Volume 21 Issue 3 - November 2015

Beat by Beat | Choral Scene
Starting Young
BRIAN CHANG
The GTA has a host of fantastic children’s choirs. From Oakville
to Mississauga, Hamilton and Niagara, these choirs are oftentimes
the entry point for a lifelong engagement with music and
the arts. They provide important exercises in strengthening the fabric
of social engagement, inside and outside of music, helping to provide
key skills as children age and move on to other adventures – some of
which may be still be musical. There are some skills essential to choral
music that directly benefit later-life experiences, such as knowing
when to blend in and be part of a greater whole; paying attention to
difficult situations and implementing plans and practices to address
them; learning to follow instructions/direction and applying them
to your personal situation/physicality; and learning how to engage
contructively with people who ignore all these things. There is so
much that these ensembles do in creating and building communities.
Here are some of them: The Toronto Children’s Chorus has eight
separate choral programs for different skills and levels of engagement
including six choirs. The VIVA! Youth Singers are featured
every year in the National Ballet’s performances of The Nutcracker
and have five ensembles. The Oakville Children’s Choir has seven
programs including six choirs. (Artistic director Sarah Morrison led
the Oakville Children’s Choir to a double gold finish at the World
Choir Games in the Summer of 2015.) The Hamilton Children’s Choir
with Zimfira Poloz was featured in R. Murray Schafer’s Apocalypsis
during Luminato, as well as the Pan American Games closing ceremonies.
These are some of the hardest working choirs out there year
after year. And there are many others throughout Southern Ontario.
It’s also important to note that these are also ensembles who have
a presence in their communities beyond their membership. The
Oakville Children’s Chorus has begun a project in partnership with
ErinoakKids, the largest children’s treatment centre for a variety of
disabilities. Members of ErinoakKids and the OCC sing together regularly
in a glee club that was created to share music. Sarah Morrison
speaks of the joy and learning that is shared when choirs reach out
into their communities. And, as she says, more often than not, it’s
the kids who have the ideas, the energy and the enthusiasm for these
collaborations. The Hamilton Children’s Choir also performs regularly
for seniors in their communities.
A functional musical vocabulary is another benefit of early involvement
in a choir. As a policy analyst by educational training and trade,
I spend a lot of time around people who have no formal musical background.
These are not people who don’t have music in their lives – far
from it. But they aren’t playing clarinet in a wind ensemble or violin
in a string quartet or singing alto in a mixed-voices choir. They have a
musical vocabulary made up of words like “rocking,” “energetic” and
“soft,” instead of “chromatic,” “largamente” and “that suspension in
the time change before the major chord was innovative.” Children’s
choirs have an important part to play in the evolution of how larger
communities engage in music. Because really, who looks at a bunch of
kids singing and goes “Wow. I really don’t like this.” These kids inevitably
grow up and in time share their experiences in music with a new
generation. Moreover, the skills they learn will continue to serve them
and us throughout their lives.
That being said, we should beware of making the jargon of music
into a kind of closed door club. I take friends to concerts who have
never been or go infrequently to live instrumental or choral music. The
musical fabric of the city is built into their lives in bars, pop concerts,
street performers and music theatre, but the same cannot be said
of instrumental music. On a recent trip to the Toronto Symphony
Orchestra’s presentation of La Mer and A Sea Symphony, I brought
a friend who had been to a symphony only twice before. I gave a
briefer on the Sea Symphony and used many of the words that I
used in last month’s column: bombastic; imperialistic; grand. This
Berlioz
L’enfance du Christ
Pax Christi Chorale
& Orchestra
with Nathalie Paulin, Olivier Laquerre,
Alain Coulombe, Sean Clark, Matthew Zadow
Saturday, December 5, 7:30p.m.
& Sunday, December 6, 3:00p.m.
Grace Church on-the-Hill
an Ontario government agency
un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario
PaxChristiChorale.org
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