I've forgotten

What I was going to say.
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Ah. Music. Yes.
I've been watching Choir on TV and (possibly revealing my age here) been enchanted by the delightful and extraordinarily youthful looking (I'm not revealing my age here as even one of the six year old boys thought, at first, that he was much to young to be in charge of them) Gareth Malone. More to the point, I was enchanted by the way he dragged 60 odd recalcitrant boys, most of the staff and even the school rappers into performing and practising regularly enough to achieve a standard fit for performance at the Albert Hall. In a year. Starting from 'don't like singing, can't sing, singing's for girls, singing is rubbish, only gays sing, blah blah blah'
As a passionate musician (and for once I mean passionate) he wanted to get a school full of non-singing boys to have and enjoy a school choir. He achieved this by chasing boys and staff around the playground, sports fields, classrooms and staffroom and charming them into, bemusedly agreeing to give it a try. And then making it work. Wow!
Highlights included the happiness of one very small boy doing a fantastic solo, several wonderful voices emerging from obscurity and also from fear of bullying. And the reluctant surrender of the macho-hero teacher. And particularly, one lad who at age 13, has incurable hodgkin's disease and said he knew he would always have cancer but the choir had given him something to share with the other boys.
Have to say I was completely swept away, remembering my own school choir (which happened to be a very good one) and how much of the same kind of stuff it did for me. We didn't have the benefit of a gorgeous young teacher (one of my best treasured memories of choir was the time we were rehearsing in Manchester Cathedral and our choirmaster, conducting with his usual fervour, arrived at a particularly large, loud, final chord and with one huge and powerful gesture, broke his baton and inadvertently spat out his false teeth. Both of which fell to the floor with a faint clatter in the perfectly disciplined silence which followed. And his glasses fell sideways down his nose.)

Whatever. Singing is good for you. Singing with other people is even more good for you. It's good because it expands your lungs and you find there's more space inside you than you thought there was. Because, out of that surprising space, comes wonderful stuff you didn't know you had in you. Because it teaches you that lots of you together are a great deal more than the sum of your parts. Because it's about not just letting, but pushing, throwing and flinging out stuff you don't need inside you. As well as conserving, controlling and garnishing some of your most precious feelings with grace and subtlety. Instead of being about going inside yourself and rummaging around in your psyche, it's about using whatever you have stashed away in there to share with no strings attached and then having made something that couldn't have existed before you all sang together to share it again with people who like to listen.

Can't sing? Nonsense! I mean this. Everyone can in fact sing. Not necessarily the solo part, not necessarily the bit the others are singing and very rarely the weird and wonderful stuff that famous people do, but listen, singing is just pushing some air out past some strings in your throat and stopping and starting the air movement and tightening and loosening the strings. Singing is yelling and whispering and muttering and speaking. Singing is listening and then doing. But above all it's GETTING OUT OF YOURSELF and being together in another place where it doesn't matter who or why you are because you're too busy making something new and astonishing, with other people, to think about yourself.

Oh and after all that, it really does sound quite nice, sometimes :)

Thank you lovely Gareth Malone. Pied piper stuff. Magic maker. (Wonderful TV).
Mmm. It was just so good to see all those little thugs and tykes having a really great time doing something really good together.

Oh and I forgot to mention, it's also extraordinarily good for your brain since it gets the old left and right brains communicating like you wouldn't believe and also 'promotes prefrontal cortex activity'. In fact it's almost as good for your brain as talking to people and sudoku - suduko - that thing with numbers. Which are also extraordinarily good for all that brain stuff.