In this series, The State of Choral Music in America, I’ve
blogged about the many good things happening in choral music here in this
country, and some of the not-so-good things as well. The series mainly dealt with surveys and
statistics, things that are fairly easy to grab hold of. But I want to close out this series by
touching on that aspect of music that is sometimes difficult for us to acknowledge
in our science-driven society, its effect on our souls. For that is really why we sing and want
others to hear us sing, and why it is so necessary to sing and make music:
because it reminds us that we have a soul.
Some years ago I read a book, Song of Survival: Women Interned, that captures this idea better
than anything I know. It’s a true story
of women in a Japanese internment camp during World War II in what was then
called the Dutch East Indies. Although
they weren’t tortured outright the conditions were terrible, and they battled
disease, near-starvation diets, rats, lice, boredom and sordid surroundings. In order to survive, a group of thirty women
created a “vocal orchestra.” One of the
women, a musician named Margaret Dryburgh, created, from memory on carefully
hoarded scraps of precious paper, vocal arrangements of great orchestral and choral
repertoire. The women were mostly too
weak and ill to remember texts, but they weren’t too weak to sing, so they sat
on stools and used syllables to shape the music.
And they gave
concerts to their fellow inmates! During
their first concerts some in the audience wept from the sheer beauty of the
music. Others were carried out of
themselves by the intense memories evoked for them by the music. At their first concert a Japanese guard
angrily plunged into the audience, bayonet at the ready on his rifle, intent on
stopping the proceedings. But somehow
the audience parted, let him in, and as he reached the front, near the choir,
he stopped, lowered his rifle, and listened.
He stood and listened during the entire concert, and even mingled with
the women during intermission. Now that
is a miracle!
The women gave concerts in the camp for about a year, but
by the end of that time nearly half the singers had died, including Margaret
Dryburgh, so they sang no more. But some
of the women survived, and one of those was author Helen Colijn, who was in the
audience for those concerts. Some of
their music has been published, and MCE women have sung one of those creations,
the Largo from Dvořaks New World
Symphony, in our own concerts. Some of
you may know it as “Goin’ Home.”
Did those interned women need that music? You bet!
Did it strengthen their spirit and help them survive another day? I’m quite sure it did.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, twentieth-century British
composer and a man extraordinarily sensitive to the spiritual nature of music,
once wrote, “The human, visible, audible and intelligible media which artists
(of all kinds) use, are symbols not of other visible and audible things but of
what lies beyond sense and knowledge.”
Why do we need music?
Because of the way it moves our economy, because it brings beauty and
builds community, and because it reminds us of things beyond sense and
knowledge; it reminds us that we have a soul.
Dr. Linda Gingrich
Conductor and artistic director
Master Chorus Eastside
Thank you for sharing this. So many aspects of choral music we feel intuitively but have a hard time putting into today's numbers and statistics. And the last chapter is the most difficult but important to express, how music ties into something beyond science, into the unexplained (mystical) part of life. You've helped validate what we know.
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