Worship Arts July August September 2022

Photos: Clark Retirement Community

The aging church choir Can senior singing skills be revitalized? by Michael Kemp

W e should have seen it coming. This year, the first of the “baby boomers” are becoming seniors, many graduating into retire ment. In this new stage of life, they have more time on their hands and are searching for meaningful activities in which their souls can be uplifted, and also in which they can contribute in a positive way with their lives. Voilà … the church choir! A swell of new senior singers is begin ning to fill our choir lofts, which is good, but of course they also bring with them many of the common vocal discomforts and quality concerns of aging singers. Singers 65 and older are beginning to constitute a significant proportion of most church choirs at the same time that younger adults seem harder to recruit in today’s society. Purely on a practical basis, we can no longer afford the old-fashioned quality control method of simply removing older singers from our choirs. Senior singers are no longer peripheral, expendable choir members. Without them, many of our choirs today would be in trouble. We are dependent on their reliability, dedication, and steady attendance, and the importance and significance of our senior singers will only become more pronounced in coming years. Not only do today’s church choirs need them, but seniors need and deserve the soul-stirring beauty which singing in a choir provides. We should not simply shut music out of seniors’ lives because their voices are not what they used to be. It is time for directors to remember that, at the core of their work with volunteer singers, there should be a genuine element of service to the singers, right alongside of the fundamental quest for aesthetic beauty. Strange bedfellows, you say? Is it possible to do the right thing of incorporating senior singers without dimin

ishing the artistic result? An obvious struggle

There is a superb old movie by the name of “Christmas without Snow” (highly recommended to show to your choir) in which John Houseman plays a retired college choral director who, in his retirement, becomes the director of an unauditioned church choir. The story line follows his budding relationship with the choir and follows the way he develops their skills with in the context of the preparation of Handel’s “Messiah.” Whoever wrote the

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