Pub Choir’s Astrid Jorgensen: ‘Let’s sing in public again’

Even those blessed with average voices can benefit from the healing power of making live music with other humans.

Pub Choir’s Astrid Jorgensen, left, and Waveney Yasso. Picture: Dan Peled

You can sing. Probably not amazingly, but most certainly, you can sing. If you have the ability to speak, the same vocal mechanisms you use gossiping at work, or yelling at the footy, or having a lockdown cry, are the ones that will allow you, if you wanted, to sing a Puccini aria.

True, you may be spectacularly far from stage-ready, but there is a very real, persistent belief out there that if you can’t sing well first go, you are doomed to sing badly forever. You may say, “Oh, I can’t sing, I’m absolutely tone deaf,” despite the fact that the clinical disorder of amusia, or true tone deafness, affects only 4 per cent of the population.

Perhaps you do sing out of tune. But if your only singing training has consisted of yelling songs in your car while stuck in traffic, what did you expect? Somewhere along the way we’ve become convinced that we can only ever be bystanders and consumers of music. I implore you to reconsider.

In 2017 I founded Pub Choir, a ticketed show during which I transform an audience – any audience – into a functional choir. By the end of the show, my accompanist Waveney Yasso and I become your audience of two, while you and your (sometimes thousands of) fellow singers perform what you have learned – usually a well-known pop song – in three-part harmony.

I believe that Pub Choir gives people the opportunity to embrace and value mediocrity and truly, madly, deeply embrace their averageness. There is freedom in a crowd where you are genuinely unimportant. Nobody believes that they have become a better singer at Pub Choir. They just feel less afraid to share whatever horrible voice they have.

Now all this is well and good until it’s illegal to sing together. Thanks to Covid-19 this is the longest time in human history that we haven’t sung together as a species. I went back to what I fundamentally knew: that our singing voices are with us wherever we go. And so the online Couch Choir was born.

I know we’ve all seen clips of virtual choirs and we’re all a bit sick of it, but in March 2020, Couch Choir pioneered this activity worldwide.

In one song we had 5000 participants from 45 countries, such as Kazakhstan and Norway. People sent videos from their farms, their wheelchairs, from houseboats, using sign language.

It was the distillation of what I had always hoped Pub Choir would be: regular, diverse people feeling personally empowered to contribute to the whole.

I’d love to say that the upward momentum continues, but the truth is that my work is rapidly approaching a crossroads.

The current return of Pub Choir live shows feels tenuous at best. There is no certainty right now for artists, audiences or venues around Australia. For two years, every attempt to stage a show has resulted in a financial loss. Pub Choir can’t tour because we don’t know which borders we can cross, and we certainly can’t afford a snap two-week quarantine.

This uncertainty is compounded by the public demonisation of live music as an unsafe activity, despite the fact that the very same bodies breathe, cheer and sing at a football match.

What can be done? I don’t think we need more government grants. Not when they end up with established arts organisations anyway. Those gatekeeper companies will always survive. But I do wish that they’d bring an authoritative voice to the table and make the case to the decision-makers in this country: that the return of live music should be treated with the same urgency as the return of live sport.

We also need the private sector to see value in providing the arts as a valuable wellbeing experience for their workforce – more than hiring a band for the Christmas party. Take your staff to the theatre. Book them a boozy art class on a Friday afternoon. If you’re all still working from home, schedule an online group-singing lesson. And if it sounds too wishy-washy, go and read some peer-reviewed research on the benefits of group singing (spoiler alert: it’s good for your health).

In September, we completed another online Couch Choir project, with 613 participants from around the world. As they submitted their singing videos, we asked them four questions about how they felt.

Sure, it’s not peer-reviewed research, it’s just 613 people who chose to participate. But when 100 per cent of them self-report that their mental health is improved by joining in, it’s worth taking note. Singing – even online – made them feel happier, more connected and more hopeful. And they thought it was an experience worth fighting for. Art has always been more than just entertainment or a distraction. Art can heal us.

Edited extract from The New Platform Papers (Vol 1): What Future for the Arts in a Post-Pandemic World? published by Currency House on December 1. Astrid Jorgensen is the founding director of Pub Choir.