Sing!

Koolulam

I have a bunch of interesting cases to tell you about, but I wanted to take the chance today to tell you about a wonderful event yesterday here in Boston celebrating Jerusalem Day, which fell yesterday on our calendar. An Israeli group called Koolulam had an event for around 2,500 people at the House of Blues. Koolulam is “a social-musical initiative aimed at strengthening the fabric of society.” It brings a lot of ordinary people together to learn Koolulam’s arrangement of a song, to sing it together, and to experience the happiness of making music.

We warmed up with an Israeli song most of the crowd knew, Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu, and we warmed down with another one, Naomi Shemer’s “Al Kol Eleh.” But the main event was—wait for it—Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.”

Why am I mentioning this to you? One of the themes of my political posts has been that our real problems are not political but cultural, or rather, that our political problems are symptoms of our cultural probems. We have to be the right kind of people if we want to have the kind of government and politics we used to have. There are lots of things we could recommend people do to try to improve the cultural climate. Most of them would be controversial for one reason or another and I won’t even mention them here to avoid derailing the post. But making music with people from all walks of life, all across the political spectrum, and from all sectors of your community, promotes your own happiness, promotes solidarity and community cohesion, and has the advantage of being really fun and non-controversial.

Koolulam may not be coming to your city. But I’ve participated in amateur choral singing, at a very high level and at a not-so-high level, for many years, and I can tell you that every city will have opportunities for singers of all levels and even for singers with no experience. Go sing! It will be good for your soul and good for the world.


2 responses to “Sing!”

  1. Antonio Di Stefano

    Interesting. Just yesterday I watched a TV program from the island of Providence Colombia in the Caribbean. The majority of the population consist of liberated slaves from Jamaica brought there by Puritans in the 1600s, when Britain ruled the island. With a new home, the population was also provided Baptist and Lutheran missionaries, whose churches provided ample opportunity for choral singing. Now ruled by Hispanic Colombia, the population cements and maintains its identity by the universal practice of choral singing, in the English and Creole languages.

    Keep up your good work.

    1. Interesting! Thanks, Antonio.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Thank you for commenting! By submitting a comment, you agree that we can retain your name, your email address, your IP address, and the text of your comment, in order to publish your name and comment on Letters Blogatory, to allow our antispam software to operate, and to ensure compliance with our rules against impersonating other commenters.