“I’m not going to speak for very long,” Donna Orbach said, “but I did want to take this opportunity to tell you a bit about why we’re doing this. And how weird is it, we’re having a birthday party for my dead son.”
It was Thursday night, a few minutes past 7:30 p.m., and Orbach stood before a crowd of 200 or so people at Chisuk Emuna Congregation, on Green Street in Uptown Harrisburg. The crowd had gathered to hear—or provide, really—a concert of vocal music with a global pedigree. There would be songs from West and South Africa, from the Tuscarora and Navajo people, from Aboriginal Australia. Proceeds from the event would benefit the REMember Foundation, a charitable organization established in memory of Orbach’s son, Reuben Eli Mitrani, who died of a sudden brain hemorrhage while studying international relations in Geneva, Switzerland, in September of 2012. He was 20 years old.
“But Reuben was a joy,” Orbach continued, “and he is a man to be celebrated. And his 20 years of life—boy am I glad he was born. And so this is his birthday, and I wanted to bring all that love back into the world that we all felt and feel for Reuben.”
The concert was the culmination of a day of community-singing workshops around town, at Londonderry School, which Reuben attended, and at Capital Area School for the Arts, a charter school downtown. The day’s final workshop took place at Chisuk Emuna itself, where many of the adults now gathered for the performance had learned, not much more than two hours prior, the songs they were about to sing.
The workshops’ leaders were Emile Hassan Dyer, a vocalist and percussionist, and the actress Maggie Wheeler, best known as the character Janice on the sitcom “Friends.” Last August, Orbach met Wheeler at the Omega Institute, a retreat center in Rhinebeck, N.Y., where Wheeler was offering vocal workshops of the sort she has taught for more than 15 years.
“I am completely and utterly tone-deaf,” Orbach said. “I have been told lovingly by other people, ‘Can you please mouth the words during ‘Happy Birthday’?’” But Wheeler had a way of putting people at ease, and Orbach soon found herself joining in songs that, as she put it, “resonate in your soul.” After the group learned of Reuben’s death, they decided spontaneously to hold a memorial and sang a Native American spiritual: “When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a way that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.”
On Thursday evening, before the start of the adult workshop, Wheeler and Dyer stood at the front of the room, soothing their throats with thermoses full of tea. “That’s hot!” Dyer said. He unscrewed the lid and started blowing. Wheeler, tall and lean, with wavy brown hair and a wide, winning grin, told the attendees, who had just taken their seats, that it was already time to move.
“What we would really love is for all the men to move to this side of the room—”
“The lower voices,” Dyer said.
“—with the very lowest voices over here,” Wheeler went on, “and the middle voices—now, tenor, alto, soprano. If it doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t fret. So, the lowest voices over here, the higher men’s voices and the lower women’s voices over here…”
Within a few moments, the singers had sorted themselves by gender and range, more or less, into an ensemble of 40 or 50 women and an attachment of around 10 men on one wing. Wheeler introduced herself and Dyer and briefly described the inter-generational choir the pair directs in Los Angeles, an “ever-evolving, ever-growing, wonderful thing that we get to do together and that brings us a lot of joy.”
Then Wheeler turned to the men and started singing. “A-hooma, a-hooma, a-hooma, a-hooma…” Tentatively, the men waded in with their voices, and a rich baritone murmur swelled beneath her. Satisfied, Wheeler pivoted and, with a gesture for the men to keep going, invited the altos in with a line of harmony. She did the same for the sopranos, and then, a three-part texture established, she floated in with a new lyric: “Sha-la-la-la, sha-la-la-la, sha-la-la-la, sha-la-la…”
For the next four minutes, she swung from one section of the choir to the next, swapping in new parts and nudging errant voices back onto the path. Dyer supported with voice and drum. At first, the singing was timid, exploratory, but soon several smiles had broken out, and knees were bobbing. When the song was finished, Dyer swiftly introduced the next one, an aboriginal chant from Australia.
“The way it works is, when you’re coming to a village…before you get to the village, you start singing. And it’s a call and response. And the people coming to the village call, and they respond, and it keeps building and building, and they come together. And the interesting thing is, no business can happen, no celebrations can continue, until everybody’s in synch.”
The singing continued, through a Tuscarora migration song, which had the men mime paddling a canoe; a South African song of celebration; and an American peace song, “If Every Woman in the World”:
If every woman in the world had her heart set on freedom
If every woman in the world dreamed a sweet dream of peace
After learning several more pieces, and being coaxed periodically to stand up in closer quarters, in order to “feel the vibrations,” the group broke for dinner. Upon request, Wheeler offered a brief flash of a former role. “In the house of God, am I allowed to say that here?” she said, smiling. Then, in a nasally New York accent, she let fly the Janice catchphrase: “Oh, my, gawd!”
Over Utz chips, cookies and wraps, the newly trained vocalists discussed the event so far.
“Fabulous, absolutely fabulous.”
“It was very easy, very fun. I was singing in the alto section, though I’m really a soprano.”
“So many cultures use songs as a way of teaching. In African cultures, they teach by song.”
“Do they really?”
“A couple of times, I stopped singing just to listen.”
“To feel the vibrations.”
During the concert itself, Wheeler and Dyer summoned the members of each successive workshop from throughout the day, producing what amounted to a multi-generational revue. The Londonderry children went first, wide-eyed and readily volunteering; then the high-school students, with the added poise and inhibitions of young adulthood. Last of all were the adults from the evening workshop, carrying with them, at least at first, all the inertia of later life: stashing their hands in pockets, adjusting their sweaters, folding their arms.
Then the song began with a chant from the men: “Ee-yo, hey. Ee-yo, hey.” On the last syllable, they swept their arms as if paddling a canoe. Simultaneously, at the back of the audience, a group of middle-schoolers formed a circle. They had learned the same song in the morning, and they now canoed the air as well, singing and giggling.
One motto of the REMember Foundation is the question, “How long is a lifetime?” As the children at the back of the room sang and danced in concert with the adults onstage, the distance between them seemed not very far at all.
