The NZ Youth Choir’s winning ways have hit the news, but as the popularity of community singalongs shows, you don’t have to be a good singer to join a choir.
Do you hear the people sing? If not, you might want to get your hearing checked, because at sports events, cinemas, neighbourhood halls and theatres the length of the country, and on America’s Got Talent, the community singalong is back in full-throated force. Once an entertainment staple, the good old-fashioned sing-song was until recently relegated to Wednesday afternoons at the retirement village. Suddenly, it’s cool again. Even New Zealand Opera is crowdsourcing the crowd for its next production.
It’s not clear exactly why. Perhaps enforced separation during Covid lockdowns has made us keen to get together to share in a joyful experience. Perhaps we were just waiting to be asked. What is clear is that in all versions, singalongs have a few things in common: inclusiveness, permission to perform (which might have been traumatically extinguished at school) and a massive feel-good factor, physically and mentally. No wonder everyone is practising good choral hygiene.
It probably helps that you don’t need a lot of equipment or prep. You might just need Fiona McDonald up the front with a ukulele. McDonald has been hosting regular singalongs in Auckland community halls since May. You get the impression that, despite stellar years in cooler-than-cool bands such as Headless Chickens and Strawpeople, she is now having the most fun she’s ever had making music.
There’s only one requirement for a song to be in her shows: “It has to be a banger,” says McDonald. “Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U is a slow, sad love song. But do we all love it? Do we all know it? And can we all sing it? We can.” Expect also to join in on the comfortably familiar likes of Sylvia’s Mother, Jolene and, of course, Ten Guitars. And yes, you can bring your guitar or banjo along.
In an example of the No 8 choir mentality at work, her gigs are promoted mainly through Facebook community pages. Book online and she’ll email you the words and a link to a Spotify playlist for the songs.
“I did proper choir singing at school,” says McDonald. “And I loved it. When you’re in a group of people and you’re hearing the other sounds around you and you’re a part of it, it’s really quite powerful. It just feels a bit magical.”
Beneath the fun and frolicking, this is karaoke with a cause. “I wanted to just give music back to people. Ninety-nine per cent of people who come tell me they are tone deaf and that they’re not musical. And I groan inside, and think, ‘What happened to you at primary school?’ Teachers, who were probably not musical at all, have said to a child at an impressionable age, ‘You’re a bit flat’, and it’s put them off for life.
“It’s our birthright to be creative, to dance and to sing. These guys are singing loud and proud and it sounds so good. But if we all love it, it doesn’t matter what anyone sounds like. It’s very friggin’ wholesome.”
Shanty town
That last word is also used by the organiser of a group whose existence indicates just how niche today’s community singing can get. The three-year-old Pōneke Shanty Club meets twice monthly in Wellington to shake the rafters and shiver some timbers: all shanties, no fillers. The genre has been the lifelong musical enthusiasm of civil service manager and club organiser Peter Tyson, who says the group also serves a non-musical purpose.
“People always complain that it’s hard to meet people in a city like Wellington, where everyone’s civil servanting or studenting,” says Tyson.
“It’s lighthearted and wholesome,” he adds, sounding slightly bemused by the club’s success. The group usually draws a crowd of around 60 enthusiasts.
“People feel different when they agree with each other, and when they’ve felt a contributor to a shared goal.
Wellington is definitely shanty town, and he says people are surprised that the demographic is not a bunch of old salts but mainly people aged around 30. “Some are not even massive shanty fans, but someone said it helped fill their soul with good vibes.”
There’s even more wholesomeness to be had at Dame Hinewehi Mohi’s Waiata Singalongs, which also have a serious purpose, and take place on a much larger scale, at major sporting events. They are the obvious locations for the te reo pioneer, whose performance of the national anthem in Māori for the first time at a 1999 rugby test in England was a game-changer in so many ways. She puts her singalongs in a traditional cultural context.
“Māori sing at every opportunity,” says Mohi. “We sing at celebrations, at funerals. There’s always got to be waiata after a speech. Anyone who’s gone to Māori language lessons will have been exposed to how waiata can help you hear the sound of the language and sound it out to yourself. And you don’t need to know how to speak Māori. It’s about inclusivity and participation – ‘I can’t speak Māori, but I can sing along and feel part of the culture.’”
Mohi says there have been singalongs before “the Warriors, the Blues game, at the Māori All Blacks and Black Ferns. And on Sunday it will be at the netball. Sporting fixtures are good, because you can guarantee a crowd.”
After decades of Māori culture being subsumed by Pākehā, Waiata Singalong is an example of movement in the other direction, with the indigenous culture influencing the post-colonial.
“Instead of singing Sweet Caroline in the stadium before the games, you can sing Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi and feel really good about that,” says Mohi.
And despite Māoritanga being under renewed pressure from various quarters, Waiata Singalong is an apparently unstoppable example of those things that bring people together rather than drive them apart.
When the New Zealand Youth Choir won the Grand Prix of Nations at the (non-professional) European Choir Games in Denmark and the Choir of the World award at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod in Wales in July, it did not go unnoticed that they did so with a mix of waiata plus songs from Samoa and Fiji, as well as the national anthem in English and te reo Māori.
“Not everyone’s into learning languages, but every bit helps,” says Mohi, “and every bit contributes to a general feeling of goodwill and mutuality and makes you feel good.”
Amateurs join the opera
New Zealand Opera’s next production is the community opera The Monster in the Maze by Jonathan Dove. It’s an hour-long retelling of the minotaur story with obvious appeal to the generation raised on The Hunger Games books and movies, which were based on the same Greek legend. For this production, the company has sought volunteer voices to act as the chorus in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland.
This being a community opera, there was just one criterion for inclusion, according to general director and conductor Brad Cohen: “You turn up and you participate. There is no selection process.”
“The target we’re going for in each city is 60 adults, 60 youth and 30 kids, so a total of 150 singers on stage, plus four [professional] principals.”
There’s no large-screen lyrics or song sheets for the amateur chorus. They get the words online in advance and memorise them as they progress through the rehearsals.
As with other communal singing options, the emphasis is on sharing the experience.
Cohen says, “The definition of community opera is an opera in which the community is not only an audience, they’re also active participants, and in some cases, they can become co-creators.
“I was saying to the choirs yesterday, ‘You are not here for our benefit. We are here to support you in making this work.’ So, it’s a kind of inversion of the traditional elite pyramid. Professionals feel carried aloft on the energy and enthusiasm of the community. The community feel energised and inspired by the professionalism of the professionals.”
So the chorus is not just the backing group for the solo star turns. On the contrary. “Jonathan Dove has a particular gift for writing fantastic, concerted finales for his operas. Everyone comes together in this transcendent, unified chorus, which goes for the last five or 10 minutes of the piece. It just takes off like a jet, and it’s a beautiful ending.”
Cohen also emphasises the science that backs up the value of this endeavour. “There’s lots of evidence to suggest that group singing really bumps up optimism, cohesion, a sense of identity. It’s good for blood flow. It’s good for vascular function. There is really no downside to singing.”
America’s got choir
It’s a sentiment echoed by the community-singing phenomenon that is Brisbanite Astrid Jorgensen. Her Pub Choir performances, in which she leads theatres full of people in song, have been a huge hit in Australia and here. But it is her appearance on America’s Got Talent, which aired in June, that looks set to make her a world singalong superstar.
Pub Choir is the simplest of concepts. Accompanied by a guitarist, Hamilton-born Jorgensen, who moved to Australia as a child, divides an audience into parts based on where their voice is pitched. Each – the basses, tenors and altos/sopranos – sings a different line displayed on a giant screen. The resulting sound is pure magic.
Like other community singing leaders, Jorgensen is all about creating joy. She traces Pub Choir’s origins to a year she spent teaching in a Townsville high school where she was put in charge of a compulsory all-school choir, where kids had to sing at assembly for an hour. And the reason that was a good thing, she says, is that it was singing just for the sake of singing.
“There was no competition, there was no performance for the parents, and that was really freeing for me. It came really naturally. I wrote out lesson plans but I never looked at them.”
She started Pub Choir in 2017 after returning to Brisbane. Eight years later and she was the season-stealing sensation of the audition round of America’s Got Talent. From a standing start, she has the audience on its feet singing Toto’s Africa in three parts, to their absolute astonishment and delight, and to the bewilderment of the judges. The only person in the room who doesn’t seem surprised by what happens is Jorgensen herself.
Living note to note
She is not allowed officially to tell the Listener whether she has advanced to the next round of the show, but the smart money would say it is worth tuning in when the time comes. “I’m trying desperately not to get too swept up in wondering what will happen.”
She describes herself as a music witch and there is definitely something magic about the effect she has on a crowd. “Everyone’s got natural inclinations as educators, and mine is adapting the plan in the moment.
“I’m not thinking about anything except the next note. I’m like an addict – I’m living note to note, trying desperately to find a way to convince everyone to sing the next one.”
Audiences don’t seem to need much convincing. “People are chuffed with themselves, which is a really nice outcome. I think it’s a surprise to a lot of people that they are good enough and that that is different from being good, and that’s a lovely discovery.” It’s also the sentiment behind the title of her upcoming book, Average at Best.
She is also aware of the science underlying what she does: “People feel different when they agree with each other, and when they’ve felt a contributor to a shared goal.
“My favourite study, which makes it so clear, was one when they measured singers’ heartbeats during a performance, and they started to sync up. They’re exerting themselves in the same way, they’re breathing at the same time.
“We don’t need to overthink it. It just feels nice and it feels correct. For a lot of people, it’s difficult to find those opportunities.
“Anything that we can do to feel better, I think, is worth doing at the moment, as long as it doesn’t hurt other people.”
Hitting the right note
Communal singing is having a musical moment, but it’s had a lot of moments previously, especially at the movies. Recent notable iterations include Sing-A-Long-A Sound of Music, first rolled out in 1999. That was an official, commercially driven project. By contrast, the notorious audience participation in The Rocky Horror Picture Show singalongs arose organically from fans.
But even before there were talkies, there were singalong movies, with Fleischer Studios’ Song Car-Tunes shorts, complete with a bouncing ball highlighting the words karaoke style, first screening in 1924. Musical accompaniment was live in the theatre.
The 1960s US TV show Singalong with Mitch, hosted by Mephistopheles lookalike Mitch Miller, featured songs performed by a regular cast plus guests with lyrics on screen to follow at home. It was the most – though not very – successful attempt to carry the format to TV and ran from 1961-64.
More recently, the popularity of Disney’s animated hit Frozen saw the company make a cinema singalong version – with bouncing snowflake – within a year of the original’s release, as well as a DVD for home choral use and even a live singalong Frozen show at Disney theme parks. Grease, Mamma Mia and Bohemian Rhapsody are among other movies that have had official singalong versions.
Want to sing along?
You’re probably too late to get a spot in the NZ Opera chorus but you can see how it works out in The Monster in the Maze: Christchurch, September 5-6; Wellington, September 12-13 and Auckland, September 19-20. Visit nzopera.com for details.
For Fiona McDonald’s dates, search “Singalong with Fiona McDonald” on EventFinda.
Pōneke Shanty Club meets on the first and third Thursdays of the month at The Welsh Dragon bar – see their Facebook page for details.
Dame Hinewehi Mohi says there will be Waiata Singalong at next month’s NZ vs South Africa netball series.
Pub Choir is back in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in November: pubchoir.com.au