What Good is a Community Chorus?

Remarks to the First Fig performing arts fundraiser, revised and annotated for print

Camden, Maine

June 16, 2024

Good afternoon, and thank you for allowing me to share a few words with you. My name is James Cook; I joined the Board of Trustees of the Midcoast Community Chorus in 2021, became Vice Chair in 2022, and have been Chair since 2023. In my day job, I'm an Associate Professor of Sociology of the University of Maine at Augusta. These two roles might seem distinct to you, but in my experience they overlap quite a bit.

“How is that Service?” A Community Chorus for Community Health

Last year, my University's president asked me a question about all of this. You may know that when working for a public university, you're expected to engage in acts of service, not only for the university, but also for the community and the people whose resources support the university. The president asked me what I'd been doing for service, and I said, "Well I'm chairing a community chorus." The president looked at me quizzically and she said very bluntly (I appreciate that bluntness), "What good is that?" She continued, "I mean, how is that service?"

That's a good question, and what I would like to do is to communicate hopefully in a few words (I'm a professor so stop me if they’re too many words) to express why the work of Midcoast Community Chorus is a public service. I'll share why I believe the chorus is worth something, not just for the singers and not just for the audience that enjoys listening to music, but for the community that surrounds us. I like to sing, of course, but I joined the Board of Midcoast Community Chorus driven by my own answer to that same question, a twofold answer drawing from research traditions in my field of sociology.

Now, to make a connection here, I'd like to know how many people here today are involved in some way in healthcare, either physical healthcare or mental healthcare. There are many hands up, I see. Well, I'm going to tell you something that you already know then, which is that physical health and mental health to a great extent are not only conditioned by the body or the mind itself, but also by the health of the community that surrounds the individual. There are two frequent findings of sociology regarding community health that matter here.

An Epidemic of Loneliness

One of those findings has to do with the value of association, an activity we've been pursuing today, right? We've been talking, making connections, learning about each other. There's something about our species that responds positively to this. The corresponding lack of that is loneliness. You may have noticed in the chorus' performance today, thanks to the organizational work of Artistic Director Jeff Maynard, that we had onstage a number of young people with us. We also had a number of people onstage singing who are not quite young. That's fairly standard in these parts, right? We know from data gathered by the Census Bureau that the town we're in today is one of the not-quite-youngest places in the country, and that Maine overall is the not-quite-youngest state of them all. We also know that young people and not-so-young people have been suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, one that predates the pandemic but has been exacerbated by it, an epidemic that is hurting people, with older Americans suffering loneliness disproportionately.

So how do we address this epidemic of loneliness? Sociologists have known for 150 years or so that something very special happens when people get together and synchronize in a process that Emile Durkheim called "collective effervescence." The collective effervescence of a chorus comes from the coordinated thought, speech and movement that it takes for people to sing together. When thought, speech, and movement of a group of singers comes into alignment, a special moment happens. If you've ever sung with others you probably know it. It's a moment when a tingle goes up your spine as you hear a voice above you, not any single person's voice but an emerging single voice of the group. That tingle is accompanied by a feeling of transformation, a feeling of belonging to something bigger than yourself. Apart from drugs, perhaps, coordinated social activity producing that feeling is one of the best cures for loneliness around, with arguably the least adverse side-effects.

In this community, suffering from a pandemic-fueled age-exacerbated loneliness epidemic, it's a sorely needed cure. That's one crucial reason to support the Midcoast Community Chorus and the experiences we provide. Cultivating collective effervescence is in our mission statement, "Singing as a Community for the Community," and it happens not just in performance but in every weekly rehearsal. Every week we gather together, we speak to each other one-on-one, we get to know each other's names and lives, and then our artistic leaders bring us together in collective effervescence. They unite us under their direction, they synchronize us, and that brings something larger than us into being that heals our community. So even if you don't care about music, if you care about the health of this community as so many of you do as healthcare workers and social workers, well, that mode of community healing is what this this chorus is all about.

The Great Separation

The second great challenge identified by sociologists is one I think we all can recognize in one way or another. It’s known by many names: division, polarization, segregation, conflict. This challenge is not just afflicting the towns of Midcoast Maine. It's afflicting the entire nation. We know this division into conflicting groups is a major challenge of our time. We talk about it privately in our homes. At times you’ve heard leaders ask publicly, "How do we combat this division that leads to so many problems down the line?"

Communities that struggle to act collectively level experience large-scale difficulties, including diminished efficiency, low levels of trust, and poor resource allocation, but problems stemming from division plague individual people too. People living in conflict-ridden communities suffer from diminished resilience and stress-related problems that affect their individual physical and mental health. We know from decades of social science research testing something called Intergroup Conflict Theory that there's a social remedy for divisions between groups of people who don't know each other, understand each other, or even care to understand each other. There are four steps, and they work most effectively when done all together. First, you have to bring people together into the same spaces, but that's not enough. Second, the people you bring together have to be put on an equal footing with one another. Third, you have to put those people to work trying to reach a shared goal. Fourth, there should be an authority figure who sanctions the event, endorsing this shared work toward a common goal. It's not magic, but it feels like magic: creating a social environment that meets these conditions melts away division and inter-group prejudice and hatred and discrimination.

This healing is possible. We've seen it at work nationally: it's one of the reasons why we went so quickly from a nation in which 2/3 of people opposed gay marriage to one in which 2/3 of people support gay marriage. Within just 15 years, the culture flipped. Regardless of how you feel about that change in terms of your values, consider why it happened, what preceded that transformation: there was a movement of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people coming out of the closet. All of a sudden, these folks went from being hidden to being everywhere. LGBTQIA+ folks are in all kinds of families, communities, workplaces, houses of worship: they're everywhere. When people walked out of the closet their cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, mothers, children, colleagues, neighbors, and friends -- all these people they'd been already working with side-by-side in shared spaces toward shared goals -- they let go of their prejudices. This transformation has happened with other inter-group conflicts too, so there is a path forward, one that has to do with cultivating the particular social structure identified in Intergroup Conflict Theory.

At this moment in history, as our political and social divisions build to a breaking point, we have an especially strong need for that transformation. Some transformations are needed globally, but this one operates locally. Yet where in our local area will this transformation happen? I challenge you to think of our institutions and to find those that meet the four standards I just identified. Public schools might help, although they're separated into different schools for different towns with different wealth and political profiles, and increasing numbers of parents are pulling their kids from public schools into more homogeneous private schools or homeschooling groups. How about churches? No: as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted more than 60 years ago, Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, and that continues to be true, not just by religious belief but by race, by class, and by political affiliation . Well, how about a restaurant or a shop? These are divided by economic class.

Where can the people of our local communities meet on equal ground for a common purpose with organizational leadership that endorses this mission? Midcoast Community Chorus, with its mission to "Sing as a Community for the Community," is one place. There are other such places, to be sure: ask our founder, Mimi Bornstein, who is engaged with new work trying to accomplish the same outcome in other local contexts. Still, this is where I have invested my heart, my soul, my time, and my sociological service. It's community healing, community health care. If you share my concerns about the health of our communities, then even if you don't care about the music itself, there are good reasons to find a way to help us pursue our mission. You could join us in singing, and we'd love that, but even if you don't have the extra time and energy, maybe you have a deeper pocketbook than I do. Money helps too, because it takes considerable resources to pull this off. Sustaining a community chorus is not just musical work; it is social work, it is rebuilding work, it is caring work, and it is healing work. If you believe our world needs this healing, we need your help. And for the help you've already provided, we are so grateful.

References

Pedersen, Duncan. 2002. "Political violence, ethnic conflict, and contemporary wars: broad implications for health and social well-being." Social Science & Medicine 55(2): 175-190.

Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Linda R. Tropp. 2006. "A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90(5): 751-783.

Pew Research Center. 2019. “Attitudes on Same-Sex Marriage.” https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/

Pizarro, José J., Larraitz N. Zumeta, Pierre Bouchat, Anna Włodarczyk, Bernard Rimé, Nekane Basabe, Alberto Amutio, and Darío Páez. 2022. "Emotional processes, collective behavior, and social movements: A meta-analytic review of collective effervescence outcomes during collective gatherings and demonstrations." Frontiers in Psychology 13: 974683.

U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce. 2023. "Age and Sex." American Community Survey Table S0101. https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S0101.