Chor Leoni officially drops “men's choir” from its title, as it prepares for The Big Roar fest
Artistic director Erick Lichte says the move ties into choral singing as an act of empathy
The Leonids. Photo by David Cooper
Erick Lichte. Photo by David Cooper
Harmonia: The Leonids & Chor Leoni takes place on April 11 at 7:30 pm, and The Big Roar takes place on April 13 at 5 pm, both at St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church
WHAT’S IN A name? For years at Chor Leoni, it meant that a gendered term described their sound and vocal instruments: “Men’s Choir”.
Now the Vancouver ensemble, celebrating its 32nd year, has officially announced the dropping of those two words from its title—terms it had stopped using internally for more than a year. At the same time, the huge annual vocal summit that Chor Leoni hosts this month, once titled the VanMan Choral Summit, has now been renamed the gender-neutral The Big Roar. It’s a more apt—and evocative—name for a festival that culminates in a 200-voice-strong concert on April 13.
“What was so clear to me is that making these choices of getting rid of the gendered language was just so much a part of the ethos and the feel of who Chor Leoni is,” artistic director Erick Lichte tells Stir. “When you say ‘men’s choir’, that sort of immediately comes up with a sound in people’s heads. But I would argue it never was really a good term—it was just language that everybody used…. It just seemed like we had a name that was trying to describe one thing, but also described many, many other things that we didn’t necessarily intend.”
The conductor reflects that back when the award-winning choral group launched in the 1990s, the term “men’s choir” was actually meant as a somewhat inclusive term for the gay and straight singers who would gather under its banner.
But times change, Lichte and his team taking inspiration from a wider world awakening to gender fluidity, from the openness and empathetic nature of the group’s repertoire, and from within the choir itself. Each summer, Lichte takes time to meet individually with each of the 65-member ensemble’s tenor, baritone, and bass singers, several of whom were either identifying as nonbinary or had transitioned. That was enough to convince him that it was time.
“It’s not trying to virtue signal, but it is important that people know that we’re going to change the language, just so that more people are welcome to the table,” he explains.
In many ways, the change speaks to how Lichte sees choral singing as, essentially, an act of exquisite empathy. This will become especially clear at the festival’s Harmonia: The Leonids & Chor Leoni concert on April 11, when the entire wide-ranging repertoire will be sung unaccompanied—completely a capella—across polyphony, chant, folk song, and more.
“You’re singing the music and texts of other people—and maybe they’re not even people from other cultures or other places,” he explains of choir singing, “but just other people—just starting there! And it takes an act of empathy to get underneath the skin of the words and the music that’s being written.
“And this is what I think makes choirs special: because of text, we have to wrangle with that collectively. We have to do that as a group, not just as a solo singer. There’s something really powerful in the doing of it. And it’s wonderful when you get to ostensibly sing about those things as well. But I also feel like that with any piece of music that we do, anything that anyone will hear on the program. I think that the unadorned voice, and doing a concert that’s fully a capella—that is so raw, that is so naked, that has no veil between the voice and the listener—even just that act is, I think, one where people start opening gates and taking down their fences.”
These themes play out vividly in Vancouver composer Robyn Jacob’s premiere at the April 11 concert—an a capella deconstruction of a poem that is, in essence, about the kind of empathy Lichte is talking about.
“It’s about seeing others around you and just truly seeing them and recognizing them,” enthuses Lichte, “understanding that they’re living, that they have joy, they have pain. And in doing that, she’s kind of blown up the poem and ripped it apart in ways which sort of treat the choir in this sort of minimal instrumental kind of way.”
The 200-voice Big Roar concert, bringing together Chor Leoni with the group’s various branches, like the MYVoice youth choir, the smaller The Leonids, and the Emerging Choral Arts Program, will include a world premiere by Edmonton composer Laura Hawley. Based on Google’s AI language-processing LaMDA, it draws on the real text of responses from the computer-generated program about its sense of self and consciousness.
“The text is all about ‘I am, I feel, I have an imagination,’” Lichte explains, “things that if you thought ‘Oh, this is a person,’ it would be the most self-affirming and uplifting kind of thing. But we know that this is coming from a piece of AI, and what I absolutely adore about it is she’s kind of written it in a prog-rock way…. And the listener can listen to this and kind of make up their own mind. If they’re feeling empathetic to this new AI it could be uplifting, but it could also be… Horrifying.
“What I love about this is that it asks so many more questions than it has answers,” he adds. “And I don’t think we get enough pieces of art these days that do that. Everybody wants to tell everybody else what to think and feel. And this is absolutely not that.”
As Chor Leoni reflects on all these ideas, and celebrates its art form next week, the choir and its colleagues still reach for a future where language will catch up with what they’re doing. Across the world, “men’s choirs” are grappling with new monikers like “lower-voice choir” and “TTBB choirs”, standing for the Tenor 1, Tenor 2, Baritone, and Bass sections of the ensembles. (The latter sometimes feels confusing and sounds a bit too similar to a disease, Lichte observes.)
“Someday, we’ll have something that, if I’m at the bus stop and someone says, ‘Oh, what do you do, Erick?’ I’ll be able to say, ‘Well, I conduct Chor Leoni and we’re a ‘blank’ kind of choir,’ and they’ll know what that means. But until that time, I think we’re all just ecstatic to just be Chor Leoni.” 
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