2 min read
In a former synagogue in Los Angeles, more than a hundred strangers gathered to spend an evening learning a choral arrangement of a Miley Cyrus song — with no audience but themselves. What sounds like an oddly modern premise turns out to touch something very old: the hunger to belong, to resonate, to disappear into something larger than your own solitude. One-day choirs, like those organized by New York’s Gaia Music Collective, are spreading quietly across cities and continents, drawing people who are grieving lost churches, lost friendships, lost third places — and finding, in communal song, an unexpected salve. “I am an ex-vangelical person… the act of singing with a collective was something that I really grieved,” said one participant, who left organized religion and found herself missing not the doctrine but the chorus. Researchers call the phenomenon “collective effervescence” — that particular electricity that moves through a body when it sings alongside other bodies. The writer who attended the LA event arrived skeptical, alert to the risk of hokeyness, and left with their inner curmudgeon dissolved by the first notes. What these gatherings offer isn’t polish or performance — it’s the older, stranger medicine of shared breath and shared voice, freely given in a room full of people who, an hour earlier, were strangers.
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