Photo: Canadian Press
Members of the Halifax Newcomer Choir use a variety of smartphones and hard copies to read music during rehearsals in St. Andrew’s Church in Halifax, December 17, 2024.
Rain patters on the sidewalk as a rendition of The Tragically Hip’s “Ahead by a Century” echoes inside St. Andrew’s United Church in downtown Halifax.
It’s Tuesday night and about three dozen people are singing in the Halifax Newcomer Choir — designed to help new immigrants to Canada learn English and build community — ahead of a concert Thursday.
The choir members come from all over the world — Chile, Brazil, Japan, China, South Korea, Kenya — and range in age from about eight years old to about 60. Rachel Manko Lutz, a choir director and founder of the group, writes the set list on a whiteboard at the front of a room in the church’s basement, and guides the group through the songs they will sing to a crowd in two nights.
Choirs have long been a popular way to celebrate music and build community, and members of the Halifax Newcomers Choir have found a unique bonding place in the city.
“We really emphasize the principles of kindness, radical hospitality and making a real concerted effort to actively build community,” Manko Lutz said in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s rehearsal
Manko Lutz, a longtime choir singer, founded the choir in November 2021. She had been teaching immigrants English for several years and had heard from newcomers that there were few opportunities to practice English outside of class. She had written a research paper on the use of choral singing as a tool for learning English and wanted to put the theory into practice.
After she created the Halifax Choir, she incorporated the group into a non-profit organization she started called the Newcomer Choir Association-Canada, which oversees two other similar immigrant-composed singing groups, in St. John’s, NL, and London, Ont.
On Tuesday night, Sylvia Ng’eno, a choir member and Swahili speaker from Kenya, stood in the middle of the group, gently swaying side to side next to Manko Lutz as they sang an a cappella version of “Song for All of Us” by the folk band MaMuse.
Ng’eno came to Canada as an international student to study nursing and learned about the choir through a friend of a friend. The bonds she has made with the other singers are a “spark” in her life, she said.
“I’ve made great, wonderful friends,” Ng’eno said after Tuesday’s rehearsal. The singing group, she said, “has touched so many nations and changed so many lives because it creates that connection.”
Manko Lutz says that the choir is an effective tool for teaching English because the choir members enjoy themselves. She said some singers have told her the choir is “the best classroom in Canada” because of its comforting environment.
Marcio Silva, a 58-year-old Portuguese speaker and civil engineer from Brazil, says he enjoyed the Halifax choir after joining in 2022. He now lives in Moncton, NB, and said in a recent phone interview that Manko Lutz’s vocal group was a “ sanctuary’ for him. The choir, he added, was “exactly what he was looking for” to improve his English.
“I had a little trouble pronouncing certain words, and when I could find the words in a song, this was great because the rhythm and the melody make sense and you can pronounce that word a lot easier,” he said.
Silva’s favorite song from the choir is Donna Rhodenizer’s “Call of the Ocean,” which helped him learn more about the oceans, with words like “barnacle” and “crumbling sand.” Manko Lutz says she chooses many songs by Canadian artists, including The Hip, Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell, so singers learn about Canada.
“The music is so full of dynamic vocabulary, so things that you wouldn’t otherwise learn in a traditional English class come out in this environment very naturally,” Manko Lutz said.
Jaime Espinoza, a 49-year-old choir regular and computer engineer from Chile, played the drums on Tuesday to accompany his baritone voice. He said the group has offered him and his wife opportunities to meet people and share the struggle to build a new life in Canada.
“You don’t have a network, you don’t have your family, you don’t understand the system. Here (the choir singers) understand you and help you,” he said.
The debate over immigration in Canada has become increasingly tense recently, with governments across the country calling for fewer newcomers due to housing shortages and difficulties accessing health care. Groups like the Halifax Newcomer Choir are becoming increasingly important because they allow immigrants to be seen in a positive light, Manko Lutz said.
In addition, she said, immigrants need more support to integrate into society — beyond settling into a home and finding work.
Martha Radice, an anthropologist at Dalhousie University, agrees. She said the choir is a form of “cheering” to create happiness and connection instead of division.
“(These groups) are really valuable parts of the social fabric of any place and we would all do well to nurture them,” she said.
