I have never understood how sports teams could get thousands and thousands of people at a single event to watch grown men or women chase after balls. Then a friend explained something that had never occurred to me. Sporting events are one of the few things where a large group of people could get together, interact, and cheer FOR something with fellow human beings. It is a common cause that has less to do with the actual game than it does with people interacting. A chorus is like a team.
Music requires no competition whatsoever.
It does, however, mandate that for a certain amount of time, all people become like-minded, like in spirit and like in attitude and emotion. This is no small feat. It requires an incredible amount of human interaction, spoken and unspoken. With phones, faxes, voice mail, answering machines, pagers, electronic mail, cell phones, beepers, Internet, AOL, Compuserve, Juno, we are easily distracted from personal contact with each other. Choral music forces us to watch and listen and understand, either as a participant or an audience member.