Using the power of song to help connect communities

Parents and children, grandparents and neighbours are chattering and calling out to one another, meeting and greeting and hurrying the scooters and bikes along to be on time for another day. Languages I understand, accents I can’t rightly place, and languages I’ve yet to identify wash past me as I walk along. It’s as if the streets are singing.

The little owl on Duolingo prompts to write a proverb – seanfhacal – tìr gan teanga, tìr gan anam – a land without language is a land without soul. I’ve been prompted to consider one of the musics of Scotland by this little owl for a proud streak of 1580 days now.

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This one, among many older languages of the land, adds a deeper drum beat to the new harmonies from New Scots which I hear in the air. Speech, said the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is a kind of singing. Glasgow is a city of music and song, old and new, foreign and domestic and it’s an extraordinary thing.

In 2008, Glasgow was designated a Unesco City of Music and is now one of around 60 such cities in the world. Such designations are granted after long, hard work by city councils and organisations and a great deal of commitment.

Celtic Connections Festival in January, the World Pipe Band Championships and a range of commitments to musical projects have cemented this designation over the years. While the musical content of the city’s offerings is subject to regular critical review in the press, the musicality of the many languages sung is also of note.

Music is a way of “world-making”, to quote the philosopher Nelson Goodman. It is inexhaustible in the soundscapes which can be made by the movements and breath and tongues, fingers and hands, feet and bones.

For a city of trade and migration such as Glasgow, this is especially the case. The city makes music, and music makes the city in turn; in every community choir, every gathering for hymn-singing, every pop concert and music festival, every squeaky first attempt on the fiddle or the bandura, on the kartal or the mbira by a wee one, under the watchful tutorage of a custodian.

The benefits of music for wellbeing are well known. The beautiful projects occurring in care homes allowing people living and dying with dementia to tap into songs of childhood, and courtship, are now commonplace.

Music can affect our emotional lives like little else and is often a great antidote to xenophobia. Hearing the singing of languages other than our own can transport us, fill us with wonder and inspire, and the harmonies and melodies can often overcome those all too human moments of insecurity in the face of a language we don’t understand or recognise.

It’s a strange quirk of human phonetics, as explained to me years ago by Professor Mike McMahon, then professor of linguistics at University of Glasgow, that it is easier to sing in another language than it is to speak it.

My dad sings fluently and confidently in Welsh, but speaking it is an entirely different matter. It’s as if music can make barriers and obstacles between people and emotions and cognition just shimmer and vanish, however fleetingly.

Of course, it’s not all good and in recent months, I’ve been privileged to listen to the Solo Way Choir – formed by women from Ukraine on the ships which provided their temporary accommodation – accompanied by the bandura, an instrument banned in the past.

I hesitantly play the mbira, an instrument from Zimbabwe, which I’ve been invited to learn by custodians of the music, fully knowing that the playing of the instrument in Zimbabwe carried the death penalty under the most brutal times of our colonial rule.

Members of the Joyous Choir sang their hearts out at the launch of the New Scots Refugee Strategy (Image: Alison Phipps)

The txalaparta was banned in the Basque country and, as we see with the destruction of universities and schools, libraries, cultural centres, mosques and churches in the Gaza Strip at present, attempts at repression or eradication of a people always aim to silence the singing of those who would sing in the face of death. The muezzin, the call to prayer, continues in Gaza, despite the worst of what human beings can experience at the hands of other humans.

Against these brutal histories and bans Glasgow, City of Music, hosts many refugee musical gems, from Musicians in Exile in Govan and the Glasgow Barons to the Refugee Festival in June this year when three community choirs sang accompanied by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in the Royal Concert Hall, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

New Scots have brought harmonies fresh and uplifting, melancholy and dreamlike to fuse, in true Celtic Connections style, with the music and musicians they find here.

There is barely a weekend goes by when a diaspora community is not celebrating a wedding or birth, with a gathering and the music of home. And through these hosted events, marking the rites of passage of life, the music – the intangible cultural heritage, protected by Unesco convention – can stay alive, in exile.

When the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy was launched last month at the University of Glasgow, the Joyous Choir – a choir made of women from Maryhill Integration Network – came to sing and mark the moment. The acoustics of the university’s Kelvin Gallery are quite something and they raised the roof.

But, as so often with the Joyous Choir, as well as their superb musicality and singing, it was the sheer energy and determination of their songs of resilience, survival and hope that gave everyone goosebumps.

Anastasia Tariq, the development co-ordinator and a powerful singer with the choir, tells me that the choir sing in Akan, in Twi, in Yoruba, Zulu, Turkish, Polynesian, Ukrainian, English and, in the past, they have learned songs in Gujarati, Gaelic, Tigrinya and Kiswahili.

Songs in this extraordinary repertoire include Mamizolo, a song from South Africa; “Hail mother of yesteryear”, a song celebrating female ancestors, mothers, grandmothers; Bambalela/Never give up – Bambelela is a Zulu word, one of South Africa’s many languages, meaning “Hold on” – it’s a song of hope and a reminder that no matter how bad things get to never give up; a traditional Yoruba song, welcoming one village to another is a call and response and a favourite that the choir engage the audience with.

At vigils and anti-deportation protests, the choir can be heard in George Square singing the Kenmure Street Song with the refrain, “These are our neighbours; these are our friends. Let them go. Let them stay” – and which has become a bit of an anthem.

In May 2022, I invited the Joyous Choir to sing during my own keynote lecture in the Scottish Exhibition Centre in Glasgow, in that echoing auditorium, which was hosting the world’s modern language scholars at the Congress of the Modern Languages Association.

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Such plenary lectures are an honour, and the theme of hospitality also helped me see that the single voice of a lecture, which can be monotonous at the best of times, needed interrupting by the many voices and languages of the world.

The women from the Joyous Choir, always up for a bit of mischief, agreed to my plan, which was that during the lecture, they would interrupt my story of hospitality to refugees in Glasgow with their own version of that story in visceral song. They brought the house down.

At the New Scots launch, the group sang Bella Ciao – an Italian protest folk song from the late 19th century, originally sung by the female workers in protest against harsh working conditions in the paddy fields of Northern Italy.

It was adopted as an anthem of the Italian Resistance Movement by the partisans who opposed Nazism and fascism. “And we shall not be denied.”

To sing in the face of death, in a City of Music, is quite an act of peaceful resistance. To refuse to let the xenophobia and fear of languages other than English be what destroys the fabric of neighbourly bonds, social bonds and intercultural potency is not easily said in rhetoric, but a sEong can do it. A song can indeed do it.

And when the singers’ lives are congruent with the words that are being sung, not a commodity or as a singing of something long ago that has been divorced from experiences that forged it, but as a truth, a palpable set of collective, determined beliefs about what can see us through the hardest of times, then necropolitics – the death wise of the politics of the age – are banished. The singing voices break the cacophonies of hate and violence.

Unesco’s mission in its founding charters says that if wars are made in the minds of people, then it is in the minds of people that the defences of peace must be constructed.

Medicinal, protecting and capable of moving to peace, the anthems of the Joyous Choir, when sung in their City of Music, with so many such resolute voices, do precisely this. They sing in the face of death.

Alison Phipps is Unesco Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts at the University of Glasgow. This year she is visiting all the Unesco sites and cities in Scotland and considering what they inspire by way of history, hospitality and peace.