REFUGEES, FORCED MIGRATION, AND THE CHOIR

JEREMY HANEMAN

MUSIC:​ Bright Ideas by Shin Suzuma

ANDRÉ:​ Support for The Choral Commons comes from the University of San Diego, the Karen
and Tom Mulvaney Center for Community, Awareness, and Social Action and the College of
Arts and Sciences Arts Engagement Initiative.

EMILIE:​ USD’s Arts Engagement Initiative supports artistic action embedded in and responsive
to ever-changing social, cultural and political circumstances, deep and meaningful engagement
with community, and increased access to the arts on the USD campus and beyond.

ANDRÉ:​ The Choral Commons is a community where choral music practitioners and
organizations can gather in order to envision equity-centered choral futures. ​With our
community and creative partners, we hope to empower choral practitioners with additional
strategies for innovation, grounded in culturally responsive, critical and equity-centered values.

ANDRÉ:​: For most of this century, conductors and choirs have found alternative ways to
express and encounter the “new normal” of choral music, a new normal that acknowledges a
kaleidoscope of practice, honors diverse ways of thinking, knowing, and being, and celebrates
new repertoires, purposes, and societal connections. The pandemic calls on us to rethink our
work and to position ourselves for a vibrantly artistic and compassionate choral culture.

MUSIC:​ Bright Ideas by Shin Suzuma

EMILIE:​ ​Jeremy Haneman feels that the choir can be a gathering place to encounter those
frequently excluded and erased. Over the last twenty years, Jeremy has co-created inclusive
choruses with and for the displaced and the LGBTQ community in England. By centering those
on the margins, not to change them, but to be changed by them, Jeremy's work points to our
common humanity.

EMILIE:​ I'm Emilie Amrein,

ANDRÉ:​: And I’m André de Quadros,

EMILIE:​ And this is the Choral Commons Podcast.

JEREMY: ​I really saw the power required to bring a community together, and we acted as a
focal point for grief, for expression of anger, for outrage, and for taking care of the people who
were hit because hundreds of people were wounded as well. So that was quite a seminal
moment for me. When I left that choir, I began to explore other ways of being a conductor, I
suppose. And when you've seen the other side, the other path, to me there is no turning back.
Because, even though there were a lot of times when I was under pressure to do so, there was,
I just couldn't go back, and the heart of it for me was about who am I being, not just a conductor,
but who am I being as a human being?

EMILIE: ​Jeremy Haneman is a conductor and musical director who specializes in choral and
operatic repertoire. He is the co-director of Together Productions, a company that produces
groundbreaking work using music and the arts to inspire social change. He is the inaugural
community chorus director for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In 2013, he co founded
The Mixed Up Chorus and an auditioned and intercultural choir in London that seeks to unite
audiences and members through a love of music, a global repertoire, regular performances, and
exciting collaborations with other artists.

MUSIC:​ Bright Ideas by Shin Suzuma

EMILIE: ​The theme of our first episode on the podcast is about choirs engaging with the issue
of forced migration, and so I wondered if you could tell us just a little bit about that context and
your work. Specifically, I'm curious about who you work with and the challenges the refugees
experience, both before they arrive in the UK and also once they've resettled there.

JEREMY:​ Sure, well, the ​project​ ​we and by we, I should say Holly Jones who is the co-director
of Together Productions, she and I -- so it's very much a joint project-- we founded our
company in 2017, I think it was, 2016. And it was really in response to the refugee crisis in
Europe and in fact it was globally, but it's typically prevalent in Europe, and it was in the news all
the time. It was headline news and it was in all the papers. And the general press here in the UK
was very negative and I think around the world really towards Immigration and there were a lot
of terrible things being put in the press about immigration and we wanted to do something in
some small way, find a way to sort of counter that argument. For me personally, it was my
parents were refugees, my grandparents were all refugees, pre and post World War Two from
the Holocaust. So it was a personal thing for me, I suppose. We wanted to do something that
would just shift a little bit hearts and minds in some direction.

JEREMY: ​And so we came up with the idea of what became known as Singing Our Lives and
Singing Our Lives is a choral project predominantly. But it’s composition has two fold, it has two
broad aspects to it: composition, which is, we get groups of people together to write new music.
And the unusual thing is that they're collaborative compositions, so they are compositions
written by between one and 200 people who come together to write music and lyrics as well.
And then the other aspect is performance. So we get similar groups of people to perform, not
just the music they've written, but their own sort of pieces and things. And the groups we've
been working with include refugee choirs and non refugee choirs, local choirs. Because a big
part of our idea about responding to​ ​the refugee crisis was to think, a lot of people just have
never met a refugee and all they know about refugees and migrants is what they read in the
newspaper, what they see in the news and I don't know a previous project used to run a charity
with bringing Palestinians and Jews together to create music. And a big part of that project was
simply about getting to know one another, creating a bond, a friendship of camaraderie,
whatever, and a choir as we know is one of the fastest ways to build bonds. I think there's
research about that to build the human bonds, so...

JEREMY:​ Singing Our Lives is essentially about bringing people together who otherwise would
not meet, and it's a, there’s a certain cunning aspect to the project, which is that we use the
medium of singing. But really, there is a very much a social aspect to it as well. So the medium
is singing because that's a very relatively neutral thing.​ ​Every culture in the world sings and the
people who sing in choirs are doing it already anyway, so it was an opportunity to bring together
people who otherwise wouldn't meet. We've been working particularly with a group of refugees,
have experienced torture, through initially, through a charity called Freedom From Torture here,
so they were refugees who had experienced torture in their home country. And then they
immigrated, not immigrated, they came as refugees or asylum seekers or both to the United
Kingdom. And then they found their way and at a certain... this charity offered them therapy in
different kinds of things. And they started a choir. They gave up on the choir, but my company
took over the choir, so we now run the choir of refugees called Sing for Freedom.

JEREMY: ​So a key part of it was to make sure that we didn't just have refugees but we had
refugees and hopefully people who'd never actually met a refugee before-- so that they would
be working together; and that was a key part of our methodology is to make sure that they
would get to know one another; they would get to make music together; they would co create
things and then they would have the experience of performing which in itself can be in the right
circumstances can be a powerful and life-affirming thing and also that they would be creating
something new again; so the act of creation was something that was also hopefully a very joyful
act. So in terms of the background of the people we worked with, not just with refugees of
experience torture, we've over the years, we've worked with other groups of refugees who have
been in detention, some of them have been here quite a long time, some of them are relatively
new. They are from all over the place. Predominantly the Middle East, and Africa, Central Africa.
The Sing for Freedom choir has a lot of people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo for
various reasons, so they probably make up 50% least 50% of the refugees in that choir. But
we've worked with some other groups as well. The Citizens of the World choir here, which has
quite a few refugees from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iran. And, uh, another group, another
refugee crackled Woven Gold, which has, they’re from all over the place. So quite a mix.

EMILIE: ​Yeah, I think that the global forced migration context is such a big topic that it's hard for
people to kind of understand it, both in terms of the scope, but also in the specificity of the
stories that people are bringing to kind of new contexts, right? So it's very different to be working
with refugees in the UK or in Europe more generally, I think, than it is here in the United States
where André and I, as you know, work at the border with refugees in Tijuana and San Diego,
and so just like the context is, I think, helpful in terms of framing what this work might look like.
So thank you for going into detail about who you work with specifically.

MUSIC:​ Bright Ideas by Shin Suzuma

ANDRÉ: ​So, Jeremy. Let's talk about, a little bit about you. I mean, as a choral conductor. You
did your Masters degree at the University of Cambridge and, that’s right, isn’t it?

JEREMY:​ I did it quite late in life..

ANDRÉ: ​Yes, yes, I realize that. But, you’ve had a kind of like we all have kind of these familiar
trajectories of choral conducting, of our education, we’re educated in very particular specific
ways to think about repertoire, to think about who we work with and who we perform for, and
what we should sing in various contexts. And you've shifted quite a lot, dismantled quite a lot of
your, I guess, the Main Street of choral music and you've chosen to drive on another road. Can
you speak a little bit about what moved you onto that side street, and what does it feel like to be
on that side street rather than on the Main Street.

JEREMY: ​That's well, that's a great question. Uh, yeah, I think about that quite a lot how I’ve
ended up where I've ended up. I think, uhm, you know, often these things happen by chance to
some degree or design. The first, when I left Australia, I did my undergraduate there and it was
very much a traditional classical training. And then I moved to the United Kingdom in 1996, with
quite an open, a much more open mind that I would have had in Australia because I didn't know
anyone here and I didn't have a clue what I was going to do or even how I would make a living.
It was just sort of an adventure really. And then the first job I got here was musical director for
the London Gay Men's Chorus and that was a community choir. It was a pretty ragtag, it was
about 15 people singing very out of tune round a very out of tune piano but with burning issues.

JEREMY: ​I stayed with them for five years and that was quite a life-changing journey for me
because I had to really reflect during those five years as who I was as a conductor. Because the
traditional model of conducting that I'd been brought up with, it wasn't that effective. It just didn't
work so well. And, uh, the traditional model that I was brought up with is that communication
flows in one direction. That is, from conductor to choir and not the other way round. And in fact
questions are discouraged. Uh, and even talking in rehearsal is absolutely verboten, and so that
that I found that I didn't like that. I just didn't like it. I found I got bored myself in rehearsals, just
hearing my own voice. And so I started to involve the choir more in conversations, and because
this wasn't just a predominantly was a choir, but at the time in the 90s there were a lot of
political issues around gay rights and the choir was involved in quite a lot of things. You know
we were regularly outside number 10 Downing Street, lobbying about this and that lobbying for
gay rights against, there was a terrible thing called Section 28 here, which forbade the
education of, talking about homosexuality in schools.

JEREMY: ​And so there are a lot of issues to talk about, to work on, to talk about. So side by
side I guess I learned about how to bring the two together, which is to involve, to relate the
music that you were singing to wider causes in the community. So if we, if London Gay Men's
Chorus sings a song like “Hello Dolly,” it has a certain context to it. If they sing “Ave verum
corpus” by Mozart-- Just the fact that they were singing that song adds another layer of identity
to the music that they were doing and had an impact on the audience. we quickly saw. Just the
fact that this group of people, whatever repertoire while we chose, would never just have a
straight-- forgive the pun-- impact. It would have a context of its own that we were bringing to it.

JEREMY: ​So we learned sort of how to, how to manipulate that. We would often change lyrics.
We would re-gender lots of things, we would play around with identity and our performances as
well in the stagecraft we used. So I, that the five years without that sort of started to me thinking
about how a choir can actually be playing an important role within a community. There was a
key moment, um, if I've got time just just to mention which which was there was a bomb, went
off in a gay pub here in 1997, I think it was or 1998. There was a series of nail bombs,
particularly vicious bombs that were set off. There were three set off in London. One targeted,
was in the heart of the black community in Brixton. There was another one targeted a women’s
center. I think it was. And then there was one in a gay pub and I happened to be. In just nearby,
when the bomb went off and we quickly rallied, the choir quickly rallied together because quite a
few of us happened to be in town that day and within about an hour we organized a rally in
Soho Square, 'cause the bomb went off in Soho in the middle of the sort of LGBT part of
London. And somehow thousands of people turned up because and we became sort of a
rallying cry and my mom in Australia ended up seeing me on the TV.

JEREMY:​ It was quite a bizarre thing, but what happened from that I really saw the power
required to bring a community together, and we acted as a focal point for grief, for expression of
anger, for outrage, and for taking care of the people who were hit because hundreds of people
were wounded as well. So that was quite a seminal moment for me. When I left that choir, I
began to explore other ways of being a conductor, I suppose. And when you've seen the other
side, the other path, to me there is no turning back. Because, even though there were a lot of
times when I was under pressure to do so, there was, I just couldn't go back, and the heart of it
for me was about who am I being, as not just a conductor, but who am I being as a human
being?

ANDRÉ:​ ​I'm going to remind you of this wonderful quotation I saw on the whiteboard in your
rehearsal room a few years ago when we bought the Manado State University Choir from
Indonesia there and everybody remarked on that, and I think you had The Mixed Up chorus on
that day and, and you said it was in there something, but there​ ​are no wrong notes here or
something like that. And so here, on the one hand you are saying this, It makes them sound
better. Or it makes them sound good? But I would say that our professional colleagues might
listen to the work that you do and the work that you're doing in a number of different settings
and say, Well, they don't really sound that good. Uh, we get. We get what you're saying, but we
don't really think you sound that good. I mean, well, how would you respond to that issue of
sounding good?

JEREMY:​ Well, look I can't. I can't do anything about how they hear it. Uh, that's you know
people hear what they want to hear. But what I can say is that for me I would much rather listen
to a choir that was full of wrong notes and inverted commas that had the natural sound, the
expression of the human voice than listen to an absolutely perfect rendition of Thomas Tallis
piece or something that's might become my personal taste because I've seen a lot of classical
music is headed towards this slightly, I would describe it as insane drive towards the perfection.
And the recording studio unfortunately, I think has played a big part in that where absolutely
everything you listed was just so crystalline, perfect and flawless. And yes. I do enjoy that on
occasion, but actually most often I'm left bored out of my brain.

MUSIC:​ Bright Ideas by Shin Suzuma

EMILIE: ​The idea that you’re regarding the performer in a different way in the work that you're
doing right, like the way you regard the performer is different than in that kind of monologue that
you were describing earlier in the conversation, and I think also the way that you are regarding
the audience as complex and whole human beings who have multiple identities, I think is a
different way of regarding the audience than many people in our field who may really perceive
the audience as either a consumer. Or like an empty bucket that needs to be filled, right? So if
you're going to come to the concert, you're going to either consume this product and pay for it,
or you are in need of some sort of enhancement or culture, right that you come to this space in
order to receive, rather than to engage. And so I wondered if you could talk just a little bit about
the regard that you hold your singers in and the community in, the audience in, and how those
are related.

JEREMY:​ Um, this the performers. I try and look at them as co-creators. So that's a key thing
for me as a conductor and this line of communication that I talk about, which is that I'm the
conductor, because I know the most. That's normally the starting point, that you're there
because you know the most. Well, I probably know the most about some things, but I definitely
don't know the most about life. And the life experiences that people can bring in a choir. They
are key for me and that is something in which I know absolutely nothing about, but it is for me,
it's become an insane thing to not engage with it. Why wouldn't you engage with that wealth of
life experience that you have there? They may not be able to sing in tune, but that doesn't mean
they haven't lived an extraordinary life. They may not be able to read music, but that doesn't
mean that they haven't spent their whole life listening and engaging with music. Just because
they don't know happen to sing in tune, or you know read music. Those things are not, uh...
JEREMY:​ You know it goes back to the thing of I've heard times and I'm sure you guys have as
well where someone says, Oh I can't sing in tune, so therefore I can't sing. Well for me, you
could sing, you just can't sing in tune. They’re two slightly, they’re often squashed together, so
in the same way that if I have, I might have a particular interpretation about a piece, but I'm, I
try-- and it's hard-- to be open to alternative interpretations because, you know, why wouldn't
you? It's more fun to engage in that. A lot of the criticism is, well, how do you get 40, 50, two
hundred people to, how do you get all their interpretations? Well, obviously you can't, but what
you can do is bring them along with you on the journey. Take them on the journey and there is
some, if you're allowed some creative space for the members of the choir or the orchestra,
whoever to have a say in, actually quite a lot of things, like ranging from should we take a breath
here? Why should we take a breath here? Should,​ ​should this section be louder? Should this
section be softer? What's the phrasing? What's the tone we want to get here? I mean, I can of
course answer all those questions, and often I do. But if there is any opportunity to get the
singers, the performers, to have, to get their feedback on it, especially the ones who know
absolutely nothing about music, quote unquote. Then you can end up going to some quite
unknown places and that looking at the co-creation thing is important for me because it also
means that when people are performing they are more likely to be present and engaged if they
have a stake in the performance itself. So like if you were doing, if I'm doing Phillip’s crescendo
or I'm doing, you know, Fatima’s phrasing. That within the thing that gives a stake, you know
their shareholders in the thing. And for me, uh, that creates a better performance. I don't know
whether it does. That's just for me where I'm at about the whole thing.

JEREMY:​ The audience is an interesting one. The audience. I always think you have no control
over them at all. they just turn up there in there, but if there is an opportunity for them to be a
part of the co-creation process or to be part of the thing, then I welcome it. So it's very. Every
Sing for Our Lives concert that we do has audience participation. The most recent one we did
was, uh, at the end of January, which seems, feels like years ago now, but we had a theme. It
was Holocaust Memorial Day, so it was in conjunction for that. But we had a theme of love. Very
original but it was “Love is” and we got we had lots of postcards with the words “Love is” on
them and we had them out to the audience and at various times they would write the answer. To
that, whatever it was and we would read them out during the concept, we were during the
various points we bread we took. I taught everyone a round, the “Love is” round, it’s the sort of
four part round all about love. And then we performed it. All of us together. The performers
mixed with the audience. We did it there so you know, I know André, you're amazing at doing
that as well, engaging the audience and getting them in there to join in. and I find that’s a more
satisfying experience for everyone at the end.

EMILIE: ​So from my perspective, it feels like I hear you saying that this is about relationships
and reciprocity to a certain extent, and I wanted to ask you a question about when you're
working with vulnerable populations, with marginalized people who have been oppressed, who
have experienced violence. I think that for a lot of us, kind of, who don't identify as sharing that
experience that there is this kind of impulse of helping and, I don't think it's a bad impulse just to
say it out loud, right? Because in fact the problems and the structural injustices that we have
constructed here in our various communities, they are real and need to be changed. So that
motive, I think is genuine and fair, but when... I think there's this danger of looking at a
community as in need of help that puts this kind of hierarchy in place. Do you know what I'm
getting here, right? So what are your thoughts on that and how do you avoid that?

JEREMY:​ It's, it's a difficult area. The experience of working with refugees have experienced
torture. You know, torture if you think about it, it's like the really darkest, deepest, most
malevolent part of humanity, really, it’s the rock bottom of one human being committing physical
violence to another person deliberately to punish them, or to extract information or whatever. It's
really like the blackest darkest part of the soul there that you're dealing with. So when I when
we started working with the with the survivors of torture that I couldn't get that out of my head,
you know, and I'd walk in the room. That would be like, Oh God, they've been tortured, they’ve
been tortured. Without saying it, 'cause obviously I'm not going to say it, uh, why would you?
And then we started the songwriting process and in the very beginning of it, everyone said,
what's their story? We want to tell their story to tell the story of, you know what happened to the
blah blah blah. And we deliberately avoided that in the songwriting because we learned pretty
quickly from some some particular, from one particular refugee who is very articulate about this.
Said that when you take someone's story, you leave a hole in the place. There is a hole once
you've taken their story and there are a lot of examples in our, you know, profession of people
milking disadvantage people for their story and their narrative, taking them for their own gains,
creating works of art, having appropriated someone else's story, whether that be refugees or
disabled people or whatever. And for refugees and those who’ve experienced deep trauma, the
active retailing, has the possibility of re invoking the trauma and reawakening it.

JEREMY:​ So, although there was tremendous curiosity,​ ​and that's absolutely normal, people
want to know what did you happen? How did you get here? What happened to you? You know,
all of this. We never brought it up and we were very clear with the librettists because we work
with some professional librettists. We were all clear from the outset. We would never going to
say to them, tell us your story. And so when we were writing the songs, we left it absolutely
open for anything to come out and to make, to do that we use some interesting processes. We
used a thing called, um, it's going out of my head, devised by Improbable Theater, and it's a way
of bringing people together in a very democratic way to, where they control the narrative of the
day. They control the narrative that song-writing, the stories. So In other words, the songs we've
ended up with we've got, I think about 7 now, none of them are about torture. Very few of them
are about refugees per say, although there are some of the songs are about fleeing from one
place to another. But you know, as far as we were concerned, the science could be about going,
going, shopping, or going to watch a movie or anything. There was no, we didn't want to put any
kind of restriction on it because, as you mentioned, a minute ago, Emilie, identity is so complex
and the the these guys who have survived God knows what to get here want to be seen, not as
a choir of people who've been tortured, they just want to be seen as as a choir who makes joyful
music. That's what they want to be seen as.

JEREMY:​ And it's interesting. We've just been doing a branding process with a wonderful
branding agency who engaged with the members of the choir to come up with a new identity
and what just came overwhelmingly was that the future that they were looking towards the
future, some future which was, a victory over the past, that was about creating something that
was that was beautiful, that was joyful, that was happy, that was celebratory, that, you know,
that's what they their focus was on. It wasn't what I had in my mind. This darkness, the torture
from them. It was all about the future and something brighter and more wonderful.

ANDRÉ: ​Except, but I also think that I think there's uh, one thing about identity being complex,
but identity is also fluid. It's it's, uh. Most cultural theorists say that identity is always in transition.
so in fact, you, Jeremy, identify differently to how you would have identified​ ​15 years ago or​ ​25
years ago. And also, just like we know from our work that sometimes people who been
imprisoned want to be known as former prisoners and others never want that word ever
associated with them. So, I think that people self label and self identify in multiple different ways.
And, as you know, there has been ongoing conversation about whether a gay men's chorus
wants to be called a gay men's chorus and to be defined as a gay men's chorus or just​ ​to be a
chorus. And so I think this idea of identifying is really, is really a big issue that comes up a lot in
the way we talk and the kinds of contexts and demographics in which you work. But, what
provoked you to call the chorus The Mixed Up Chorus. What's mixed up about it?

JEREMY: ​Yeah, it was sort of a whimsical thing. We wanted to sort of turn the idea of a chorus
on its head because the, a lot of choral conductors we spent a lot of time getting around to
blend and to be the same. And actually what if you didn't do that? What if you didn't? What if
you got rid of the blend and went deliberately, went the other direction? What if you wanted the
voices to just be the voices they are? Without I mean, it can blend the vowel and what not, but
still the sound. And then of course it had a bigger cultural meaning, which is that the more mixed
up you are, the better. Tt was something to celebrate. The fact that your identity is so complex
and so layered and so nuanced that in our world, unfortunately it's hitting more and more in the
direction that there are two answers black or white to any question. But what if you could
actually celebrate complexity? What if you can't answer a question in one sentence? But if you
do have to have a long conversation about it, what if life is really multifaceted and complicated
and there isn't a black and white answer? So all those things...

ANDRÉ: ​What about if​ ​we are all confused? What about if you're all confused and there is a
kind of here, and there's a kind of confusion on, right? I mean, I mean, even at this moment I'm
speaking in the middle of May and we are here, we are three choral conductors talking about,
about our work and our lives and where you have been before, but think about it now, Jeremy.
Every every time, uh, in your professional life if I asked you what you're going to do going
forward, you might have had some uncertainty about what your options might be, but now we
are faced with this kind of existential question about whether we can actually do the things that
we have become accustomed to be doing in any way, in any form, and when that might even
restart.

ANDRÉ:​ So that kind of confusion and uncertainty that we have now is unprecedented for all of
us, and we share that. I'm going to ask you another question which relates specifically to these
demographics and populations, and one of the things that comes up quite a lot in our in our
work, and more generally, is that the people who are suffering the most in the coronavirus
epidemic are in fact, certainly United States African Americans, poor people, the people who are
most defenseless and so on. And so and so in your mission, to engage with populations who
are traditionally or conventionally deprived in choral music, you have engaged with them in
multiple kinds of ways… Now they are once again deprived in this pandemic.

MUSIC:​ Bright Ideas by Shin Suzuma

ANDRÉ:​ AHow do we move forward? Is there an idea that you have about how you might
continue some kind of engagement? What might that shift for you? Do you have any solutions
or thoughts or despairs that you want to share with us?

JEREMY: ​Plenty of despairs, but all I can tell you, I can tell you is what I'm doing. I don't think
any of us can see more than a month ahead at this point. We are offering virtual rehearsals, so
with all our choirs. We’re doing an online program where we’re adapting as much as we can
because we found that people still want that connection online. Although the very fundamental
thing about a choir which is that you are together with your hearts beating together and you’re
breathing together and that's gone. But there is still a connection that can be made online.
We've had, in fact The Mixed Up Chorus, we've had this term more people join than ever. By
some miracle and the great thing has been that people have joined from all over the world.
We've got people from Mozambique, from Indonesia, from Canada, from various parts of
Europe, have joined The Mixed Up Chorus, who otherwise would never make it to north London
on a Tuesday night, so that's exciting.

JEREMY: ​We've developed a new master class series we’re calling it, where we're doing talks
every Thursday night and lots of different topics from reading music to cultural identity to looking
at uh, we had a master class where someone played there, the yangqin, the Chinese instrument
looking at lots of different things. The Sing for Freedom Choir is also being online, but there are
practical issues that are very significant and as indeed as you've said here, we’ve found a lot of
the refugee participants are​ ​in dire straits. They've been left behind as a result of all this, and
some of them are really desperate for money. The act of being online implies that you've got a
Wi-Fi and be something to play the Wi-Fi on, so that's been an issue because a lot of Internet
cafes with a lot of the guys used to go are closed, food banks of closed, access to a lots of
things and a lot of them have been yeah, left at the bottom of the heap, unfortunately. So we're
doing what we can to mitigate that. We're putting call outs to various groups, we're getting
donations of laptops and phones, we’re using funding that we used to use to pay their travel to
come to rehearsals, now we’re using that to buy Wi-Fi for them. Things like that. So we're doing
what we can, but it is really challenging.

JEREMY:​ But the feedback we've got is that people are still valuing that connection for the
choir, even if it's just an hour a week. Seeing their faces on the damn screen or on their phone
is better than nothing. So we're going to carry on doing the online offering as long as we
possibly can, because there are connections to be made there. It's a different way of working.
And for me personally, as a conductor, it's deeply unsatisfying, but I've just got to get over that
because people need it, you know, and that I just have to find satisfaction in another way and
just think of the idea, we're doing virtual choir projects. The latest Singing Our Lives piece, the
composer has now adapted it to be suitable for an online choir. So we got lots of people to
record, including our refugees to record little 10 second samples of music. Uh, and sounds and
noises from their culture that they were creating or whatever, and he's leaving that into a
backing track that's going to serve the new composition. So we're going to premiere that it runs
going to record themselves. Will it work? God only knows, but that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to keep it alive. We're trying to keep the choral connection alive. We're trying to
keep people singing as much as they can. It's often much more difficult if you're at home to, or
wherever you are, to sing freely without feeling inhibited by people around you and all that kind
of stuff. We’re signposting people towards food banks and whatever and essentially keep asking
the question what do you need that's keeping? What do you need? What do you need from us?
What can we do? Uh, yeah, so that's where we're at. I mean, there's a lot of...

ANDRÉ: ​That's a very, that's a very interesting question here you are saying what do you need?
And that is not generally a question that choral conductors tend to ask.​ ​What you need. It's not
the kind of question we ask our singers. It's not the kind of question we generally ask our
communities or policymakers. We generally make a whole range of assumptions about what it is
we think they need, and very often were driven by simply not asking you the question at all.
Because we are just inculturated, like all of us are, to continue doing what we have been
educated rather well to do. And you've already tried to break out of that in different kinds of
ways.

EMILIE: ​And creatively, too, you know. So I think that the solutions that you are, that you named
are really creative responses to the reality of this time, and you know, for me, one of the things
that… and we're running short on time I think at this point, so we probably should wrap up, but I
guess I just wanted to come back to this idea of the way that we emphasize process and
relationships, and one of the built-in issues, I think with kind of the digital engagement is that a
lot of people are just like making these virtual choirs that in fact completely replicate the product
of a performance that positions the audience as a consumer and positions the choir itself as
producers of the product. And so that's one of the things that I kind of them wrestling with you
know, going forward, how to use the tool of this technology in a way to kind of continue to build
relationships and to acknowledge and honor the wholeness of the people that were working
with, and the wholeness of the audience, too. You know, so I don't have any answers to that. Do
you have any kind of final remarks about the virtual choir phenomenon and how to, how to
leverage the tool to engage with people in a more meaningful way.

JEREMY:​ I don't have an answer with just trying to be that you know adversity is often a great
source of creativity. That's what I keep telling myself that we just have to innovate. You know,
we just have to innovate and find a way to do it. We don't. I certainly don't haven't a clue. We're
just experimenting and this is a great time to for us to experiment and be outside of our comfort
zones and try and think, and you're asking exactly the right question, Emilie and I don't know
what the answer is, but it seems it might be this way for awhile so that that's most prognosis. So
we either have to give up and have silence or, Do you know be brave enough to fail? I think
that's the big thing is to just try things and if they bomb, they bomb at the moment everyone's
doing virtual choir whatever. That will probably get very tired of that very quickly. I'm already
tired of it. I've done 3 this week so I'm sick of it. But you know, I don't know. We'll have to do it.
Maybe what we have to do is really make a push for the technology to enable us to sing in real
time. That's the real gap. If that is solved, then a lot of things that will open up huge possibilities
if that time lag thing gets to be solved that would be amazing, but in the meantime we've just got
to innovate. I don't. I don't know a lot of new things are emerging very quickly and I think we're a
creative community and yeah, wish us all good luck!

MUSIC: ​Ekphrastic Song #1 by VOICES 21C

EMILIE:​ ​Jeremy Haneman is the co-founder of The Mixed Up Chorus and Together
Productions, a UK based organization that believes that the arts can make a difference, bridging
social divides, building community, expanding horizons, and opening up new perspectives and
relationships. You can learn more about Jeremy's work on his website,
www.jeremyhaneman.com.

EMILIE:​ The Choral Commons podcast is hosted by Emilie Amrein and André de Quadros,
produced by Emilie Amrein in partnership with the University of San Diego ​and supported by
listeners like you.

ANDRÉ:​ ​ ​If your organization would like to join our list of sponsors, please reach out to us at
thechoralcommons@gmail.com​.

EMILIE:​ Or consider joining our community of supporters on our website, where you can
schedule regular donations of 5 or 10 dollars a month to help us offset the costs of producing
these programs.

ANDRÉ:​ You can find this and other episodes of The Choral Commons ​on our webpage, Apple
Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
EMILIE: ​The Choral Commons aims to provide a space for choirs and conductors to envision
innovative and equity-centered practice. We produce podcasts and interactive webinars and
offer curated resources on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

ANDRÉ: ​We connect and engage community in meaningful dialogue on pedagogy and practice,
and incubate creative, artistic, and compassionate choral projects that empower choral music
organizations to work for a just and peaceful world.

EMILIE:​ VOICES 21C created an improvisational sound sculpture in response to this

conversation. The creative leader for this project was Michael Genese. You can listen to the full
recording and learn about the ensemble’s creative process on our website,
www.thechoralcommons.com​.

MUSIC:​ Bright Ideas by Shin Suzuma