The other day, there was a detailed message on The WholeNote's voicemail. It was from a long-time Toronto resident who explained that she was wanting to join a choir for the first time in many years, wanting to reconnect with the sense of community she’d felt singing with others in her youth, especially now because she was confident being in a choir would help her recovery from a recent stroke.
The comforting smell of coffee lingered in the air as conductor Jean-Sébastian Vallée listened to the fading notes of the morning’s final song. More than a hundred people had gathered in red-carpeted Yorkminister Park Baptist Church on a Saturday this past September for a special Mendelssohn Choir Singsation workshop celebrating the choir’s 130th anniversary. TMChoir, as Toronto’s largest and oldest choral organization is now known, has offered Singsations since 1999.
Chandeliers shone down on empty tables. A handful of other early-admitted guests chatted next to the cash-only bar as RESOUND Choir warmed up. Many of the 60 singers wore a gold pin with the choir’s symbol: a phoenix. Their dress for the evening was otherwise business casual.
The singers filed off their risers and front-of-house opened the doors. Within ten minutes, an audience of almost 300 packed the room.
I’d gone to LVIV Pavilion Banquet Hall in Oshawa mid-October for a concert called Sips & Shanties. RESOUND Choir was celebrating its fifth anniversary with a program of Canadian folk music and works by contemporary Indigenous composers. I was particularly curious to hear how they’d handle songs popularized by the Rankin Family, who formed a big part of the soundtrack of my childhood in Nova Scotia.
Renowned neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin paused as he sang the word “strings” and looked over the neck of his guitar to the audience in the University of Toronto’s Desautels Hall. The air felt charged. Instinctively, we knew what he wanted. For a brief moment, many of the two-hundred-plus gathered began singing along, some harmonizing at the end of a song we’d all just heard for the first time.
One day in the golden late ’80s in Hong Kong, almost past the reaches of Elaine Choi's memory, she balanced on her mother's piano bench. She was about three years old. Her mother helped one of her small fingers find middle C. The note resonated through the black upright Yamaha, as it did for the many piano students who filled Choi’s childhood home. Choi's own lessons with her mother turned out to be the beginning of an impressive international music career bridging East and West. But not as a performance soloist. Instead, Choi found success in one of music's most collaborative genres – as a conductor for choral music.
