Anthropologists agree that before early humans spoke, we sang. The magic of singing is that it connects us with something that’s ancient and central to our humanity. For all of us, the ability to understand music and song seems to be innate.
In 20 years with the Island Community Chorus, I’ve served four terms on its board, and am winding up my third year as president. I am reminded at every Monday night rehearsal, and at every concert, how profoundly nourishing the chorus is — for its singers, and for its audiences.
I’ve seen this again and again: Once people connect with the joys of choral singing, they sing with us, literally, until they can’t sing any more.
Philip Craig of Edgartown, the mystery novelist, collapsed on the riser behind me during a dress rehearsal at the Old Whaling Church in April 2007. The guys beside him in the bass section helped him down to a pew until the EMTs could arrive. Phil Craig died the next month.
Jini Poole of Chilmark sang with the altos of the chorus until a stroke left her unable to sing. Her husband, Everett, would wheel Jini into our rehearsal room so she could sit with her section, reading along.
Gloria Wong of Oak Bluffs, who died in January just one month shy of her 96th birthday, had sung with us at our Monday night rehearsal just the week before.
Lee Fierro of Vineyard Haven announced at a rehearsal in 2017 that she was leaving the chorus, leaving the Island, moving to an assisted living facility in Ohio. She was in tears. And she finished her announcement by singing to us the old German canon:
All things shall perish from under the sky;
Music alone shall live, music alone shall live,
Music alone shall live, never to die.
Choral singing is an especially powerful example of music’s community-building dynamic. Every rehearsal of the Island Community Chorus begins with stretches, breathing exercises, and vocalizations. It’s a reminder that when we sing, we aren’t just playing an instrument — we are the instrument. Every bit of us — body, mind, breath, spirit — all that we are goes into making our song.
As choral singers, we’re striving to be harmonious parts of something greater than anything one individual can accomplish. We’re reaching for harmony — its root is the Greek word harmos, to join, connect, fit together. When we achieve that harmony, it’s a joy-filled experience.
There’s a powerful sense of achievement in creating music that comes from the whole person, music that comes from working together across weeks and months, the satisfactions of reaching toward mastery, of engaging with great works from the choral repertoire.
For me, our chorus rehearsals are the shortest two hours of the week. For those two hours, we set everything else aside and sing. Sometimes in our rehearsals, and in our concerts, we can experience what scientists call “flow” — a sense of clarity and high function, of deep personal involvement, of immersion in the music, our ordinary sense of time falling away as we enter the rhythms of the song.
“Community” and “communication” — these words have the same root. When we communicate, we take an idea from inside one person and move it into the public sphere, where it can be shared, where we can connect. When we live in community, we are living in a fabric that deepens our connections with each other, building trust, encouraging us to invest in one another, helping us make healthy decisions about how we might continue to evolve together.
Building community isn’t just a side-effect of an organization like the Island Community Chorus — it’s a primary effect. Each Monday night in the Edgartown library program room, we roll the piano out from its corner, and arrange the chairs around our director, Bill Peek — the only member of the chorus who doesn’t make a sound. The singers take their places, we stand to stretch and sigh and breathe, we open our music folios, and we begin to sing. And we know, each of us, that for these two hours, this is where we belong.
The Island Community Chorus presents its annual Holiday Concert at 7:30 pm on Saturday, Dec. 7, and again at 3 pm on Sunday, Dec. 8, at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown.
