When I turned 23, I bought myself an electric piano. With proper weighted keys, a matching bench complete with leather seat, inbuilt music storage compartment and a beautiful rosewood finish, it remains the most expensive gift I’ve ever given myself.
That it was a treat to have my own piano would have confused my younger self. When I first started learning to play the instrument some 15 years earlier, the idea of regular music practice felt like a chore. I was initially taught to play by my father’s aunt, an elderly Catholic nun from the Presentation Sisters order. Auntie Loretta, as we called her, came to our house every week and taught first me and then my brothers on the century-old Griffin foot piano in the room that we called the dining room yet never dined in. In the careless way of children, I did not fully appreciate either her kind heart or the gift she was giving me until many years after it was impossible to tell her how much it meant.
Auntie Loretta’s piano lessons taught me how to read music, and while I never achieved anything like the dizzying heights of proficiency of some of my peers, by the time I got to high school I was competent enough to bash out a swishy jazz tune for my friends, and I taught myself to play some Smashing Pumpkins songs by ear. But it wasn’t until I joined my high school’s choir at the age of 13 that I started to understand the way making music could feel.
For four years, I sang with that ever changing group of schoolgirls. I learnt how to hold pitch among people singing completely different parts; I learnt how to perform in front of hundreds of people; I even applied myself enough at the piano to accompany the choir during a piece from Les Misérables – I screwed it up so many times during rehearsal that when I actually got it right on stage I skipped off excitedly after I’d finished without even remembering to bow.
One of the sad realities of growing up is that you increasingly find yourself making decisions based on pragmatism rather than passion. You choose the career that will support you financially rather than the one that speaks to your soul. You structure your life around what you think you should do rather than what actually brings you joy. I have always tried to hold out against this tendency but even if you’re following your heart, you have to have priorities.
Music, along with painting and drawing, which I also loved, eventually became a casualty of my love for writing. Writing, in turn, became work. I stopped singing regularly after I left high school. I stopped playing the piano, too – I now see that birthday present to myself at the age of 23 as a symptom of something missing, the attempt to claw back something that I knew had slipped out of my grasp.
My father was a singer. After finishing school, so the family story goes, he had all the makings of an elite bass-baritone but put an offer of a place at the Victorian College of the Arts on hold to work for a year instead – and never went back. Every now and then he breaks out into a rendition of Old Man River and holds everyone enthralled with that deep, powerful vibrato. As kids, my brothers and I used to bury our heads in embarrassment when he took to the stage (kids can be so cruel); now, I just about burst with pride accompanied by that distinct pang of the sadness of lost dreams.
When I moved to Sydney a few years ago to follow that passion for writing into a career in journalism, I left behind in Melbourne a community that I’d been part of for my entire childhood and the vast majority of my adult life. My partner understood my decision to move, but he, too, had to stay behind, as work responsibilities kept him in our home town. So I flung myself into a new city and career more or less alone. Faced with the immediate prospect of profound solitude ameliorated only by work, I decided that I would use the time as an opportunity to rediscover those things I loved that had fallen by the wayside. I decided to join a choir.
I tooled around for a few months, trying to find one that would suit me – accomplished without being professional, committed but not pretentious, big enough to be fun but not large enough to get lost in. After a couple of false starts and unanswered enquiries I finally sent off an email to the director of a smallish inner-west community choir called Polyphony, explaining who I was and what I was looking for. His reply was enthusiastic and generous, so one sticky January evening I went along to a rehearsal.
When I walked into that crumbling old church that doubles as Polyphony’s rehearsal space, I knew I’d come home. The director, Jack Colwell – a successful independent musician in his own right – held out his hand to shake mine with a big, warm smile and said “Welcome!” But it was when we stood to sing through the first song – a Tori Amos tune that sucked me right back to the emotional upheaval of my late teens – I nearly burst into tears. I had forgotten how it felt to sing with other people, and the sudden rush of memory and pure joy was like a kick to the heart.
Singing in a choir has been linked to everything from increased immune competence, elevated mood, social inclusion and a more positive sense of self, to increased wellbeing in prisoners. But to anyone who’s ever done it, these things are self-evident. The euphoria and catharsis that accompanies collective music-making is intensified all the more when those sounds are coming from your body. French sociologist Émile Durkheim called the feeling “collective effervescence”; it’s most readily associated with religious fervour. The critical thing is that you cannot do it alone: it’s a heightened experience only achievable when you band together with others in a shared practice, with a shared goal. And when you are moving to a beat with 35 other people, whether your voices are locked together in unison or split along different harmonies and rhythms, it’s about as close as you can come to secular transcendence.
Singing in a choir taught me that music is best when it’s shared, but singing with Polyphony taught me how important it is to make time for pure joy. We are a community choir: we are political staffers, artists, school teachers, computer programmers, personal assistants, events managers, administrators, students, and therapists; we have all kinds of cultural backgrounds and personal lives. We have picnics in the park, clothes swaps, boozy parties and karaoke nights. We put on two concerts a year, and get involved with other artists around the inner west. In 2017, we sang as a surprise encore at the Unity concert in favour of marriage equality. The only thing we all have in common is that we sing together, yet it is enough.
When I left rehearsal that first night I said to Jack, “You guys don’t know it yet, but you’re my people.” It’s as true now as it was then. Polyphony made Sydney a home for me, but in a really fundamental way, it also brought me back to myself.
