More Why We Sing: a POW choir

Subject: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: Marion
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 01:48 PM

I'm going to copy below my an article in today's paper, about women POWs in Japan during WWII who formed a secret choir and composed music for themselves. I'm sorry this is so long - the article was in a subframe so I didn't know how to link directly to it. I wish I could hear the recording of the restaged concert; I'm definitely going to see the movie.

Love, Marion

The inspiring power of music

PoW choir moves man to share freedom of song with the world

Ron Corbett The Ottawa Citizen, September 29

It started with a newspaper story. Little more than a review, really. There had been a choir performance at the Perth Concert Hall in Australia to mark the 75th anniversary of the South Australian Red Cross Society. The date was Aug. 14, 1990.

The performance -- by the Perth Girls' Choir, under the direction of Colin Curtis -- was covered by the Australian newspaper. A small review was published the next day. That story was read by Martin Meader, a recently graduated film student from Melbourne.

"The story just leapt off the page at me," remembers Mr. Meader. "I read the story, then I read it again and I thought, 'this is a beautiful story.' Right away, I needed to know more."

That small review, and the quest to "know more," set off a sequence of events that culminated in 1997 with the release of Paradise Road, a movie starring Glenn Close and Frances McDormand.

It has also brought Mr. Meader to Ottawa this week, where he will be leading a community singing workshop at the Cartier Place Hotel on Sunday.

What the audience in Perth heard that night was the first public performance of songs written in a Japanese PoW camp during the Second World War.

The prisoners in the camp were women. Most were nurses. Many were held captive for nearly four years under brutal conditions, and under such conditions -- with their Japanese guards violently opposed to what they were doing at the outset -- they formed a choir.

The women rehearsed in the camp kitchen while doing chores, and late at night while pretending to sleep in their bunks. Their musical scores were copied from memory into children's workbooks, the workbooks then hidden away.

The choir consisted of 32 members and was set up with a four-part vocal structure. It was classical in both song selection and temperament. Because there were many nationalities in the camp, there were no spoken words.

The effect of all that -- unless you've already seen the movie or heard the score -- is unlike anything you've heard before. Mr. Meader wonders about the effect of the music to this day.

"When I was trying to raise money for the film, I always made sure I had a tape of the Perth concert with me," he says. "Whenever I played the tape, people just started to open up.

"I have seen bankers break down in tears after listening to the tape. There is something cathartic about the music the women created. It might actually be divine. I think that's a possibility."

The story of how that music came to be -- and it is more or less truthfully told in the movie Paradise Road -- is, once again, unlike anything you have heard before.

It all began on Feb. 12, 1942, on the day the Japanese navy broke through the British naval defences around Singapore.

- - -

For all practical purposes, Singapore fell once the British defences were breached. Immediately, there was an attempted mass evacuation of all civilians, many of whom were either European refugees or British residents.

Women and children were herded onto ships and sent away. Many of those ships -- and it remains one of the worst atrocities committed in the war -- were shelled and shot at by the Japanese navy and airforce.

Ships were sunk. Thousands of people drowned. Those who didn't drown either swam or were swept ashore at places like Sumatra or Bangka Island.

The lucky ones were then sent to prisoner of war camps. The unlucky ones were gunned down on beaches as soon as they landed.

The PoW camps were designed, and functioned, to break the spirit of the women who survived. The prisoners were poorly fed, continually beaten and deprived of all rights to associate. Their children could not receive any formal school instruction. Prayer was banned. Any sort of meeting or public gathering was forbidden.

And yet, the women rebelled against all that. Not by planning an escape, or trying to overpower their captors, or by some other grand and aggressive gesture.

They simply formed a choir.

"It is quite inspiring the solution they came up with to survive life in the prison camp," says Cara Kelson, a concert pianist from Australia who has written extensively on the PoW choir. "It was such a graceful solution. Yet so strong."

Initially, and this is shown quite well in Paradise Road, the Japanese guards were adamantly opposed to the choir. The women were beaten whenever they tried to sing. They had their food rations cut. They were harassed and humiliated.

The woman who formed and conducted the choir, Norah Chambers (played by Glenn Close in the movie) even had to beat a dog to death once, for refusing to disband the choir.

After nearly a year of this, however, a strange and unexpected thing happened. One night the Japanese guards broke into the kitchen, where another clandestine choir practice was occurring, but instead of immediately beating the women, they hesitated.

They hesitated, and in a few seconds they started shuffling their feet self-consciously. They lowered their weapons. They listened. Then they left.

The next night the guards returned again. This time they sat on the floor until the end of the rehearsal. Then they left without saying a word.

Although the camp policy against group association never officially changed, the choir was allowed to practice from then on in peace. There were even concerts near the end of the war.

"Think for a moment what these women did," says Mr. Meader. "In the middle of a war, under these hellish conditions, they discovered and found solace from one of the oldest truths we know.

"Music touches everyone. It's as simple as that."

- - -

Betty Jeffrey is 91 this year. She lives in Melbourne today, and when contacted by telephone, she says she can spare only a few moments to talk. She's rather busy.

But the choir, of course she remembers the choir. How could she ever forget it?

"It was Norah who came up with the idea, and she was such a grand conductor," says Ms. Jeffrey. " I don't know how we could have survived without the choir. Everytime I was singing in the choir, I completely forgot where I was. I wasn't in the camp any more. I was free and someplace else."

Ms. Jeffrey is one of the last surviving members of that long-ago choir. Her choir "workbook," which contained not only musical scores, but also diary entries, was published in 1952 and became a best-seller in Australia. The book is now on permanent display at Australia's war museum.

Yet it is the choir, and the never-heard-before-on-the-planet vocal ar-

rangements, that she remembers best about the war.

"There were 32 of us in the choir, and many of us could not even communicate," she remembers. "There were Dutch women and Malaysian women, women from other countries as well.

"For many of us, there were only two things we shared. We were prisoners. And we sang."

In the end, the music was something even the guards shared. Ms. Jeffrey remembers how the guards stopped their harassment of the choir, a change that seemed to occur overnight. In the last year of the war there was even a set, and rather communal, routine to evenings in the camp.

The choir would gather to sing. The guards would gather to listen to the haunting, wordless music. Then everyone, without saying a word, would head off to sleep.

The camp moved frequently during the war -- back and forth from Sumatro to Bangka Island -- before finally being liberated in September 1945. Ms. Jeffrey was so ill at the time of liberation she spent the next two years in hospitals, trying to recover from TB, among other diseases.

The concert in Perth in 1990 was a restaging of the 1944 Christmas concert the choir gave in the PoW camp. The original musical scores were used. Ms. Jeffrey was in attendance.

"I've never experienced anything like that Christmas concert in 1944 ," says Ms. Jeffrey. "We were all in tears by the end of it. What music, what singing, means to me today, it's almost impossible to describe to you.

"That choir changed my life. It changed a great many people's lives."

- - -

Martin Meader is one person whose life was changed by the music that came out of the women's PoW camp.

After hearing an amateur tape of the Perth concert, and then hearing the full story of the choir, he set out to make a movie. He had never made a movie before. Yet somehow the music from the camp opened every door that he needed to have opened.

Australian director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) agreed to direct the movie after Mr. Meader played him the tape from the Perth concert.

A Los Angeles investor, initially skeptical, signed a cheque for $8 million after hearing the tape.

All the actresses in the movie signed on after hearing the tape.

The movie cost $26 million to make and garnered glowing reviews. It also gave Mr. Meader a new calling in life.

"I realized that something powerful was at work here," says Mr. Meader. "There is a huge interest nowadays in community singing, a huge interest in choirs in general.

"I think that's because a lot of us spend our days now in front of televisions and computers, staring at all these little boxes. The feeling you have when you're singing with other people -- the feeling those women must have experienced in the PoW camp -- we're missing that from our lives today."

A trained musician (guitar and saxophone) before he ever read that long-ago news story, Mr. Meader has gone on to form two choirs in Australia and now gives community singing workshops around the world.

He will give a workshop at the Cartier Place Hotel on Sunday. He will also conduct local choirs (Ashbury and the Ottawa-Carleton Police choir) in rehearsals through the week.

"Anyone can sing," says Mr. Meader. "These workshops are for people who have been told they can never sing. If you can speak, you can sing. It's that simple.

"And the feeling you get from singing, there really is no other experience like it. It gives you freedom. Just like it did for those women during the war."

Ms. Jeffrey, at 91, agrees with that assessment.

"I still sing," she tells me with a laugh. "I'm a little croakier than I used to be, but the feeling for me is exactly the same. It has never changed."

I ask her to describe the feeling. She has a one-word answer:

"Joy."

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: MMario
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 01:55 PM

My mother had friends in that camp. I remember hearing her tell about her friends experiences and vagualy remember the story of this choir.

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: KathWestra
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 02:18 PM

Marion -- What an incredibly moving story. Thank you so much for sharing it. Kathy

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: katlaughing
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 03:04 PM

Thank you, Marion. I intend to share with my friends and sisters, as soon as I quit crying. Incredible.

Right now, women in Afghanistan are not allowed to listen to any music nor sing or play instruments, upon pain of public beatings which often result in death.

kat

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: paddymac
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 03:55 PM

Wow! What more can be said. Joy to all.

There is a similar story behind the Nazi concentration camp song "The Peatbog Soldiers". The author is anonymous, but one of the prisoners. It's been translated into several languages, and I expect is powerful in all of them. The Dubliners recored it several years ago, and more recently, the Black Family did it. We did an a capella rendition at a recent show, with three-part harmonies, and the crowd absolutely loved it, tho the vast majority had never heard it before. It was the only "down" song in the show, but drew greater applause than all the other rowdy, bawdy stuff.

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 04:42 PM

Thanks for passing the story along to us, Marion. It's very inspiring.

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: Sourdough
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 07:15 PM

That is really a lovely story about the power of music when it it bsed in the deepest part of our being.

I also would like to know more about "The Peat Bog Soldiers" but for that I will start another thread (if there hasn't been one already).

Sourdough

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: WyoWoman
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 10:40 PM

Thank you so much for sharing that. The Cheyenne warriors used to sing themselves "strong-heart songs" before they went into battle. I find that stories also become my strong-heart songs, and I collect in my heart stories that give me courage and give me models for how to deal creatively with adversity.

This is definitely a new one to hold in my heart.

WW

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: DougR
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 11:23 PM

If you haven't seen "Paradise Road," the movie this story is base on, it is in your favorite video store and well worth watching.

DougR

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: Big Mick
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 11:36 PM

Great story, I have heard of these women before. Not sure why you didn't just include it in the thread that we already have going on the topic, but glad you posted it.

All the best,

Mick

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: GeorgeH
Date: 30 Sep 99 - 10:49 AM

On a not unrelated theme (but a somewhat less straightforward one) I'd recommend the Arthur Miller play (originally a TV script, I believe) "Playing for Time".

G.

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: Allan C.
Date: 17 Dec 01 - 06:47 PM

refresh

Subject: RE: More Why We Sing: a POW choir
From: Callie
Date: 17 Dec 01 - 06:52 PM

Wow - I just started a thread about this! Sorry to double up. What a coincidence (see "Paradise Road vocal orchestra").

Callie