The goal of these rounds pages is to provide a way for people to learn some of the rounds that we often sing in Swarthmore-related roundsings. The ones we’re listing here are some of our favorites from among the hundreds we’ve collected.

In some cases, we link to other people’s recordings of the rounds. In some cases (marked with an asterisk in the Contents list), we provide our own recordings.

(Links to others’ recordings are sometimes iTunes links. In each of those cases, you can listen to a preview of the song in a web browser.)

For each round that we’ve recorded, there are two recordings: One that teaches the round, and one that briefly demonstrates it. The teaching recording for each round goes through the melody a few times, often teaching one part at a time. You can listen to parts of the teaching recording repeatedly to learn the various parts. The demonstration recording for each round goes through once in unison, and then three times through as a round.

Our convention for lyrics formatting is that line breaks correspond to part breaks; a new part comes in at a new line.

Our versions of rounds are sometimes lightly folk-processed; they don’t always precisely match the original versions.

Rounds that we’ve recorded that are in copyright are posted here with permission.

A note about difficulty ratings: How easy or hard a given song is to learn is highly subjective, and different people find different things hard to learn. Still, we’ve noticed some patterns in what kinds of things singers have a harder time learning; for example, people tend to find it harder to learn songs that have tricky rhythms or wide ranges or unusual intervals, and long songs, and songs that are in languages they don’t know. So we’ve assigned some tentative difficulty ratings for singers who aren’t terribly advanced and who speak only English. But your reactions may vary; let us know if you think we’ve miscategorized anything.