Sunday Sermonette: Sing Out!
Four years ago, the music director at my church thought of a way to use her talents to make art, make community, and make money for social needs. Sing for Good! gathered together choristers from other churches to perform, and the hat was passed. Last year, choristers from Falmouth to Provincetown filled half the pews in the Brewster meetinghouse, and the audience were crowded into the rafters. This year, the rabbi at the Cape Cod Synagogue in Hyannis was kind enough to let us use his space, which has at least double our capacity. 107 choristers came from church and community choirs across the Cape, and we filled the synagogue to standing room only. We raised the roof on the final number, Aaron Copland’s The Promise of Living (which ends on a fortississimo high C), and we raised $6000 for Habitat for Humanity. It was thrilling.
Then I heard the cell phone recording a friend made of our performance, and I cringed. Were’t the sopranos just a little flat right there? And the basses came in weakly and dragged the tempo for a couple measures. Sure, the conductor and accompanists rescued it, the audience loved it - they rose to their feet at the triumphant end - but I thought it sounded a bit amateurish.
And then I caught myself. We are amateurs. We rehearsed this piece together as en ensemble exactly once, just before the show. We were over a hundred amateur singers who don’t usually sing together, and we got together for the love of it, which is what amateur means after all.
It got me to thinking. Singing is something that everyone can do, but most Americans just don’t. The last time most sang for fun was in school. We have ceded the stage to professionals. We have become consumers of music, not makers of it. We’ve all seen someone get the proverbial hook while auditioning for one of the “reality” shows like X-Factor and The Voice, but we are our own harshest critics. We can’t devote the time and money to sing professionally, so we just don’t do it.
We learn the rudiments of choral music in school, but it’s the first program cut when the budget gets tight. Church choirs have also been decimated by budgetary considerations and the lack of people interested in or able to spare the time for weekly rehearsals. My former church no longer has a choir at all. Catholics, who possess a patrimony of the world’s greatest sacred music, are usually reduced to a single miked soprano soloist. She’s ostensibly leading the music, but no one else is singing. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t - on my last visit to a Catholic church I was surprised to find no hymnals whatsoever. Apparently it is expected the people will sing along the simple words to the childish tune. The experience left me wondering how anyone could feel emotionally or spiritually enlightened by the experience.
Jolene Johnson has been interested in how music might help the aging process for almost thirty years. She thought choral singing was the perfect activity. We all have our instrument already, we get the delight of being surrounded by the beautiful sounds our fellow choristers are making, we exercise our brains as well as our lungs and vocal cords, and we get the benefits of regular social interaction with friends. In 2010, she won a Fulbright scholarship to study the impact of singing on the quality of life in Finland.
We all learn to sing together as children, but in America, high school chorus is where it stops. In Finland, they study the arts in school, but they keep going when they get older. In one city of 125,000, there were more than 50 choirs, six of which were dedicated to older adults.
Johnson noted how, among other benefits, choral music formed community cohesion in Finland. Singing together has been pivotal in their history. Singing festivals were a way to get together without incurring the suspicion of the Russian rulers, and eventually led to the country’s independence.
Back in the States, she received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to found the Community of Voices study, the largest of its kind. It involved 390 participants from a dozen senior centers in the San Francisco area, not just singing along, but actually spending 90 minutes a week under the baton of a professional conductor, learning new music for performance before an audience three or four times a year. Among the measures being tracked are cognitive function, lower body strength, and emotional well-being, as well as seemingly unrelated things like walking speed and falls. Johnson is attempting to prove that music participation is a cost-effective way to promote health and well-being and help older people remain active and independent. Other studies have found that older adults who sing in choirs tend to be happier and have a greater sense of well-being, but it has not been established whether that’s due to self-selection or the experience of singing.
I live in an older community that seems to have already gotten the message. My church is an outlier, a haven of music. Our choir ranges around twenty voices, and we do everything from Bach to Broadway to the Beatles (we did the Village People’s YMCA last year). I heard them sing at the first service I attended, and immediately went up and asked the director if she could use a tenor. There’s also a small contemporary music group and an instrumental ensemble. We also have community choruses. The Unindicted Co-Conspirator and I sing with the Cape Cod Chorale, and I’m hoping to do the Fauré Requiem next month with the Choral Art Society of the South Shore. Next season we’re hoping to check out the Outer Cape Chorale. There’s also the Chatham Chorale, the Mid Cape Chorus, the Falmouth Chorale, the Greater Falmouth Community Chorus, the Greater Falmouth Mostly All-Male Men’s Chorus, and We Are The Men (a Harwich male chorus in the Welsh tradition). At this rate, I should be able to stave off senility for a long time.