Colloquium 233 - Singing Together

The sonic and social dynamics of people singing together are, surprisingly, an under-developed and under-theorized field in music studies and voice studies. In the time of COVID-19, managing the significant risks of singing together amplifies these dynamics through the impossibility of physical co-presence and the possibilities of technologically enabled participation at a distance. This is an extraordinary time to think and write about what it means to sing together. Work on the voice tends toward an almost exclusive focus on individual voices, despite the human commonplace of group singing, choric chanting, and joint speech. In this research tutorial, we will take stock of how group singing is treated as either a sonic or a social phenomenon—as unisonance (the appearance of ideological coherence in mass singing) or multisonance (the sonic textures of thickness and weight in mass singing); as collective singing (voicing something in common) or collected singing (voices curated according to a sonic ideal). We will then be positioned to move beyond the sonic/social divide in understanding how people sing together, and what its effects and affects are. Our research will be historical, comparative, ethnographic (engaging with choirs and singing communities navigating the limits and possibilities of functioning during COVID-19), and keyed to the physical and sonic particulars of group singing. A major part of our project will be to model a decolonized approach to group singing while leveraging the critical and comparative possibilities that traditions of choir and choral singing afford us. In the six-week summer research period, we will collaborate in writing a scholarly article based on our work to be submitted to a major journal. Although students need not be singers themselves, the Amherst College Choral Society and student-led singing groups will serve as important resources for our work.

This course is part of a tutorial series that engages Amherst students in substantive research with faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

Open to sophomores and juniors interested in research. Limited to 6 students. Admission with consent of the instructor. Spring Semester. Professor Engelhardt. Hyflex format with as much face-to-face learning as possible. Online elements of the course will be conducted via Zoom and the course website.