Singing your string

Been trying to teach my grandsons to sing in parts. I thought everyone could do it since it always seemed to come easy for me. Funny how that works. If you can do it you think everyone else must surely be able to do it, too. Not so. Especially in this singing thing.

When I got married I found out that some people can not even carry a tune, let alone hold their own parts while you sing the harmony. Oh, well. How tolerant and understanding we get as we grow older!

Every week, I take the boys out to lunch just to give Mom a break from homeschooling. The car is a wonderful place to have their complete attention. Like a cocoon.

We started out whistling in the car to a CD piano rendition of "The Rose." The piano held the tune steady, and the boys and I would whistle a third above in harmony, and the entire car would be filled with music. What fun! I looked up the words to the song on the internet, and decided we wouldn't need to sing, just whistle.

This week, I wanted to go the next step and start singing in parts. In my training as an elementary teacher, we had a segment on music in the classroom. Way back 50 years ago, the method was to learn a melody, then sing it as a round, graduating to 3 parts. I thought we could do that. The boys are very quick, and very musical. Later the harmonizing would come.

We (I) chose "Row, row, row your boat." As soon as we got home, I asked Ethan to get his guitar, and play it for us. He was all in to chord progressions, and wanted to get really fancy, but with rounds, you can't do that. It's all the same chord throughout the whole song. Next, Ethan sang it by himself, while Davis and I came in on the second part. That worked nicely, too.

Then the real test came when I dropped in to the third part and we were each singing our own part, and holding our own pretty well, if I do say so myself!

Now we wanted to get a little creative at the end when we all ended up singing "Life is but a DREAM." So we slowed it down, modulated up, with great pomp and circumstance, and held out "DREAM" as long and as loud as we could. The only trouble was, we tended to drift together.

"Sing your string, guys!" I told them. Ethan plucked out each string of the chord, and one by one we sang our string until we had a beautiful chord. We were singing our string. It worked! We did it with gusto! And tremelo! And lots of volume.

Then Kathleen came home, and we had to show her what we had been working on all afternoon. She thought we were pretty good, too, I think. And we sure did have a lot of fun singing our string!

Next step, two different melodies in counterpoint. Who knows where this will end? Sometimes the most fun is in the process.