“Tis almost the season for the family to gather around the smart speaker and stream Christmas music. Sing Christmas carols, you ask? Don’t be so vulgar. For many of us today, music is something we consume rather than something we do, and at this point of the year we do a particularly good job of outsourcing the task to Mariah Carey and Wham! rather than piping up ourselves. According to one study, 46 per cent of 18 to 29-year-olds have never sung a traditional carol, whilst another found that only 51 per cent of millennial parents can sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”. But singing has numerous benefits and is huge fun. So why don’t more of us do it?

The obvious response is that we don’t bother singing because recorded music is everywhere. But this doesn’t add up: radio, gramophone records, cassettes and CDs were widely available for much of the twentieth century, when communal singing was still popular. 

The problem is in part down to the failure of schools to give a generation of children the skills they need to sing competently. Singing is not hugely difficult, and you do not need to have the voice of Luciano Pavarotti or Christina Aguilera to enjoy doing it, but there are some skills you need: to be able to keep time with others, and to sing the right notes (otherwise known as “singing in tune” or “matching pitch”). Contrary to the myth that some people are “tone deaf”, being able to match pitch is not something you are innately able to do or not do; it is a skill, and most people can learn it.

Singing has also suffered because of the embarrassment we now feel towards our Western cultural inheritance

I have led singing in many primary and secondary schools in the UK as part of my work as a composer, and I have seen that it is now normal for most pupils in a class to be unable to sing the right notes, and for teachers to do nothing when children are belting out the wrong ones. I know teachers who have attempted to teach children relatively sophisticated concepts such as head and chest voice when they are not hitting the right notes, which is rather like teaching pirouettes and demi-pliés to babies who can’t crawl.

Why don’t children learn to sing the right notes? I don’t blame the teachers, who themselves often lack the necessary skills, and only receive a few hours’ musical training during their PGCE. The problem can be traced back to the rise of critical pedagogy and student-centred learning in the 1960s. These advocate that learning should start with the children’s own experiences and interests, that lessons should involve peer learning with the teacher as “facilitator”, and that the focus should be on “creativity” and “participation”. Such ideas have their origins in the explicitly Marxist pedagogy of Paulo Freire, who considered education to be inherently political and conventional teaching to be “authoritarian”. Freire’s work now underpins much mainstream educational thought. Lucy Green, an influential academic, has called for music education involving “little or no adult supervision”.

It is hard to argue with the idea that learning music should be participatory and creative. But we have been so keen for our teachers not to be the demanding taskmasters of yore (think of the abusive jazz teacher in Whiplash: “are you one of those single tear people?”) that we have ended up not helping children to sing correctly for fear that doing so would be insufficiently “participatory”. If a maths teacher tried to encourage participation by letting children answer sums with any number they liked, or a football teacher didn’t explain that the ball needs to go in the net, it would be an obvious dereliction of duty. Why should music be different?

Singing has also suffered because of the embarrassment we now feel towards our Western cultural inheritance. Christmas carols, hymns and folk songs were once the staple of school music-making, but these have fallen out of favour in the name of “diversifying” the curriculum. It is wonderful for children to learn a wide variety of music, but in practice “diversity” often ends up meaning more Western pop music.

For example, one resource for school singing assemblies funded by Arts Council England makes no mention of Christmas carols but suggests, for a “winter”-themed assembly, “Frosty the Snowman” and “Winter Wonderland”. Other suggestions include, for a “Think Positive” theme, “The Bare Necessities”, and for “Celebrating Difference and Diversity”, “Let It Go”.

I enjoy these songs as much as the next man, but it is hard to escape the impression that Western classical and Christian musical traditions are being deliberately sidelined. This tendency has become more pronounced in recent years with calls to decolonise the music curriculum. It is a brave soul today who dares to suggest “Baa baa black sheep” for singing assembly.

More practically, pop songs can often be difficult for young voices to sing. To give one example, “Let It Go” is a virtuosic power ballad with a range of nearly two octaves, from the F below middle C (far too low for primary school children to sing comfortably) to a high E flat (getting too high for all but trained choristers). Children are unlikely to develop a love of singing if they are struggling to sound like Elsa, whose part in the Frozen film is sung by Idina Menzel, a trained Broadway singer. By contrast, many folk songs and hymns are much simpler to sing.

The dire state of singing has been exacerbated by the decline in church attendance and communal hymn singing, and the rise of TV talent shows, which has encouraged a sense that singing is something done by individual “stars”. One of the studies mentioned above found that one in ten millennial parents do not sing to their babies because they have an “awful” singing voice or feel “awkward”, even though their baby probably has lower expectations than Simon Cowell.

It is a sad irony that a move towards “participation”, however well-meaning, has left many people unable to participate properly, and that calls for “diverse” repertoire have resulted in children being fed a diet of pop music owned by giant corporations. Many organisations such as Sing for Pleasure and Gabrieli Roar are doing exceptional work to foster singing in schools, but these efforts are inevitably piecemeal. Until we rediscover the joys of communal singing and the enormously varied wealth of music that has been handed down to us to sing, more and more of us will be putting up our feet and asking Alexa to play winter music.