Skip to main content

A Golden Thread

From my bed, propped up with cushions and with my fancy headphones on, I sip gin and watch the screen as I sing an arrangement of Ball Park Music’s Surrender.


“It’s OK, it’s alright, true terror in the middle of the night, give in if it makes you feel better. So surrender, so surrender.”


On the Facebook livestream members of our choir make comments and jokes, or poke the emoji button until we are swirling in a sea of hearts. In my little house, my family stack the dishwasher and play with the dog. But I’m “at choir”, singing while ginning, connecting to voices, virtually.


Sophia Exiner has run Melbourne Indie Voices for the past three years with technical director and guitarist, Josh Teicher. Starting out in her front room with a small group of 30, there are now more than 250 of us, rehearsing over three nights in a Collingwood studio. “We’ve tried to build a community with the choir,” she says. “It’s a unique space for connection and also a chance to let go.”


But now the world is shutting down. Since last week Exiner and Teicher have had to work on technological connections, bringing our choir rehearsals live via Facebook to our devices. Two weeks ago a number of choristers showed up in person, but more than half of us followed direction in our own homes via the livestream.


“Last week I felt like everything was splintering, but we just felt so together at rehearsals,” Exiner says. “Getting online has highlighted what our core values are: inclusivity, community, love of music and shared experiences. We’ve realised that for a lot of that, it doesn’t require us to be in the same physical space.”


Of course it wasn’t the same as being in a sea of voices, feeling buoyed by the waves of sound around me. I missed the energy of that human frisson. Sometimes, in pre-corona rehearsals, we would turn to face each other and sing in a circle so we could hear our different parts, the blending together of melodies and harmonies. We can’t do that online, but we are still singing together. For many of us it feels like a lifeline.


Now Melbourne Indie Voices is running totally online. We all let a deep breath out to the image of a golden thread, “a beautiful sparkly network of connectivity”, as Exiner describes it.

To refine the online choir delivery, Exiner has added our choir soundtrack to the livestream. Last week when we sang our parts at home, we didn’t feel so alone. It worked so well that when the applause came at the end of the recording, many of us felt like we were there, in the room together.


Excited comments streamed on to the screen: “Yes!” “That sounded great!” “I feel like I’m surrounded by you beautiful choir people.” There were nearly 400 comments, likes, and even jokes, though the slight time lag can make comedy delivery difficult. (Knock, knock ... silence.)

In our little community of singers, we can step away from the viral vortex, follow a beat, breathe in and breathe out. The repetition of singing phrases and melodies can give us a sense of control in our swirling lives.


Other choirs are adapting to distancing too: Jane York’s Just Holler Choir has had live broadcast singalongs from a loungeroom. Astrid Jorgensen’s Pub Choir has stitched together a mass participatory video performance. Sydney’s Polyphony choir are hosting practices over Zoom. People are connecting while staying apart, using technology’s bridges.


Melbourne Indie Voices still plans to record an album this year, somehow. Even if we are singing in dark times, we can turn our voices to the light, by the glow of our screens, surrounded by a community of hearts.



“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”

― Bertolt Brecht

(c) Anna Sublet, 2020
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Waiting

Morning walk.  I wake too late to do my nature writing workshop so I decide to get out into nature instead! Head off at about 7 am, sustained on half a cup of hot water with lemon, a banana and a snack KitKat. Make it to the backbeach in time to see the gold coming up from behind the sand dunes, flowering light from the lighthouse. Tiny black and white wren on the rocks, the Plover family just foraging. A heavy gull takes off when I approach. It flies past me, sits and waits, and flies back as it senses I’m no danger. I take photos and slow-mo videos. I can hardly make out the flying birds as they rise into the dark clouds.  I keep stopping to look at things. At one point I lie with my back in the sand on the edge of the dunes. All around the waves continue coming in and the birds call. What would I do without this?  At the lighthouse, Galahs wheel and screech, their pink bellies exposed as they fly above me. A couple fall behind, screeching ‘wait for me, wait f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Not smiling, wanking

The bricks were always cold underneath my bum. Cold and hard. I could feel their sharp edges. In the nights we sat and talked. The smells of sour smoke and saliva on one, body odour on another, and menace on the other. The fluorescent globes hummed from the station platform, and the street lights pooled at the corner. Inside was out of bounds to these boys, so we met on our side stairs. The frosted glass door between us and our home. Outside; offside: the limits to friendships. These were the kids we didn’t trust, the boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Where were their parents? Absent fathers, unsighted mothers, these boys roamed the streets and set me on edge. The attraction to the dirt, to the smell of one’s mouth...I can still feel it now. It was an urge, but not an infatuation.  The hearts of these boys remained hidden. It was as if they walked in costumes, played their parts, and kept their distance. We weren’t allowed to welcome them in. One day, my m...
4 comments
Read more

Coming of Age

The bricks were always cold underneath my bum. Cold and hard. I could feel their sharp edges. In the nights we sat and talked, my brother and I and the neighbourhood boys. The smells of sour smoke and saliva on one, body odour on another, and menace on the other. The fluorescent globes hummed from the train station platform across the road, and the street lights pooled at the corner. Inside was out of bounds to these boys, so we met on our side stairs. The frosted glass door between us and our home. These were the kids we didn’t trust, the boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Where were their parents? Absent fathers, unsighted mothers, these boys roamed the streets and set me on edge. The attraction to the dirt, to the smell of one’s mouth...I can still feel it now. It was an urge, but not an infatuation.  The hearts of these boys remained hidden. It was as if they walked in costumes, played their parts, and kept their distance. One day, my mum greeted me at...
4 comments
Read more