Singing In Harmony

DeKalb Choral Guild at their spring concert.

A group of singers in DeKalb, GA, more than forty in number, singing together, enjoying each other's company, rehearsing together and performing together. That describes the DEKALB CHORAL GUILD. They come from a gamut of backgrounds, young and old and in-between, from all over the Atlanta metro area. A professional director and musicians lead and accompany them, respectively.

This group performs several concerts each year and appears at a number of community events. In addition, each rehearsal provides an opportunity for members to learn a bit more about choral music and receive vocal instruction. It's all in the service of providing excellent choral music and performance.



Mary Gowing, president of DeKalb Choral Guild, pondered the role of harmony in choral singing and in world affairs. She started out by considering Gandhi's idea of being the change you want to see in the world, only with harmony substituted for the word change, since she likes to think in musical terms. She said, "Harmony, musically in a chorus, is when different people sing different notes/pitches and yet when sung together they sound pleasing and like they are meant to be together. In life and culture we often use the word harmony as a metaphor for getting along well in social relationships."

When singers in a chorus sing together and realize what that means, they can go further and help to catalyze harmony in the world. Ms. Gowing explained, "[P]eople who sing in choruses have the expectation and experience that both musical harmony and social harmony are possible....[E]ven musical harmony doesn't happen without a lot of coordinated effort and a shared vision for a desired result. We come together as a chorus at the beginning of the season, many of us strangers, as new people join the group. We have to learn to know and trust one another as we learn the music in order to sing together as a single voice instead of many individual voices."

A close-up of a section of DeKalb Choral Guild in performance.

There are also other key elements in creating that musical harmony and also harmony in the social realm. Ms. Gowing added, "It takes work, it takes understanding the voices around you, it takes having good leadership, it takes understanding the leadership and speaking out when needed, it takes being willing to become part of the whole at the same time as being an individual voice, it takes trust and caring and even compassion." And with that, Ms Gowing invited everyone to participate in a chorus wherever they are located, as a means of adding harmony into their lives.

Thanks for information from this article on Charter For Compassion: https://www.charterforcompassion.org/dekalb-choral-guild-inc; this article by Mary Gowing on DeKalb Choral Guild's blog: http://www.dekalbchoralguild.org/blog/viewpost/312.html; and the above link.

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