As part of the HarbourVOICES! festival, this choir singer says music can create “deep unity”

Composer Hussein Janmohamed will perform at the St. John’s HarbourVOICES! festival next week. Pictured here, he makes the introduction for the Vancouver Youth Choir at the World Symposium on Choral Music in Turkey. (Ki Adams/submitted by Hussein Janmohamed)

The HarbourVOICES! Festival will take place next week in St. John’s. The singers will not only present great music and songs, but also the unifying and healing power of music.

HarbourVOICES! is an international festival that brings together 1,400 singers from Canada and around the world for concerts, workshops and events where audiences are encouraged to actively participate in the creation of the music.

The festival begins on Saturday 29 June and runs until 4 July at Mary Brown’s Centre.

Hussein Janmohamed is a chorister who has lived in Canada since the age of six, but has Northwest Indian roots that inspire his art. He was born in Nairobi, Kenya.

He spoke with CBC’s Heather Barrett on the radio show Weekend AM.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you first come into contact with music?

A – My first memories of singing are my grandmother and mother singing lullabies to me as a child.

My second memory is of visiting our prayer halls as an Ismaili Muslim and being immersed in a passionate sound of piety, praise and love.

I particularly remember a prayer ceremony where I was there with my mother and all the women were standing around me. I was just a little child. I was surrounded by what felt to me like a womb of love.

I understand that you really got involved with music through the Canadian school system?

When I moved to Canada at the age of 6 and entered the Canadian school system, I was completely immersed in singing. Oh Canada every morning at school. And I remember the goosebumps that come with singing together. I remember the pride I felt when I was able to sing this beautiful song, and I think in retrospect that it was because the word God was in it – a connection to these childhood experiences from my own tradition.

From then on, school music was a part of my life.

And then you studied classical music at university level.

Absolutely, my career path was dentistry. I had everything planned out.

And since life has its wonderful twists and adventures, I eventually turned to music and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Music.

I fell in love with it and just continued from there with two masters degrees, one in choral conducting, one in opera production and most recently a PhD in music education.

The music you studied at school and university came from the Western and European classical music tradition, so how did you incorporate your own heritage and cultural influences into your work?

I sang a lot of choral music in the services. And I think that connection to the community, the recognition that this music was part of a larger community effort to teach values ​​of love, kindness and generosity, which are also Muslim values, was the bridge.

And so I joined a similar youth choir, where we further explored the diverse repertoire of our communities around the world.

Shortly after I started with the choir, September 11th happened.

I was sitting in a car driving down the highway and suddenly I remembered that one of my favorite choir sounds from high school (sings a melody) … matched the melody of a Muslim prayer by Mohammed, and I just had an idea: Why don’t I combine them?

And it was my way of responding to the misrepresentation and negation of Muslim culture as intolerant, warlike and terroristic by finding and creating a vision of what I understand as a quarter of the world’s population: a space of peace, the face of peacemaking and the improvement of the world.

And so I started thinking about what our music would be like. What would my music be like? And how could I use the structure of choral music, which was already there in layers as metaphor and counterpoint, to weave into these beautiful harmonies sounds from my very cross-cultural and multi-layered musical life – from pop music to religious music to Hindi songs – to listening to Cliff Richard.

Choral music became a way for me to reintegrate the beautiful identities of my cultures into what I felt was part of the beautiful identity of the school music culture. That was important to me because growing up in Alberta, we faced a lot of racism. And then of course after 9/11, there was not only an attack on the colour of my skin, but also on my core values.

Tell me a little about the work you will be doing in St. John’s when you come here for Harbor Voices.

It will be a celebration of singing together and an expansion of our ideas about a choir. I will lead a plenary session with two great musicians, thinkers and writers, Andre de Quadros and Andrew Balfour, both of Cree descent. I will discuss how to reimagine choral music and create meaningful repertoire from a justice perspective.

Second, I’m going to do an interactive presentation where the audience can participate creatively in the musical experience. One of the things that’s important to me as a composer is that I don’t just show a song and then leave the room, I want the audience and the singers to really participate creatively.

Hussein, if there is something you would like to say to our listeners about the power of singing together, what would it be?

The power of singing together, to me, means the power to create a deep unity. Especially in a world that is so divided, in a world where differences are seen as a threat. This power of singing brings us together. It creates a unified community of heart, a kind of communion, if I may use that word, and a catharsis that allows all differences to fall away and get to the core.

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