Medha Sahi’s enthusiasm is infectious.
She hops, skips and jumps as she conducts her impromptu choirs.
In each city she sweeps through, she brings strangers together for a three-hour crash course in singing as a group. After their rehearsals are done, they perform for an audience of themselves and each other at the venue of the day: a Portuguese guesthouse in Goa, an art gallery in Chennai, a design store in Mumbai.
Sahi calls it The Strangers’ Choir and it is inspired, she says, by the New York-based Gaia Music Collective’s one-day choir initiative, in which a few hundred strangers meet at a different iconic venue each time, to learn, rehearse and perform.
A musician and vocal coach from Mumbai, Sahi, 33, who now lives in Goa, got her pop-up choirs started in March. After performances featuring a total of 410 people across six cities (Goa, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi and Pune), she is now in the midst of “Season 2”.
Events were held in Mumbai on September 13 and 14. One will be held in Gurugram on September 20 and in Delhi on September 21. Up next are Kolkata, Vadodara, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Kochi, over the next 10 weeks.
Each group sings a different tune. So far, these have included Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, Frode Fjellheim’s Vuelie, the theme song for the Frozen films, KT Tunstall’s Suddenly I See and Coldplay’s Viva la Vida.
Singers learn to play their roles in a three-part harmony and in choral interludes. The largest group so far has consisted of 120 people.
She does this, Sahi says, because she wants to demonstrate how music is really a gift that brings people together. It isn’t something to fear.
Choral music in particular is usually associated with perfection and discipline, she adds. The idea here is to subvert that notion and create a bridge between choral and acapella music.
“It’s one room, one song and a bunch of strangers. It always, somehow, comes together in the end,” she says. “This helps close that distance between people and performance too. And we get to have some fun, make new friends, and get to know each other a little bit.”
Harmony’s child
Sahi has always loved music. As a child, she trained under a Hindustani vocalist, learnt to play the guitar, and performed in school musicals.
Studying psychology at Vassar College in New York state, she pursued musical theatre and drama and was part of the Vassar College Jazz Ensemble. She returned to Mumbai, qualified as a vocal coach, and began to teach at True School of Music.
For a while, she and fellow teacher Vyoma Shah formed the duo SaltWater (Sahi singing and Shah on keyboards), and performed at intimate venues.
She then auditioned for a role in the Disney production of Beauty and the Beast, which toured India in 2015, and landed the part of The Wardrobe, the operatic Madame de la Grande Bouche (or Lady with the Big Mouth). A few years later, she sang four songs on the Amazon Prime series Four More Shots Please!, in 2019-20.
“Teaching has always been my anchor in music, though,” Sahi says. “It is still the thing that gives me the most joy.” So she began looking for a way to reach out as a coach again.
Choral riffs
The Strangers’ Choir began as a WhatsApp group text.
One summer morning in Goa, Sahi posted an invitation to a hobbies and events WhatsApp community group. Would people like to turn up and learn how to sing, for just a few hours?
She chose Ohio by Neil Young for that first session. “It was the first song I learned to harmonise to, when I was 11, and it had a three-part harmony I never forgot,” she says.
Fifteen people expressed an interest, nine confirmed. Eventually, some of the nine brought friends, and her first group consisted of 17 people, most of whom had never performed before.
Every two weeks after that, she picked a new song and posted an invitation on the group. “Each time, about half the participants were new,” she says.
She decided to take her concept to Mumbai next, and as videos of the choirs began to do the rounds on social media, the numbers started to grow. Any more per session and it might become too unwieldy, she says, laughing.
The format she follows is simple. For the first 90 minutes, everyone learns the basics of how to be part of a choir: learn to blend in, watch the conductor’s hands, match one’s tone to that of one’s assigned partner or group.
Then there is a pre-song, something simple like a sea shanty or ABBA’s Souper Trouper.
After a break (“it’s an aerobic activity, so you will need food,” she says), work on the chosen song begins. Groups are formed. Harmonies are arranged. The entire song is then performed twice, often with videos being recorded alongside.
“I was apprehensive because I don’t think I perform very well as a singer, especially on the high notes,” says Ishita Sharma, 37, a banker who signed up for a Season 1 session in Bengaluru in July. “But once I got started, the experience was out of this world. Each person is grouped with others who have a similar tonality, so you don’t feel alone and there are no inhibitions. What started out as very different voices came together seamlessly. At the end of three hours, we were left wishing there was more.”
She feels very lucky to be able to do this, Sahi says.
“We live in a time when we have sunk into our own worlds, curated through technology. Many of us are starting to do some course-correction, individually and in groups. I am doing this partly to reach out, and partly for myself too,” she says. “I’m a chronic doomscroller, but for these three hours, I am offline and completely present.”
The music isn’t perfect; why would it be? “There are wrong notes, every single time,” Sahi says, smiling. “But they culminate in something beautiful, every single time. It’s incredible what people can do if you convince them that they can.”
(To sign up for a session, go to @thestrangerschoir on Instagram. Registration costs ₹1,250 per head)
