It’s taken me a while to decide whether to publish this post because it’s so very personal. It is about choirs, and about All Together Now in particular, but it’s also more about my own experience in that context than I would usually write. But I learned something about being vulnerable, and in a way it’s a follow-through to be vulnerable here as well. If this isn’t your cup of tea, please feel free to leave out this post! There’ll be another along very soon…

Three weeks ago, I wrote here about why we perform. Mostly because it’s a gift of love, I said (partly to ourselves, as well). A couple of Sundays ago, we gave our first concert as All Together Now en masse.

It was all carefully planned - I thought I had every detail covered. And the choirs and other choir leaders had worked so hard to prepare everyone and get each group ready to just the right point for this particular moment of performance. But the one thing I could never have predicted was the death of a dear friend on the morning of the concert. A family member, really - an ex-partner with whom I’d spent several years while my children were growing up, and who had remained close to us all.

His passing wasn’t entirely unexpected. I had let all of our singers know that I wasn’t available in the few days before the concert because I was away spending time with someone who was sick. And I knew when I left to travel back to Auckland on Saturday night that I was saying goodbye.

I have to admit I had some moments of wondering why these things had to coincide. All that commitment and all that work from everyone, and I was arriving tired and sad. In general, I don’t subscribe to the view that everything happens for a reason. I think many things just happen as they happen, and we do our best to deal with them gracefully. I wanted to respect the work that everyone had put in, and I have a strong view that part of my role as a leader is to put aside whatever is going on in my life, and not make it about me. So I wondered whether to tell the choir.

But it’s hard to hold something that big, and I was a bit vague and mucking up the schedule, and I could hear some of my communications sounding a little sharper than I intended. So I briefly put the choir in the picture.

The wave of love and support that came towards me in that moment was something that I’ll hold amongst my most precious ever choir memories. There was a sense that we were all in this together, and we were going to weave all the joys and sorrows that we all carried into something beautiful. And people told me afterwards that they just wanted to sing their best for us. Some of it was hard but it moved us, and it moved our audience, and it connected us to the music and to each other.

I’m aware of the tricky territory that this could be, and it could sound as though I’m suggesting that sadness and loss help us to create art. I’d like to think we could find all of those connections without having to go through trauma. But I think the thing is that we all do go through trauma, and we can’t always control how and when it happens. And we carry all of our experience with us - the sadness and the loss as well as the fun and the joy. And part of why we sing is to express that full range of emotion and experience.

Woven into that concert was not only teamwork, generosity, self-discipline, and hard work, but also grace, aroha, beauty, sadness, joy…a whole lot of stuff about what it is to be human and part of a community of humans working towards something worthwhile. The very best of what it is to be part of a choir.

That’s all I have to say about it. Other than that I’m so grateful for all of it.
 

This Love Will Carry Me 11 June 2023