Everyone knows the power of humming. Humming is the very sound of power. Not everyone will sing in public, but nobody can resist joining in with a hum. It infects everything in is path and spreads like a virus, sometimes lying dormant for years before erupting out of nowhere in a supermarket aisle on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday afternoon.
Humming is the most democratic of bodily instruments, including thigh-slapping. It is also the most subversive. Like song, hummed sound can travel over a wide area, but humming can be done in secret, with no outward sign of activity: it is highly contagious, sweeping up everything before it and nobody ever knows who started it. It can go underground like a stream and disappear for long periods, but seeds will sprout in the most obscure situations, far in space and time from where they were planted.
Humming has long been used as a weapon to strike back at much more powerful adversaries, and those who are practiced in the dark arts know how deceptively deep it can resonate. Given the right angle it can send cracks running all the way down to the base foundations and topple the highest buildings.
Many a schoolteacher has run furious from the classroom with the overpowering hum of butter-wouldn’t-melt pupils ringing in his ears. It is not much of a jump from there to full-blown sonic warfare on a military scale, as a grinding guerilla war of attrition or a single sling shot square between the eyes to bring the giant crashing down to his knees. The principle is very much the same.
During the War on Music humming came the fore, and in fact it was hard to pass a day without hearing someone somewhere humming a tune, even at the height of the proscription. It became a weapon, a statement, a rallying cry and a call to arms. Even with the best intentions humming would not disappear, and forgotten melodies flourished like weeds on abandoned waste ground because they didn’t know how to die.
People would hum to themselves in private, just to remember what music sounded like. To remember what it felt like. They would hum to feel their skulls vibrate and their teeth rattle round in their sockets. They would hum to their children at bedtime when they didn’t dare to sing out loud, and they would unconsciously hum the hook of the symphony that was rising to a glorious crescendo between their ears.
It has since been written that humming also served as a barometer of public opinion and morale as music disappeared further and further from public life. While for a long time humming was something one might catch a stolen snatch of as it floated on the wind like a lone desperado, it was a form of real communication and in the latter stages of the War it became more and more common as the public sensed that the laws had lost their teeth and were bound to collapse.
At 99 degrees water is hot: at 100 degrees it boils – and it was humming that cranked up the heat. Soon it could be heard everywhere, and all those repressed tunes were bursting out all over. Tunes flowed from person to person like pollen on the breeze, rushing and eddying in the currents. It was a celebration, not just of music but of the very act of humming itself.
Humming Day is on 23 May, the day when people gathered in town centres and village squares and hummed out loud to demand that music be restored to its rightful place in society. The legal wheels ground slowly, but on that day it was clear that the War was over. Today we celebrate that victory by humming in just the same way – gathering with friends at an official event or randomly passing on a tune that has come our way.
From secret monotone humming in the queue at the post office to a full west-end production, we can add a new harmonic to the fundamental universal vibration that holds us and moulds us and echoes all around across the land.
Even if you know the words – hum it!
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