Creating Community through Song

Kate Munger on communal singing in difficult and charged moments

“We have not developed the tool sensitive enough to measure what our voices do to our bodies when we sing to ourselves and to each other. Let’s figure out how we can heal each other with our voices.” —Kate Munger, founder of the Threshold Choirs and Hate Has No Home Here

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 159 with Kate Munger, community singing leader

“Perfect strangers can come together and within five minutes create something beautiful without baggage and feel the healthy benefits,” says Kate Munger, speaking about why she is so passionate about communal singing. In this week’s episode (out this Thursday) , we talk with Kate about her songwriting process, what a makes a good communal song, why singing is so important especially now in a time of division, the need for new songs that we can all agree to sing, the physical changes song makes in our bodies, and a story about how a song profoundly changed a hate-filled moment.

Kate Munger has been passionate about community singing since she was 8 years old at Girl Scout Camp and has led community singing now for over 45 years. In 2000 she founded the first of now 200 Threshold Choirs around the world, singing at the bedsides of people who are dying. Now retired from running the Threshold Choir, Kate has returned to her passions of writing songs for medicinal use and singing for people in coma and with folks who are incarcerated she is offering monthly free sessions to learn 60 new songs to sing on the way to, at and from protests to repair democracy, called “Hate Has No Home Here.” An email to Kate (kateamunger@gmail.com) will sign you up.

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What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• Thinking about some of my favorite singers who are making music for our times for others to sing, I am thinking of Ma Muse, who we mention in this interview, and their song “Wonder,” which brings curiosity to a time of darkness and meets it with beauty, harmony and openness.

• I don’t think I have ever shared a recipe here before, but I have to tell you friends that this must be the simplest, most delicious dish I have made in recent memory—oven roasted cherry tomatoes with herbs. Um, wow. For salad. For a side. To toss with pasta. To eat with a spoon. I mean, our family can’t get enough of this. I guess it counts as what I’m reading? I’ve been making it both with and without the garlic and I like it best both ways.

Christie:

• “Do you ever think about how much life happens around you while you go about your business?” So begins this beautiful visual essay published at Last Word On Nothing by previous Emerging Form guest Sarah Gilman.

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In Harsh Times

I know, music alone
will not save us. But tonight
when my daughter played
the song we both love,
we smiled at each other,
all giddy and warm,
and some shriveled
part of me revived.
It was like those seeds
in the desert that wait years
to germinate—all they need
is one good rain.
That’s what a song can do.
Remind us our hope
is merely dormant, not dead.
Who could blame me, then,
for wanting to bring a song
to the whole thirsty world,
a song that soaks into
our parched hearts,
stunning us with just how fast
even the harshest world
can transform.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Only our paid subscribers receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support. This week we talk with Kate about the feeling when you know you are fulfilling your creative potential, doing “what you are supposed to be doing.” We talk about commitment and passion coming together, creating a song book to be sung to the dying, and how sometimes the things we beat ourselves up for as young artists become our great gifts in later life.

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Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. Tell us about a moment when singing made a moment “better” (and consider defining better).

2. What quote do you wish someone would turn into a communal song?