Rounds for home singing?

August 15, 2020 4:22 PM

With choirs out of the picture for a while, our three-person household has decided an occasional sing is a good idea. My knowledge of rounds is sparse and has already been exhausted, however; and search engines mostly turn up pieces for children or schools. Can you recommend some pieces?

- It should ideally stay within an octave - the workable overlap between all our voices is about C#3-C#4.
- Any other pieces which work for three voices are welcome.

posted by solarion to Media & Arts (12 answers total)

Dona Nobis Pacem.
posted by Melismata at 4:24 PM on August 15, 2020 [4 favorites]

Rise Up and Sing can be searched for rounds.
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:28 PM on August 15, 2020 [4 favorites]

I used to sing with this group that has accumulated a long list of rounds. Words only, but if any of them intrigue you, you can often find performances on youtube with a quick search. If this seems like the right direction, I can pick out a dozen or so favorites from that list and try to dig up corresponding recordings.

Moondog's album Moondog 2 has a bunch of beautiful rounds, which can be fun / tricky to sing because they're often in unusual time signatures.
posted by moonmilk at 4:30 PM on August 15, 2020 [4 favorites]

The Penguin Book of Rounds by my aunt, Rosemary Cass-Beggs, is very good.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 4:48 PM on August 15, 2020 [3 favorites]

Aww, I love Dona Nobis Pacem (a.k.a. "Sim Shalom" for a Hebrew version)

There are a bunch of nice rounds online here! These seem to be 17th and 18th century traditional tunes.

Here are a few more.
posted by wintersonata9 at 5:55 PM on August 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

The catches of Henry Purcell are great stuff. Full of drinking and wenching and dirty jokes. Most of them probably have more than an octave’s range, though. In that era there was a lot of crossover between catches and drinking songs.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:06 PM on August 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

IMSLP has a copy of Purcell’s Catches, Rounds, Two-part and Three-part Songs
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:09 PM on August 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

Thomas Ravenscroft also wrote a bunch of good ones. My favorite is Hey ho, to the greenwood.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:14 PM on August 15, 2020

I've taught this one a few times and really like it. (I just do the English part, and not the Hebrew part.) It's a canon, not a round, but it will have that same zippy "omg we're all doing a different thing but it goes together" thrill. If you're looking for relatively simple stuff and don't mind weeding through some hippy-ish stuff, there are some good options here.
posted by Charity Garfein at 9:56 AM on August 16, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh also, lots of songs that aren't typically rounds work great as rounds. For example, "Dynamite" ("I throw my hands up in the air sometimes...."). It's in two and then four parts in that video.

And "Viva La Musica" is so, so beautiful for something so so simple.
posted by Charity Garfein at 10:14 AM on August 16, 2020

I came here absolutely to second Moondog 2.

My favorites:

Be A Hobo
All Is Loneliness
Why Spend A Dark Night With Me
Down Is Up
Some Trust All

(Note: In some of these, the round is implied by the instrumentation, whereas in others it's actually sung. You can experiment with the arrangements.)
posted by mykescipark at 11:51 AM on August 16, 2020

Oh also, lots of songs that aren't typically rounds work great as rounds.

Like singing the melodies and countermelodies of “it’s a small world” and “One Little Spark” together. But some people have a low tolerance for Sherman Brothers Disney songs.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:06 AM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]