My life as a Canadian choir kid

Cold is the Arctic sea

I was a choir kid growing up—for almost a decade. We had uniforms and everything. I wish I had a picture to share!

I credit a lot of both my musicality and character to the discipline and artistry that was expected and taught there, even when very young. It’s one of the reasons I don’t have much of a tolerance for a lack of expectation of young children: they are capable of incredible excellence and beauty, and it’s not good for our culture to fawn over tone-deafness and distraction because it’s “cute.” Children respond strongly to a culture of excellence, and deeply experience purpose and meaning through its cultivation in them. We see this responsiveness also in a lot of Montessori schooling programs. We should desire to instil this where we can.

The children’s choir was founded when I was 8, and I joined it as somewhat of a pioneer the same year after an audition process. It sounded like a great idea to my parents for me, but they couldn’t have known how remarkable it would be. Saskatoon, my home city, is a small place in the middle of cold, stretching prairie; it’s not Toronto or New York or Beijing, and could easily be underestimated. But this was not to be just a “community” choir.

Under the artistic direction of Phoebe Voigts, we competed and won internationally on multiple occasions, touring France and Spain and travelling extensively within Canada. After I left, the choir travelled also to Africa and Asia. After spending years abroad—where I encountered the Viennese Boys’ Choir and regularly attended the symphony, ballet, and opera at the Wiener Staastoper— as well as in my time in some of the upper echelons of music industry, I maintain to this day that she is a true world-class genius in her craft through what she was able to bring about with largely untrained young singers. Her uncommon vision for what children could accomplish was not thwarted but came to pass.

The song below today is one of my favourite choral pieces that we sang. It’s haunting. We did quite a bit of Canadian folk music, and I realize now, too, how much of a gift that was. I likely wouldn’t know any of it without that choir experience. Few Canadians know much at all of the history encapsulated in our folk songs.

It tells the story of the sailor men of a community in the high North of Canada getting frozen into water, which would inevitably lead to their death—and a community of women and children left behind. My understanding (although willing to be corrected) is that it’s not a true story in the strict sense, but that it is the kind of thing that did happen in these early Canadian communities, and was certainly a constant threat.

So many of us in North America forget that the pioneers who built the world we now enjoy were made of hidden heroes and fighters; they could not have survived any other way. We forget how hard life has been for most people through most of history. What was normative is unfathomable to many of us now.

We are deeply indebted to their sorrows and sacrifices. Instead we so often mock them for being primitive and unsophisticated. It’s appalling, really.

This song also carries a distinct Canadian feeling to me—a melancholy sadness that has a peculiar quality I haven’t experienced elsewhere in the world. I can feel the cold. I often think about how the extreme weather of the Canadian frontier has informed so much of how we are. There is something about the constant threat of imminent death by freezing—without practical wisdom and the support of a surrounding community—that begets a certain kind of culture.

Happy to share this today.