Ten Thousand Angels
‘Charity think no evil, and charity never faileth:
Let me feed you with a song.’
--Owen Pallett, ‘The Secret Seven’
The composer cut off the choir mid-phrase. ‘You know, that’s … pretty,’ he said with a sardonic sweetness, ‘but we’re not really going for pretty.’
His name was Paul Caldwell. He and his composing partner Sean Ivory had been commissioned to write a piece called ‘Ten Thousand Angels’ that the Messiah College Concert Choir was going to premiere in just a week’s time, and they were visiting to help us workshop the piece in rehearsals. In terms of demeanour, Paul and Sean were complementary opposites. Sean was mellow, laid-back, soft-spoken, while Paul, tall and willowy, was loud, ostentatious, boisterous, constantly in motion, gesticulating wildly as he spoke, which he did with an exaggerated southern twang … and very, very gay. On Messiah’s campus, that haven of sexual purity, enforced heterosexuality, and the expectation of a marriage proposal by spring of senior year, in the midst of central Pennsylvania’s gentle farmland, he cut a conspicuous figure.
‘I’m going to tell y’all a story,’ he said. ‘When I write music, I try to capture the feeling I had as a little boy at the Pentecostal church—an atmosphere of jubilation, of ecstasy, of community coming together. People jumping up on the pews, people swinging from the rafters. I’m not really a part of that world anymore’—here a rueful smile—‘but my memories there are some of the happiest memories of my life.’
To me, his voice sounded like home, like the accent I tried to resist and suppress whenever I spoke. I could not relate to his story, I knew the feelings he described but couldn’t find them in the places he had found them, but his passion was forceful; it demanded that you submit to it, with no choice but to be swept up in its currents. To hear him speak was to want to share in his experience. I was in awe; I think we all were. It made me very uncomfortable.
‘Let’s try that again, and this time, think jubilation, think celebration,’ Paul was saying, and counted us off once more. The choir immediately launched into the jaunty, call-and-response chorus: ‘How many angels?’ ‘Ten thousand, times ten thousand!’
‘Whew, honey, now I am speaking in tongues!’ Paul exclaimed approvingly. ‘Just remember, you are that choir of angels. You are that celebration in heaven.’
I’ve been singing in choirs almost since I could speak. With a mom who’s a voice teacher and a dad who’s a minister of music, there was no other choice. (The first couple of times my husband heard me singing with my family, he joked, ‘It’s like marrying into the Von Trapps.’) Even when I first left my parents’ house, and choral singing was no longer an obligation but a choice, it remained a significant part of my life. And then came the PhD, and a few years of precarious academic jobs that left time for little else, and singing was one of the things that fell by the wayside. One of the first things I did after quitting academia was join a community choir—the first one I’ve joined in nearly a decade—with my husband, who has never taken part in choral singing before. I’ve been learning from that experience just how much I’d taken for granted, and how much I’d been missing, as if I’ve gotten back in touch with an entire vocabulary I used to have for connecting with other people.
Some studies have shown that sometimes, the heartbeats of people singing in a choir together can synchronize. At the end of one rehearsal of Govanhill Voices recently, something like that happened, one of those ineffable moments when the entire group came together as one unit and everyone seemed perfectly in tune with each other. When it was finished we were silent for a breath, glancing at each other bewildered and edified by what had just happened. John, who had never experienced that kind of thing before, remarked on it on our walk home. ‘It was like something in the air of the room changed,’ he said, ‘and brought us all closer together.’ I nodded and stories came flooding out of me of similar times in other choirs: lying flat on our backs in a rehearsal space with the lights dimmed singing ‘All My Heart This Night Rejoices’, feeling a church in Tennessee shake with the force of four hundred voices singing ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. In a collaborative concert with a women’s prison choir in Mexico City, losing ourselves in the plaintive lyrics, ‘Oye, O Dios, mis ruegos, cuando clamo hacia tí…’ Songs and confessions around bonfires by the Yellow Breeches creek at college choir retreats: at one of these during my senior year my friend Brian, who I’d been very close to in my sophomore year but had since drifted away from (as was wont to happen with all my male friendships at the time) approached me, hugged me, and said, ‘I don’t know how else to say this, but I’ve always thought of you as my older brother in this group.’ (It is a truth universally acknowledged that young evangelicals situated around a bonfire must immediately begin spilling their most deeply held feelings.)
Rehearsals and performances that leave you feeling emotionally open and vulnerable for days afterward, week-long choir tours in which you seem to live in that more heightened state. Lyrics and melodies that stay with you and are tied to such strange and specific times in your life. Just a few weeks ago my friend Matt from college texted me that he had thought of me after an inside joke the two of us had shared about a song we’d sung in choir popped into his head. ‘All day I’ve been going around repeating to myself, “These shoes I wear are gospel shoes!”’ he said.
All of these memories came back after Govanhill Voices closed a rehearsal with ‘Dans nos obscurités’, a chant from the Taizé community in the south of France. Some of the most profound and emotional spiritual experiences of my life have happened at Taizé-style services, kneeling on a tabouret or cushion on the floor, with no other light in the room except a few candles, with just a handful of instruments accompanying us. If I still have any remaining scrap of faith, it resides in that twilit space: heads bowed, lips hypnotically stumbling over the repetitive phrases and harmonies, enveloped and held within each other’s sound. A priest I know once told me about a campaign for disarmament he’d organized at the nuclear weapons facility at Faslane in Scotland. When the cops showed up, he began leading the group in singing Taizé chants. ‘Police have no idea what to do with people singing together,’ he said. ‘They don’t know how to respond to it.’
Can I tell these stories without also talking about stricture, about shame, about cultures of silence around certain feelings and desires? Can I write about any of this without talking about hubris, about our inflated and even downright wrongheaded sense of what good we thought we were doing?
Let’s say this: Most of my most profound memories of singing in choirs are deeply embedded in Christian environments and institutions that were hostile and destructive, not only to myself, not chiefly to myself.
Let’s say this: For a long time I struggled to access my whole vocal range, my throat and chest clenching up at the exact moments they needed to relax and let my diaphragm support the air, my mouth trying to force the sound out where it should be letting it gently resonate.
Let’s say this: The world of classical music, and of vocal performance in particular, remains highly gendered—hell, my friend Rylan wrote an entire concept album about it.
Let’s say this: in my college choir there were music students and everyone else, and I was everyone else. Even if you were a music student, the schedule and rehearsal regime, and the expectation to adhere to these, were punitively strict. After we’d both graduated, I met for lunch in Edinburgh with a friend from that choir. ‘I just keep thinking, there was no reason the whole thing needed to be as stressful as it was,’ she said. ‘Absolutely none.’
Let’s say this: It was tacitly understood in my college choir that anyone who was too ‘out’ would fall out of favour with our choir director. There were a lot of whispers, a lot of secrets, plenty of oblique references to events and situations for which I will probably never know all the details. (I don’t blame anyone. I wasn’t trustworthy with that kind of information for a lot of that time.)
At Messiah College we used to end our choir concerts with ‘Anticipation’, a gospel song about longing for the Christian afterlife. During the song, we would disperse out into the crowd, making eye contact and shaking hands with people in their seats. It was an intensely moving experience—most of us couldn’t make it through the song without welling up—rooted in something I’m not sure I believe in anymore, filtered through what now feels like an infinitesimally small corner of human existence. What do I do with this memory? I still don’t know.
A director for another choir with whom I toured in Mexico one summer once told us a story about a time a touring vocal ensemble performed at his church. ‘They were awful, just awful,’ he said. ‘And after the concert, when people came up and thanked them to be polite, they all just smiled sweetly and said, “Aw, it was just Jesus.” Like they were blaming the whole thing on him!’
We all giggled, but then he grew serious. ‘Never, ever say anything like that,’ he said. ‘Music takes craft and practice; it’s a human art and it’s always going to be flawed. All you can hope to do is point to the divine, the artistry and the mistakes are all yours to own.’
And there was also this: singing a Christmas concert with a community choir in South Carolina, performing a harrowing piece about the slaying of the holy innocents the day after a jury declared Darren Wilson not guilty of killing Michael Brown, Rachel weeping for all her children. A church service in Leeds right after the 2017 UK General Election, where the priest ditched the morning’s liturgy and we sang Taizé chants during the service to soothe everyone’s frazzled nerves. Some just sat in silence and listened. Attending my first rehearsal of Govanhill Voices (where vocal parts are emphatically non-gendered) right after the 2024 U.S. presidential election and learning a rendition of Kate Rusby’s ‘Walk the Road’ with this room full of people I didn’t yet know, but feeling held and buoyed by the music.
I will never forget the moment we premiered ‘Ten Thousand Angels’, the exuberant cacophony we made under Paul’s direction. As we finished the song, breathless, Paul dropped to his knees on the conductor’s podium, his hands covering most of his face, his eyes brimming with tears as he looked up at all of us in the choir—a look of almost unbearable joy—with the roar of applause behind him.