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Published: Sunday, 29 December 2024 at 10:30 AM
Why making music together in the home is a wonderful way to unite families
Read on to discover why making music together in the home is hugely beneficial for families…
Making music together… Christmas sing-alongs
Many decades on, my most vivid memory of childhood Christmases doesn’t involve twinkling fairy-lights, turkey with all the trimmings or boozy uncles behaving badly – though all of that featured in our little London semi. No, what I recall most clearly is the magic moment, at about 7pm on Christmas Day, when a dozen neighbours would crowd into our living room and my dad would sit at the piano, a glass of Dubonnet perched precariously on top, and start playing song after song for everyone to join in.
He never used sheet music and never had to stop to think what tune to play next. He had that gift, honed through years in dance bands and as a hotel pianist, of being able to recall hundreds of Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter tunes, perfectly harmonised, stylishly embellished, from memory.
I don’t have anything like that talent but I still try to keep the tradition going chez Morrison by inflicting a Christmas singsong on my children and grandchildren. To be fair, they indulge my whim with a reasonable imitation of enthusiasm. Inevitably the repertoire has changed over the decades, but not the intention – that, at least once a year, the whole family should engage in a bit of communal music-making.
Recreating the parlour song of Queen Victoria’s day
Some, like the incredible singing Bevan family and the Kanneh-Masons, have carried genetically related music-making to an exalted level. Few households can aspire to that professionalism. But all music-loving parents can at least try to create opportunities to sing or play alongside their offspring.
Those opportunities used to be much easier to engineer than they are now. Before radio and TV permeated every home, the Victorian parlour was somewhere where many families made music daily. We know this from the sheer volume of 19th-century sheet music published for home consumption. That era even invented a genre – the parlour-song – specifically to meet the demand for ditties that amateurs could perform. At least early in her reign, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert led the way with frequent music-making, joined by their friend Felix Mendelssohn when he was in town.
The arrival of mass broadcasting, the gramophone and its successors had many beneficial effects, of course, but also tended to turn the vast majority of people into passive consumers rather than active performers in their own homes. That’s regrettable. People like me often bang on about the need for the state to provide more music-making in schools. But there’s also much to be said for parents taking matters into their own hands – involving their children in their own music-making.
Making music together… choirs, bands and musicals
Where and how? Choirs are one obvious answer, although choirs filled with people of all ages are a rarity and teenagers are understandably reluctant to join choral societies where they would be the only members under 60. Brass and wind bands are a good bet. They span generations, bind families together and have largely escaped the taunts of ‘elitism’ flung at other classical music ensembles (even though their musical standards are frequently as demanding).
Similarly, the liveliest amateur productions of Broadway musicals I’ve seen are ones where teenagers and older people are performing side by side, radiating a feeling of a whole community having fun together. It’s remarkable how many professional singers and actors I meet who say they fell in love with the stage because their parents involved them in am-dram from a young age.
Making music together… learning an instrument alongside your child
But there’s also great value in learning an instrument alongside your child, so that you progress together. Indeed, certain teaching methods (Suzuki, most famously) actively encourage that. And with electronic instruments now so cheaply available, there’s no reason why, as in Victorian times, every home shouldn’t possess a keyboard.
Which, again, stirs deep memories in me. When I was a boy my father used to listen surreptitiously while I picked out harmonies by ear on the piano. Occasionally he would come up, almost apologetically, and guide me towards a chord progression that he knew worked better. Nothing was written down, nothing ‘taught’ in a formal sense. It was just a passing-down of what you might call ancestral intuition.
Today I find myself doing the same with my seven-year-old daughter. It’s like a secret code we share: a reminder that in an era when the generations often seem at odds with each other, music can be a priceless bond between all ages – intangible yet indelible.