Happy New Year, lovelies!
It has been an emotional New Year’s for us this year. Many mixed feelings, and lots of gratitude in spite of everything.
Here is another example of Dilovely’s infinite nerdiness, in the form of rounds. Some call them canons; like Row, Row, Row Your Boat, one person starts the song and then if others start singing the same song at appropriate intervals, it sounds dope. I mean, it sounds pretty. (Sean and I watched Trevor Noah’s “Son of Patricia” last night, so “dope” came to mind, but who am I kidding? I can’t pull that off.)
I have loved singing rounds since I was a girl – too young to remember learning my first ones. I was (am) lucky to have two sisters and a mom who could all sing, so sometimes we sang them together. Also, in my experience, Quakers know lots of rounds. We used to sing them at Camp NeeKauNis, and I once attended a Folk Song Weekend at Journey’s End Farm Camp (also run by Quakers) where we learned some new ones. And I have fond memories of singing rounds in front of a campfire at a family reunion once.
I always wish they would keep going forever, because when you’re actually singing them, it takes a while to get the hang of it – and then it sounds magical. I have kept these ones short, though – they are mostly for reference. My nerdy ambition is to make an online collection of rounds I know so that they don’t die (not that they necessarily would without my patronage… but round-singing isn’t as common as it used to be, I think).
So here are the two I prepared earlier. They constitute the collection so far. The first is a wish for the new year, and the second is simply one of the shortest and prettiest rounds EVER. (Apologies that on the first one, the key I’m singing in tends upward by at least a half-step by the end.) They are only briefly in four parts – mostly it’s three parts, to hear the roles shifting. Voilà, et bonne année!
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