Alongside cabin fever, anxiety and home baking, singing was an early theme of lockdown last year. Do you remember those scenes from Italian balconies, as opera singers entertained their neighbours? Then there were the concert pianists jazzing things up from home pianos. Music matters. It also, as conductor David Brophy knows, raises endorphins, and connects people across communities and around the world.
Now, Brophy is leading an Irish plan to break the world record for the number of different nationalities in a single choir next week. The venue is Expo 2020, a behemoth World Fair currently under way in Dubai. The sharp eyed among you will notice the date, but the more forgiving will also realise that there wasn't really much space for a behemoth World Fair in 2020, given the year that was in it. So, 12 months on, what is literally a global village has landed in the UAE city on the Persian Gulf.
One reason for Riverdance's success is the way it internationalised Irish music
Described by one witty insider as “the ploughing championships of international diplomacy”, Expo 2020 sees 192 countries in national pavilions all putting their best foot forward to raise awareness of their culture, promote international business and trade, and talk about sustainability and climate change; the latter, perhaps, to assuage their anxieties about flying in huge numbers to participate in events such as these.
The Irish Pavilion has a bit of a nod to Michael Scott's design for the same gig, back in 1939 at the New York World's Fair. This time a team from the Office of Public Works (OPW), led by Ciarán O'Connor and Ger Harvey, have created a building that also apparently includes "an exploration of Ireland's Neolithic passage tombs". It has, by all accounts, been a roaring success, not least because an updated version of Riverdance has been wowing new Middle Eastern audiences.
One reason for Riverdance's success is the way it internationalised Irish music, blending it with international notes to create what was, perhaps, a metaphor for the Diaspora. Now, it is joined by a new venture (and branding opportunity): The Irish Songbook. Niall Stokes and the National Concert Hall's Gary Sheehan have together selected 55 songs from Ireland's back catalogue. These are being played (and reinterpreted) by an ensemble of musicians known as the Expo Players, at the pavilion for the six months of the event. There's also going to be an album, launched, of course, on St Patrick's Day.
Ranging from U2’s One to Moloko’s Sing it Back!, the tracks are also going to be performed by that record-breaking choir. I get hold of David Brophy somewhere between Mo Ghile Mear and Mná na h Éireann. With less than two weeks to go until the event, he has been flat out, arranging the songs for what is essentially four choirs.
There are, he explains, a core of soloists: "I hope to have Tolü Makay, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Dana Masters and Jerry Fish, " then an eight-part professional choir from Ireland, plus another larger choir made up mainly (though not exclusively) of Irish expats, currently rehearsing in Dubai; and last, but definitely not least, up to 1,000 people from as many countries in the world as the team can possibly muster.
At time of writing, 77 countries have registered. A total of 109 are needed to break the record. But “where better”, asks Brophy, “to break it but Expo?” I picture Irish scouts rocking up to the pavilions of countries from Afghanistan to Zambia, via Burkina Faso, Djibouti and Fiji, encouraging them to send along a singer or two. (Austria and Greece are also surprisingly recalcitrant – you’d think after all the Eurovision years, they’d be well up for the challenge.)
Seemingly this is exactly what is happening, and those in charge of the database say you can see where they’ve been as new sign-ups come in. “It is also one of my tasks when I go out,” says Brophy, perking up at the thought. “To walk around with a clipboard and go into pavilions and say, ‘Hello, we’ve no one from Lithuania yet.’”
Even if you're not singing the right notes or pitch, you're still singing. And when you're singing, your body is releasing the oxytocin and the endorphins
What, I wonder, thinking purely of myself, if you can’t sing? I have cold memories of being told just to move my lips in school, and not to let out a sound. This, as it turns out, is Brophy’s passion. “Everyone can sing,” he says. “Even if you’re not singing the right notes or pitch, you’re still singing. And when you’re singing, your body is releasing the oxytocin and the endorphins.
“Research shows that after half an hour of singing as a group, your pulses start to align. You’re all breathing at the same time. The air we use to sing regulates your heart.”
Brophy says filming the documentary The High Hopes Choir (2014), made up of homeless people and those who work with them, caused him to rethink his attitude to music. “I was interested in the healing potential of songs and singing,” he remembers. “And I learned everything I know about singing from them.
"I'm from Santry which is not a hot bed of classical or conducting talent. I can't do the po-faced stuff at all," adds the principal conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. Instead, he says, he often yearns for a younger self who doesn't have all the baggage of a certain kind of music education. "I can tap into that when I'm singing with people who have it."
There is, he says, a pent-up need among people to come together and sing, and Dubai is the place for it. “We can do it outdoors, we can be safely distant. We’re guaranteed decent weather.”
Music went a long way to making being apart more bearable. It can also be a glorious way to reconnect, and Brophy is a brilliant champion. “I feel like I’m on the street corner, with quavers in my back pocket, saying ‘you want some of these?’ When you get that hit of seeing people singing for the first time, it’s amazing. It should be prescribed.”
