Dear singers,

Have you ever played Humm . . . ble?

It's an old charades-type game in which people hum tunes and earn points for getting their partners to recognize them.

My husband and I played an epic game of late-night Humm . . . . ble with friends a few years ago, and had SO much fun.

Just try humming the Batman theme -

"Hmm-mm-mm-mm-Mm-mm-mm-mm-Hmm-mm-mm-mm-Mm-mm-mm-mm-MM! MM!"

This summer, when I was planning an all-day music camp for my students, I thought a game of Humm . . . ble would make a fun activity.

I knew the kids wouldn't know the songs from the original game - the last edition came out in 1997! - so I wrote about 50 new clues.

I used a mix of traditional songs, carols, music theater songs, Disney themes, and added the titles of a few of the most popular pop songs on the current charts.

Friends, this game was a complete and utter flop, and not because my students can't hum.

They didn't know the tunes.

Among the songs they claimed they had never heard were Silent Night, Kumbayah, and America the Beautiful.

What??

Even the current pop hits were a real problem - they could hum them, but their teammates couldn't recognize them because the songs have no tunes.

Now, if you've had the misfortune to cross me on the street, you've probably heard me rant on about Ola Gjeilo and Eric Whitacre and how choral music has moved completely away from melody and is now just washes of beautiful chords.

I stand by my unpopular opinion, but I also feel like our cultural move away from melody is a more fundamental problem than bad choral music and non-hummable pop hits.

We are no longer a culture of tunes!

Over the last five years, I've spent a lot of time in the music of Charles Ives - eight of his songs are on the album I recorded this summer.

Ives was deeply committed to old tunes - patriotic songs, hymns, spirituals - and he would quote snippets of them in his (otherwise extremely modern) compositions.

The other composers of his generation hated it.

They wanted to break free of the past, and he kept bringing it back up!

But Ives's old melodies weren't just sentimentality, or a concession to unsophisticated listeners.

Ives put old tunes into his new compositions because he believed they hold our individual and national memory.

These melodies, reproduced for generations through home piano culture, church services, tent revivals, and small town parades, recall to us the deep meaning of the institutions from which they derive - family, church, and town.

He wrote in The Things our Fathers Loved:

Singing old songs reminds us who we are.

Like Ives, I believe there is a special connection between our songs and our memories.

We have to keep hearing and singing them to keep them alive!

Many of the songs I remember most fondly from my own childhood are SO old fashioned.

My parents sang them to me, but they must have come through them from my grandparents' and great-grandparents' youths - Bicycle Built for Two, I Dream of Jeannie, The Man on the Flying Trapeze.

What are your memory-tunes?

Think of a song that you loved as a kid, something as simple as Baa baa black sheep, or the theme song to Three's Company (VERY hard to hum - what are those intervals?).

Sing it, share it, teach it to a kid.

Call your cousin and remind her of your shared memory!

I think you'll find it very powerful.

And if you'd like to hear some of these amazing Ives songs, my album will be coming out March 20th, and I will announce a few performances of the program in the coming weeks.

​Check out the press page, with a few early-release singles! You can even pre-order the album on vinyl or CD if you like.

In the meanwhile, would you tell me about your memory-tunes?

Big melodic hugs,

Laura