LHI's Virtual Choir:
Assembling a Message of Hope
by: Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director
Hayley Smith, LHI’s founder/director working on the video.
It’s safe to say that these days we can truly appreciate our built-in need for mobility, routine, exercise, and mental stimulation, to see friends and family, to have a personal physical space to maintain sanity.
You can imagine how painful it was to temporarily shut the doors to our refugee center in Greece, halting those exact activities to those who have been in a state of uncertainty and isolation for years.
It’s so awful to see them experience more fear than they already have. I was trying to figure out how we could cheer them up, and the idea of putting together one of those collage videos that have been going around popped into my head. That way, they could see familiar faces and hear beautiful music being sung directly to them. I reached out to our volunteer community and was completely overwhelmed with the response.
Roos Meijer, singer/songwriter and former LHI volunteer
Roos Meijer, a singer/songwriter and former LHI volunteer who studies at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance, graciously lent us her beautiful voice and one of her own compositions called Dance ’Til We Win from her EP, Maktub (click here to check out on Soundcloud).
40 singers and musicians joined their voices together to create this beautiful performance.
The process of making a virtual choir is really involved.
Each singer or musician had to record themselves singing along to Roos’s master track.
I edited the video, one part at a time — melody, tenor, bass, alto and soprano.
Daniel Pines, a recent graduate from the Berkley School of Music, who plays violin in the video, lent us his professional audio mastering skills to make the song sound as stunning as it does.
As you can see, everything in the video, from the songwriting, to the arrangement, to the final production and mixing, was done by LHI volunteers.
Someone asked if I got sick of the song, since it took me 100 hours to edit. Not at all. I was close to tears every single time I watched it.
While we wanted to bring familiar faces to Yazidis in Serres, Greece, the song and its message of hope is universal, and we hope it reaches as many refugees around the world as possible.
Here’s the video again, in case you haven’t seen it yet:
