Abstracts

Aleksandra Holubowicz (Bio)

Daring to Sing: (Re)Gaining Your Voice in Activism

In Poland nowadays relatively few people dare to sing in public, even though philosopher Alva Noë enumerates it as one of the activities that are “basic and involuntary modes of our organization”. Traditional and intuitive singing, e.g. to babies is often supplemented, if not fully replaced, with other types of music considered as having a higher artistic or educational value. It seems that children are not encouraged to sing, either, unless they are recognized as talented and thus might be granted an opportunity to receive rigorous training in a special school that offers music education. Regular public schools in Poland rarely provide quality music education, and the reform implemented after 1999 curbed the number of hours devoted to artistic education. The trend seems to be wider - Charles W. Beale in his Transforming Choral Singing also points to the ”patchy” nature of music education provision in UK. Market logic overrides all others, which translates to an inferior status of Arts and Humanities, as these do not promise an economically stable career. My paper seeks to research possibilities for (re)gaining a singing voice in activism. I focus on choral singing, which can account for a transformative experience in a psychological and political dimension: collective singing might become the first step to daring to use one’s own voice for artistic and political expression. For this I derive from the body of research on participatory art, including Karel Teige’s views on its democratization. I also examine the process of teaching and learning to sing and develop vocal skills in informal collectives relying on critical pedagogy, as exemplified by Prague Revolutionary Choir.