Can Everybody Sing?

Singer and Composer Melanie DeMore Says Yes!

Singer and composer Melanie DeMore enjoys nothing more than gathering together a group of people and forming a spontaneous choir. “I think that singing in a community allows people to have a certain bigness that they cannot have in a solitary way,” she says. In this Chorus America interview, DeMore talks about the importance of spreading the gift of choral singing far and wide. 

You are all about giving people opportunities to sing. How do people react to being given that opportunity?

People come up to me and say, “This is absolutely the first time I have ever felt free enough to sing.” That is what I try to set up for them. I tell them, “Just throw your head back and sing,” and people who don’t normally sing in groups find themselves going to places and doing things that they never, ever thought they would get a chance to do or that they could do.

I think there is a certain thing that happens in a community when we give people permission to be bigger than they think they should be. I think that singing in a community allows people to have a certain bigness that they cannot have in a solitary way. 

To me, every concert should have that component. I don’t care what it is, even the Bach B Minor Mass. There needs to be one thing where the audience sings with the choir. They call it live music for a reason. It should be an exchange. 

So how do you incorporate the audience in a concert of the B Minor Mass?

Maybe the audience is not singing in the B Minor Mass. But there should be something in the program that everybody sings. What has been lacking in traditional music settings, whether a choral music concert or a symphony concert, is that exchange between the listener and the music maker. The two things cannot exist without the other. There should be an exchange that happens not only with the audience singing but a feeling of connection between the performer and audience member as well.

How many times have you gone to a concert and everybody looks great, they sound wonderful, but you are getting nothing—no human exchange from the human beings who are making the music? There’s this veil between you and the performers. To me, what is the point? I could sit at home in my underwear and turn the radio on and feel comfortable. 

People say, “Oh, the Bach B Minor Mass is so serious.” But Bach had 20 kids. The man had a life. Why do you take the life out of the music? I want the audience to feel like they are part of the alchemy of the whole evening. There may not be music and sounds coming out of those people’s mouths, but they are vital to the creation of the energy that makes this music.

"A song can hold you up when there seems to be no ground beneath you." -Melanie DeMore

And you think creating that exchange is the responsibility of choral organizations?

I think so. With every choir that I work with there are two things we do every time before a show. First we ask, “Who are we as a choral organization?” And then, “Who are we singing for?” Who are we consciously going to hold as we sing? It makes an incredible difference. Besides yourself, who else are you singing for? Who do you know that needs to be held in some way? What it does is make everybody’s intention really sharp and really clear. As a choir you are thinking about the fact that when people come in they should be wrapped up in this sound and held up for that hour and a half or two hours. That’s our job as singers, as artists, as choirs, to not only hold our audience but to hold each other and to cultivate this sense of wellness that only music and voices can do in this way. 

In the African-American culture and in other cultures, that is part of [the purpose of singing]—to be able to get you through your day-to-day life. There are songs that give you power, songs that give you comfort, songs that give you energy, songs that inspire you to keep going, songs that make everything work better, songs that give you joy. A song can hold you up when there seems to be no ground beneath you. I think it is part of our job as singers. We have been given a gift, and it is our absolute responsibility and joy to give it back. Not doing that really dishonors that particular gift we have been given. 

How can you encourage this type of singing?

You have to be crazy and fearless and also stay out of the way. I have enough confidence in what I do in my madness to know that I can do this. I have a workshop I do called Page to the Stage. A choir will bring a piece they have been working on for a long, long time and there are usually people watching. I talk to them about really singing from the inside out. I worked with a wonderful women’s choir, and they were singing beautifully and the audience was really moved. I said, “That’s really beautiful. But what is this really about?”

I asked them to put their music down and had their conductor sit down. I asked them to sing it again. They all got this look on their faces of “oh no” and the choir director started to tremble a little bit. I said, “You all know what this song is about here," and pointed to my head. "You’ve got the notes right, the dynamics right. But you are missing the most important part--the part that makes it three- and four-dimensional. You are not filtering what you are singing through your heart.”

"In every major movement of the world, music is the thing that brings all of the people together." -Melanie DeMore

So I made them sing the song again and look at each other. I saw the conductor try to move her hand, and I put my hand over hers. The singers did not miss a note or a beat. The song became so multi-layered because they really came to it from the heart. They were not just singing the notes. They sang it as a community of people giving voice to another community of people that maybe didn’t have a voice. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

The conductor was just floored. I told her, “It is a mark of a good conductor that all of your singers know exactly what to do because you taught them. Once you give them the tools, it’s like teaching someone how to walk. They get to go.”  The conductor had to get out of the way of the music, and let the singers sing as a community of singers. When we raise our voices together, that is an opportunity for people to be heard who don’t have a voice or who are afraid.  

How does it help those people who are afraid? If I (as a singer) am not afraid, does it help my audience become less afraid?

It absolutely does. I have seen it. I have sung at a lot of rallies and gotten people to sing and you can see those people who are resistant to raising their voice. You can see them start to move around and, first of all, feel like they are not alone.  And they can hear that, as just one more voice is added, it becomes stronger. That’s why the Civil Rights movement worked. People were not alone, and they could raise their voices together and feel like they were strengthened.

I have people come up to me and say, “I sang tonight and I feel more alive than I ever have.” I say, “You know, honey, you were born singing. Maybe that’s not how you are going to make your living. But I am going to make it possible for you to sing with another group of people.” They just want to be able to get with some people and sing a song. 

The perfectionist piece is something that a lot of choral singers and teachers get caught up in. They say, “You know, you need to go sing in the back row.” So you make opportunities for people who maybe are not going to be able to sing in the Bach Choir. You give them opportunities to sing with other people. It is as vital as water. 

So how do we make those opportunities, maybe not just in our choral organizations but in communities? 

I do a lot of community sings. People can come, you bring something to eat and everybody sings. You have to find a way to make people feel comfortable, and singing is as simple as breathing.  As a song leader or conductor you have to get people to feel confident and joyful in the first ten seconds. You have to get rid of that fear. 

We live in a society where there is a lot of fearfulness. I don’t want to be too loud, too big, too joyful, too noticeable. There are so many things set up to keep us apart from each other. This is where we have a chance to bypass all of that. In every major movement of the world, music is the thing that brings all of the people together.

Melanie DeMore is a singer/songwriter, choral conductor, and vocal activist who weaves the fibers of African American folk music with soulful ballads, spirituals, and her own original music. DeMore has toured extensively, singing and conducting at festivals, universities, and concert halls. In addition to her solo work, DeMore facilitates vocal and stick pounding workshops for professional and community-based choral groups and has taught her program called "Sound Awareness" in schools, prisons, and youth organizations around the world. DeMore was a California Artist in Residence with the Oakland Youth Chorus for ten years.             

 

She is a featured artist/presenter for SpeakOut!: The Institute for Social and Cultural Change and is adjunct faculty at the California Institute for Integral Studies. DeMore is the lead teaching artist for TEMPO, the youth arts program through CalPerformances at UC Berkeley. She is the artistic director/conductor of the Oakland Community Children's Choir with Living Jazz. DeMore was also a founding member of the Grammy- nominated vocal ensemble, Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir.