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Emer McLysaght: Going back to choir feels life-saving

‘I didn’t realise how much I would miss singing with a group in a field or a hall until it was gone’

The pandemic demonised choral singing, but like everything else choirs are healing.

Emer McLysaght's face
Emer McLysaght
Sat Jun 4 2022 - 06:40

In early March 2020, a choir about an hour’s drive north of Seattle in the US went ahead with its weekly practice. Sixty people showed up — about half the regular attendance — to try, as news of the coronavirus spread, to maintain a bit of normalcy with community and song. They kept their distance and didn’t share sheet music or their usual hugs of hi and goodbye. They were due to perform at a festival in April, which never went ahead. By the end of the month, 45 of the choir members had tested positive for Covid-19, at least three had been hospitalised and two were dead. It was one of the first reported “superspreader” events, with the projection of voices and spreading of aerosols from asymptomatic people adding more words to our growing gloomy pandemic vocabularies.

I went to my last choir practice in December 2019. It was a Christmas special, and hundreds of people showed up to sing some Shakin’ Stevens and reach the most dizzying heights of festive spirit. Led by accomplished choirmaster Róisín Savage (of the High Hopes and Line Up choirs) we were corralled into sections and taught three-part harmonies in about an hour. A saxophonist joined the usual keyboard player for the occasion, and I remember my cheeks burning with the closeness and joy of it all as I roared my “ring-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-dong-dings” and tried not to let my perfectionist tendencies get too het up about the person behind me coming in too soon with their dongs and their dings.

We were all amateurs after all, and Savage’s “Casual Choir” sessions were a place for anyone who wanted to sing their hearts out to come and do just that. They had grown from about 100 participants in a small venue in Harold’s Cross in Dublin in September 2018, to this huge Christmas group in a lecture theatre at University College Dublin.

I attended as many Casual Choirs as I could. You had to buy a ticket in advance to keep the numbers under control, and presumably to give an incentive to actually show up. I was a true choir nerd at school, preferring to harmonise aggressively in a large group than to go it alone (although I did play Oliver in my transition year all-girl production, and nothing says “starving orphans” like 16-year-old girls thundering around a stage in Doc Martins). I love to harmonise in the car when I think nobody is looking.

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I was addicted to those BBC TV shows a few years back where bespectacled choirmaster Gareth Malone would cajole a group of surly builders into performing a rough and ready version of Landslide. I dream of somehow being called on to a stage by Whoopi Goldberg to perform the greatest hits of Sister Act 2. I just love to sing in a group. I love the power of the voices as confidence in the words and notes increases. I love anticipating the most beautiful cadences and harmonies.

A few weeks ago, after 2½ years, I went back to choir. Savage, after plugging away at remote “sofa sessions” during the pandemic and waiting, waiting, waiting for a chance to sing and be safe together again, launched a seven-week “short term” adult choir and I was in like Flynn. In an LA Times article in March 2020 about that doomed Seattle choir, some members said it had been a centring force in their lives, and after my first practice I already feel grounded and part of something. It feels life-giving; maybe even life-saving. Savage reminded us that we have all been through a collective trauma these past few years, and if we got emotional while singing it was okay. She had sent out line tapes via email so we could get familiar with the harmonies and as the voices soared on our first song — a slowed down version of a joyful Harry Styles track — my eyes were definitely prickling. There was something in the words too, “You know it’s not the same as it was”.

The very next day I saw videos doing the rounds of a Harry Styles show in London. In them he appears blown away by the volume of the crowd in the Brixton Academy, drowning him out as they sing his lyrics back to him. I live close to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and for two nights My Chemical Romance played to ecstatic and nostalgic crowds after the gigs were cancelled twice because of the pandemic. I swear I could hear them singing over the music of Welcome to the Black Parade from my patio. It’s an emotive, rock opera song, just perfect for fist-in-the-air cacophonic roaring from thousands of fans. I’m going to see Liam Gallagher in Knebworth this weekend, and while it’s not quite the Oasis reunion that would soothe my teenage soul, I am anticipating the mass singalong required of Don’t Look Back in Anger and Champagne Supernova. I didn’t realise how much I would miss singing in a field or a hall or a theatre until it was gone, and I am so thrilled we’ve all found our voices again.

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