Tag: singing

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, on a Singing Hike We Go

  • Music teacher Maura Volante leading students on her "Woods Walk Singing", a singing hike (Photo by Karen Kelly)

In many cultures, people sing as
they work or as they travel. But in North
America, most of us aren’t comfortable
singing out loud in public. Karen Kelly
reports on a music teacher who’s trying
to change that – by taking her students
into the woods:

Transcript

In many cultures, people sing as
they work or as they travel. But in North
America, most of us aren’t comfortable
singing out loud in public. Karen Kelly
reports on a music teacher who’s trying
to change that – by taking her students
into the woods:


“Ooh, ah. Ooh ah. Here’s another part: aay-oh”

Maura Volante is leading a troupe of six students through a path in the forest.

It’s rainy, buggy and muddy. But everyone quickly gets into a groove – both with their
feet and with their voice.

(sound of walking song)

“There’s lots to look at all the time: the green and the shadows, the lake, the sky and all
the different vegetation. And when I’m feeling relaxed and I’m in my body and I’m
walking along and I’m in nature like that, it just makes me want to sing. It inspires me to
let my voice out.”

Volante teaches singing in Ottawa, Canada. For her, people don’t need a good voice to be
able to sing. Instead, she says singing just comes naturally to humans, like breathing and
walking. Which is why she tries to get people outside where they can experiment and
make mistakes.

“It’s kind of like recreational softball. It doesn’t matter if someone sucks at it. They can
still play. It’s for fun.”

(sound of more singing)

We spend about two hours hiking around the heavily-wooded Mud Lake.

I did some research to see if I could find any other organized singing hikes. I found one
at a bible camp in Virginia. And there’s one at a kibbutz in Israel. And, at Yellowstone
National Park? They recommend singing loudly – or shouting – to scare the bears away.

Of course, lots of people like to sing when they hike. On this walk, Kathy Woodgold
says she sings differently when she’s walking in nature.

“When we’re in the woods, it brings sort of a primitive spirit. Like, I’m thinking, let’s
pretend we’re not civilized, instincts, and so on. And maybe that opens up a creative
spirit. It frees us to sing random notes, instead of having to feel like we have to do a
predefined melody.”

This isn’t really a conservationist group. But teacher Maura Volante says, in some small
way, doing this helps the planet.

“I think there is a benefit to the environment for people to sing more because that gets
them to appreciate nature more and appreciating nature helps you be committed to
preserving it.”

(sound of singing “O Canada”)

The small group stops at a dock overlooking Mud Lake for their only performance of the
day. The audience? Ducks, frogs and mosquitoes.

But they give it their all.

For The Environment Report, I’m Karen Kelly.

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Songbirds’ Numbers Flying South

  • A Nashville Warbler - one of the birds that Matt Etterson heard during this bird count in Canada (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

The numbers and types of songbirds
are dropping dramatically in many areas of
the country. A lot of people are trying to
get a better count on the number of birds
that are still around. Stephanie Hemphill recently went with researchers
on one of the more ambitious bird count projects:

Transcript

The numbers and types of songbirds
are dropping dramatically in many areas of
the country. A lot of people are trying to
get a better count on the number of birds
that are still around. Stephanie Hemphill recently went with researchers
on one of the more ambitious bird count projects:

The jumping off point for this trip is a tiny airport with a grass runway in
northern Minnesota, about 20 miles from the Canadian border.

We fly for 15 minutes, over trees and swamps as far as the eye can see. Down
below we get a glimpse of a moose. And, later, a pair of rare trumpeter swans
in their nest.

The helicopter sets down in what’s known as a floating bog. Its runners are
sitting in six inches of water.

We jump out in knee-high boots and rain jackets, and douse with DEET to try
to keep the mosquitoes away.

I’m following Heidi Seeland, a graduate student who seems to know her way
around a bog.

We’re in knee-deep water. Then it’s thigh-deep Pretty soon it’s waist-deep. I try
to step on a clump of sphagnum moss. But it sinks. It holds onto my boot, and
I’m sitting in water.

Heidi helps me up, and we catch up with the others.

They fan out on different points of the compass. I follow Matt Etterson. He’s an
ornithologist, a bird expert. We slog through the bog for nearly half an hour.
Etterson is aiming for a piece of higher ground, where the trees are a little
taller, better for nesting.

Suddenly he stops. He’s found the spot he was looking for. He sets his watch
for 10 minutes and pulls out a notebook.

Etterson cocks his head this way and that, jotting the names of the birds he can
hear, and the time he hears them. He doesn’t pay any attention to the mosquito
biting the back of his neck. He just listens and takes notes.

“We had a couple of hermit thrush — that’s the singing to the north of us. A
veery called a couple of times to the west of us. A Nashville warbler, and a
couple of western palm warblers, and that was about it. It was pretty quiet
otherwise,” Etterson said.

We trudge through the muck for another 20 or 30 minutes and he repeats the
process.

It’s two hours later, and the three researchers meet at the helicopter landing spot
and compare notes. They’re excited about Etterson’s veery and Nashville
warbler. The others heard a Connecticut warbler and a Lincoln’s sparrow.

They would have been really happy if they’d heard a golden-winged warbler.
It’s one of the most threatened of bird species. The number of golden-winged
warblers has declined by some 80% during the last 50 years.

Today’s trip is an experiment to see how well it works to count birds in remote
places, using a helicopter.

It’ll take five years to finish the bird count here. Then, in 10 or 20 years, they’ll
do it all over again, to see how the birds are faring.

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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Songwriter Connects With Kids

  • Joe Reilly and poetry writer Nora sing at a CD release party for Joe's album. (Photo by Chris Reilly)

Singer-songwriter Joe Reilly recently made an album with kids. The songs on the album are all about nature. Reilly discovered that when it comes to writing and singing about nature, some of these kids are wise beyond their years. Kyle Norris has this story:

Transcript

Singer-songwriter Joe Reilly recently made an album with kids. The songs on the album are all about nature. Reilly discovered that when it comes to writing and singing about nature, some of these kids are wise beyond their years. Kyle Norris has this story:


It’s hard to get kids to think outside their own little world. Let alone get them to think about the entire planet. But Joe Reilly seems to have a knack for getting kids to think big. And to talk about something pretty big, nature. He does it with music:


“Realizing the way that music can reach a place in any person, but especially in a kid that is a place of excitement and inspiration, there’s really like a magic there.”


Joe Reilly recently wrote an entire album with kids. He’d ask the kids open-ended questions, like “why is it important to protect the river?” And then he’d weave their answers into lyrics. He had one song with music, but no words. And then he heard a poem written by one of his ten-year old students. The poem by Nora Sinnett blew him out of the water. Reilly asked Nora if she was willing to read the poem over the song’s music.


(Song lyrics): “I am important. I may be only a whisper in a sea of voices. I may be only a blade of grass on a lawn. I may be one flower in a garden, a minnow in an ocean, a grain of sand on a beach, one star in the sky. But I am important. I matter. I stand tall. I am proud.”


She says she wrote the poem one day while she was hanging out in her grandpa’s library and she was just feeling kind of blue:


“I just like, saw a little ray of sunshine in window and I thought wow, that little ray of sunshine is really small but without that little ray of sunshine there wouldn’t be any other bits of sunshine. Then the room would just be dark. It just made me feel like I’m important because like, there’s only one leaf on a tree but without leaves the tree would be really bare. So little things make up big things.”


At a benefit show for the CD, Nora and Joe performed the song together. Afterwards, a mob of children and adults surrounded Nora. Kim Hunter is a poet and writer-in-residence in the Detroit schools. He was one of the people congratulating her.


“She has some really great metaphors in there. She’s a small person but she still, as says in poem, stands tall. And that’s, for a ten-year-old, a pretty sophisticated metaphor, and she employed it in a lot of different situations. It was a good poem.”


Hunter wasn’t the only person who thought it was a good poem. Songwriter Joe Reilly jokes that he’s been writing longer than Nora has been alive. He says he wishes he could write things as profound as Nora’s poem:


“I think there’s a real power in giving kids a voice and they can speak to adults and other kids, in a way we grown folks can’t always do.”


When Joe Reilly was a kid the adults in his life taught him about music and nature. He spent a lot of time exploring both of these things. He says they helped him to feel safe and good. These days, music and nature give him hope, which he says is a welcome change. To the hopelessness he feels about the environment and the future:


“When I can sit and make music with kids about how the beautiful earth is and how we want to celebrate our connections and inter-connections with all living beings. That just takes me beyond that despair, and it anchors me in some kind of hope.”


Reilly says that if he had sat down alone and tried to write a bunch of songs about nature, the songs would have been more serious. And not as fun. And silly. And lighthearted as it was with the kids. Like in this song. Where Joe and the kids invented a word to rhyme with river:


(Song): “Shibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby diver/We got a song about the Huron River/Water is such an important life-giver/We will protect it we will deliver”


For the Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

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