Here’s the mid-season concert lull, with a background humming of college choirs and local chorales preparing for major March concerts, and the dozens of local church choirs about to enter Lent leading inexorably to their Easter musical peak. With this hum of choirs hard at work let’s take advantage of the lull to think about ‘us’ and ‘them.’
This ‘us and them’ business is not just for teens and politicians; it’s for anyone who deciding who to trust, who to ask for help or who to help. We are always asking, consciously or unconsciously, who is our friend, our colleague, our neighbor
Who is our choral neighbor? Late last month, at 4 p.m. on 23 December, close to 600 people joined in the annual Messiah Sing Along of the Claremont Symphony Orchestra at ‘Little Bridges’ in Claremont, for the second performance of the afternoon. That afternoon more than a thousand people shared an experience of being in a large choir singing the music of Handel. Were we a community? Maybe yes, maybe no, but we who were there are certainly neighbors in some larger community.
The same day of the Messiah sing along NPR broadcast a story of a very different kind of ad hoc choral group (Choir! Choir! Choir!). The setting was not a concert hall, but a bar in Toronto. The music was not close to Handel, but older pop/rock songs arranged simply for amateur choral singing. There’s no orchestra, just a guitar. and, instead of an annual event with a thousand people, around a hundred young adults show up every week to join in the experience of singing chorally with others.
Imagine that these two ad hoc choirs existed only ten miles apart, not two thousand. Would our two groups of singers belong to a common community? Would we be neighbors? I think we would, despite differing ages and musical tastes, because of a characteristic we share: the feeling comes from the act of singing together. Young or old, religious or irreligious, popular or traditional choral music, there is something in that which we share.
What does this have to do with your choir or mine? Can the ensembles with which I sing be good neighbors to yours? Can we help each other in any way? Can we cooperate for our mutual good or for the good of our community however we define it? If you take the time to search the Internet for chorales doing outreach (try using ‘chorale outreach site:org’ for search terms), you will find that many ensembles answer this with a ‘yes.’