Creating Community

Just before 7:00 on a cool Monday evening, people start to trickle into the Centre Sant Pere Apòstol on a narrow street close to La Palau de la Música in central Barcelona. They’ve come for the Monday night practice session of the Barcelona English Choir.

Ed Aldcroft, the founder and conductor of the choir is there to greet them as they come. The choir has 220 participants split among three groups which practice in different locations but perform together. Ed knows everyone by name: “Community is extremely important,” he tells me. “I know something about everybody. If I got to the point where I didn't know everybody’s name, I would quit.”

Ed started the choir in January 2012, having moved to Barcelona from the UK with his wife Alexandra the year before. Back in the UK he studied music but he knew he didn’t want a career as a performance musician, finding himself more drawn to the educational and therapeutic side of music. Music is the vehicle but his purpose is something else—a desire to help people to develop themselves.

“It's extremely important to me that there's a challenge. It doesn't matter what level you're at, you need to feel like you're reaching just slightly above where you think you can get to, so you can come out the other side having achieved it."—Ed Aldcroft

He saw an opportunity in Barcelona to combine his experience running choirs with the demand for English language activities for local people. “One thing that was very important to me was that it wasn't just a bunch of English people,” he says. “There are loads native English speakers in the choir, but for me, the central thing is the community choir aspect—there are no auditions, anybody can sing, and it’s an open, supportive space.”

Eventually, around 90 people file in to the auditorium. An electronic piano keyboard is set up in at one end and there are a few piles of sheet music spread out on the stage behind. Choir members—a mix of local and international people of all ages—greet each other warmly and the atmosphere is relaxed. Catalan and Spanish people make up a little more than half, another quarter are native English speakers, and the remainder from around the world. “I have to work out how many countries we have represented,” says Ed. “I think it’s about 25.”

At precisely 7:15 Ed stands before the assembled group and claps his hands: “On your feet please!” he calls out and everyone gets up. They start off with some stretches and voice exercises. “Everyone is tired and a bit hungover,” says Michelle, who’s from the U.S. It turns out most members of the group have just returned from a team-building weekend in the countryside where they took part in music workshops, a talent night and karaoke till very late.

As they ease into the first song, a surprisingly sophisticated sound rises high up into the ceiling of the auditorium. Some members have singing experience but most have none at all. “What you get is this really nice ecosystem whereby less experienced singers are surrounded by slightly more experienced singers, and sort of by osmosis their level improves,” Ed explains.

He has everyone organized into groups—sopranos, altos, tenors and bases—and moves them around in different arrangements, sometimes gathering them near the stage, then spreading them out around the room. Each group sings their part separately at first then all together, giving a layered, haunting effect:

“I’m not a lone wolf and I never was

Anything I achieve, I achieve it because

I am standing on the shoulders

Of an infinite many, seen and unseen.”

Christian, from France, tells me he joined the choir after attending a concert: “I really felt those vibrations even in the audience. I really feel it when we are singing, sometimes I get shivers.” Indeed, there is something about a group of people singing together that touches something very human and primal in us. Pilar, from Barcelona, who was one of the original members of the choir, explains that among many other reasons for taking part it helps her to maintain her mental health. “This is my therapy,” she says.

They move on into some more upbeat songs and the energy changes. Ed’s slightly reserved British demeanor dissolves as he comes alive in front of his secular congregation: bouncing on his toes in time to the music, calling out the first word of the next line, and joking about the oddness of some lyrics. He has clearly found his calling, and the choir follows his directions confidently, trusting that he knows what he’s doing.

Although he’s encouraging, he doesn’t hesitate to tell them when they get it wrong. “That was completely flat,” he says at one point, to deflated faces. But he quickly buoys them up again by explaining why the exercise of running through the piece without music was still useful, even if it didn’t go perfectly.

“It's extremely important to me that there's a challenge,” he tells me. “It doesn't matter what level you're at, you need to feel like you're reaching just slightly above where you think you can get to, so you can come out the other side having achieved it. It’s that sense of ‘I'm not sure I can get that,’ and then the elation on the other side of getting there. It’s really powerful.”

The choir makes a music video for its YouTube channel every year, and puts on two concerts—one at Christmas and the other in June. Rather than just doing it for fun they use the opportunity to support charities and causes ranging from homelessness to domestic violence to the Nepal earthquake. This year’s charity is Petits amb Llum, which supports families who have lost a baby during pregnancy or shortly after birth. The choir is currently preparing for its concert at Razzmataz on June 15th.

It’s going to be the most ambitious so far, Ed tells me. “We’ll have 190 singers on the stage, but the thing that's different this year is we have quite a large team of other people involved. There’s going to be a rock band, but also strings and extra percussionists—even a beatboxer. A visual artist is going help create a 360 degree experience for the audience,” he says.

There is currently a list of 120 people waiting to join the choir, but as much he would like to expand, Ed is cautious, explaining how important it is to preserve the group dynamic he has so carefully developed. Every choir member I speak to emphasizes the sense of community: “Above all, I love the people, the diversity,” says Candelas, who’s originally from León. “When we’re all together the sound is so beautiful—it’s an essential part of my life.” Miriam from Germany, originally joined in the hope that the voice training would help her with her job, which involves public speaking: “But once I joined I realized it was so much more, it’s a real community, I’m not from Barcelona so it’s a way of feeling at home here,” she says.

Perhaps Tori, from the U.S., sums it up best when she says: “We’re more than just a choir. I mean, we’re just 200 amateur singers, but we can make really beautiful things.”