5 March 2009

Last night I joined about a hundred other people in the little auditorium of the Mt. Eden Normal Primary School (and it was only when I asked if there were an Abnormal School down the road that my friend Ailie sort of scratched her head and realized she didn't have a good explanation for that moniker) to form a community chorus. We filed in, either found our name tags or paid our "casual fee" (no, not a surtax for those wearing jeans, but their version of "drop-in"), and then sorted ourselves into gatherings of sopranos, altos, tenors, and bass. No auditions, not even enough sheet music to go around. And yet when Max, the greying, pony-tailed leader who started this experiment in "If you sing it, they will come," got us started on Let It Be, we opened our mouths and joy came out. How could a group of people who've never sung together -- some with perfect pitch and some, like me, who can barely stay on key-- produce harmonies that made us all stand a little straighter?

There was a rustle of anticipation when Max announced we'd be trying Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah before the night was out. Cohen had bowled NZ over last month with performances in Auckland and Wellington that had people swearing it was the best concert they'd ever attended, and there were many people at the choir last night who still had that song ringing in their heads from their evening with Cohen. Like many of Cohen's songs, it is poetic and ambiguous and dark, but when we sang, "I'll stand before the lord of song/With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah/Hallelujah, Hallelujah," the irony of the words was buried under the pure joy of having made such a gorgeous sound with people we hadn't known a half hour ago.

I wonder how many people responded to Max's ad in a community paper inviting interested neighbors to come and sing because, like me, they had seen Young at Heart and wondered when and why they had stopped singing. Are there hundreds of groups like this popping up in different countries because people want to start making music again, even if they were still smarting, decades later, from having been assigned to the "listener" group in previous music classes?

So, I'm back in New Zealand for a couple of months. This time I'm eating dessert first, visiting friends and spending time thinking, writing, and surprise! singing. Next month I haul my three bags of class supplies and one filled with enough black pants and changes of underwear to last several weeks as I crisscross the North and South Islands teaching at a Symposium, an art festival and two quilt guilds. Except for the schlepping of several 50 lb suitcases, it is going to be another happy adventure in meeting other women interested in sewing one piece of cloth to another to make something more beautiful than the sum of its parts. How serendipitous to start these two months with a group of strangers who hoped to perform that same alchemy with the joining of their voices to produce something very much like a prayer.