did when I was a kid. If we can’t keep continuity with that past, then at the very least, it falls to us to make something new.

Earlier in this post I briefly touched on how the professionalisation of music has led to the act of music-making being reserved for a certain class of trained professionals. However, this does not necessarily mean that that same spirit of communal music-making lives on for those in the professional musician class. In the mainstream performance culture it’s virtually non-existent. One place where something akin to that does exist is in the sphere of Early Music, something which I believe can be ascribed to EM’s origins as a countercultural discipline of amateurs in the early-to-mid 20th century. However even in Early Music, there is an expectation of displays of technical virtuosity, artistry, and a certain amount of text-faithfulness and refinement, making it much less spontaneous than true informal collective music-making. These jam sessions will centre on a score, which you will sight-read with various other musicians. Once again, oral transmission and spontaneous improvisation are non-existent. Another feature of informal collective music-making is simply making do with what you’ve got – if you have one guitar and several people, then one person plays and the rest sing. With an early music jam, by contrast, people will painstakingly select repertoire that is appropriate for the assembled forces. Maybe a flute will play an oboe part or some other small substitution like that, but in the end the dogma of good taste wins out. Jazz has perfect infrastructure for a culture of informal collective music-making, with its large body of standards that everyone knows and highly developed concept of improvisation. But as jazz moves further and further into the conservatoire/art music model that it originally developed as a means by which to seek legitimacy from a Western Art Music standpoint, there comes greater baggage, a greater expectation of training, virtuosity, and “professionalism” in music-making.

I’ve found some limited success with late renaissance/early baroque rounds, canons, and catches, which are easily taught, easily executed, and buckets of fun for everyone involved. I have several friends with whom I sing canons and catches for entertainment. Sometimes we sing some of the ones we have memorised as we walk through the city, attracting the delight of passers-by.



-A