What I learned singing in the community choir

Evanston Civic Chorus, 2019

The Evanston Civic Orchestra and Chorus is ready to perform a Christmas program called “Carols and Fantasies.” It will be held at the Davis Middle School Auditorium at 7:00 P.M., Thursday, December 19, 2019. You may have seen flyers in shop windows around town and shared on Facebook. This is your personal invitation to join the fun.

Of course, you will hear seasonal favorites like, “Twas the night before Christmas,” and the “Nutcracker.” You will hear the glories of “Angels we have heard on high.” You will experience a medley of English carols and an arrangement of “Jingle Bells” that will make you laugh out loud.

Musicians and singers have been gathering on Thursday nights for months to prepare for the occasion. They drive in from Kemmerer and from Morgan, Utah. They come from our middle schools and high school, businesses and churches. They come for the pure joy of making music together.

In a world of increasing individualism and fragmentation, live music is something that requires togetherness. Sheet music is only paper and ink until real people in real space and in real time bring it to life. In the beginning, it’s not pretty.

Sour notes, missed cues, nasal tones and a thousand other personal sins muddle the music in the early going. Every singer makes more than his or her share of mistakes. “No one is righteous. No, not one.” Practice makes it better, but not as quickly as you might think.

We submit to correction and cajoling from the director and from one another. Rarely do tempers flare. Mostly the flubs are acknowledged with self-depreciating humor. After all, we are there because we want to be there. While we are striving toward a common goal, happiness does not depend on perfection. Joy is found in the striving.

I think that we all start rehearsals hoping that our mistakes will be hidden in the general cacophony. But the closer we get to the performance, the more we realize that there is no place to hide. To enjoy the chorus means that we each take full responsibility for our own part in it.

What started as external pressure and admonition to learn the music turns into an internal desire. Once that shift occurs, people roll up their sleeves and do the nitty-gritty work behind the scenes. That’s when the community chorus begins to gel, and real music begins to happen.

What is true of a chorus is true of every community. It may start off with laws and law-enforcers. But unless the desire to work together comes from each individual member, it will never gel as a community and “make music.”

In a community, just as in a chorus, every member will make plenty of mistakes. As a result, we are all responsible both to bear with the mistakes of others gracefully as well as to help lift them up with gentleness and love. Most of all, each member of the community is responsible to work behind the scenes at developing habits of the heart that come out when we come together.

This kind of community-building cannot come from coercive rules and forced participation. Laws can only set boundaries that provide a framework. Community depends on a personal willingness to do what cannot be enforced. It also comes with a dawning realization that there is no place to hide.

As in the community chorus, we may start off thinking that our own sins will be hidden by the background noise of everybody else’s sins. With this mindset, our only motivation is to be mediocre. We tell ourselves, “Don’t do anything stupid that will make you stick out of the crowd.” This is easily accomplished by doing nothing at all.

But eventually everyone comes to realize that if you want to contribute to the chorus, you must risk blurting out a wrong note. If nobody is willing to take that risk, we will mumble through life without ever having the joy of making actual music.

ECOC performs the Messiah, 2012

The truth is that all the world’s a stage. There is no place to hide. Every person matters. Your voice and your actions impact everyone around you. Silence speaks as loudly as a scream. Inactivity does just as much as action. You are on the stage by virtue of your birth. You can play your part or not, but either way you remain on the stage.

As each member of the community learns this lesson for himself, he comes to enjoy the unique note that he is given to contribute. As he confidently sounds it out while blending it with the other notes around him, he contributes to the richness of the harmony.

But enough of the lessons about life. What about the concert itself? Sure, the performers may be having the time of their life, but can’t we hear the same songs with perfect acoustics and perfect performances downloaded from the internet?

Ever since audio recording was invented in the nineteenth century, we have been tempted to believe that music can be distilled into the pure physics of sound waves carried through the air. If that’s true, a pair of ear buds can give you the very same experience as a live concert.

Yet, no matter how far technology advances, recorded audio will always leave the hearer disappointed. There is something intangible in a live concert that touches the heart like nothing else.

That’s because at the heart of all music is the human heart. Music is not about the perfect arrangement of sound waves. Music is about human beings working in harmony.

No matter how perfectly the sounds may be reproduced, no recording can convey the united hearts. Conversely, even where an audience member may sneeze during a solo or a baritone strike a sour note, the exuberance of the players is not diminished in the least.

Before the invention of audio recordings, music could only be experienced live. From a harmonica on the front porch to an orchestra at symphony hall, people listed to people. The musicians were not performing for a machine, they were connecting with other people. Likewise, the audience was never listening to magnets and paper, they were listening to friends and neighbors.

Every hour of every day we are saturated with audio and visual recordings of people that we don’t know. They fill our minds with disembodied thoughts that churn away and distract us from the actual people in our lives. These recordings do not create community, they fragment and frustrate it.

But on Thursday night, all of Evanston has a special, one-time opportunity. We can turn off our cell phones and pull the plastic from our ears for one special hour.

It will be an hour of great music with great friends. Most of all, it is an opportunity to witness human hearts in harmony create a sound that reaches not just your ears but your very heart. That little community on the stage of DMS will draw you into the experience of community that music was made to give.