‘This is where she comes alive’: for ageing migrants, community choirs are more than music

Every Friday morning in a community hall near Fremantle, something quietly extraordinary happens.

Chairs are arranged in a rough semicircle. Someone has brought a tray of biscotti from a recipe carried, unchanged, from Vasto, in the Abruzzo region of Italy. An organetto, a small button accordion common in southern Italian folk music, opens with a tarantella, a fast and joyful southern Italian dance tune. Before the first verse has ended, a dozen voices have joined. Some are strong. Some waver. All are unmistakably present.

Later, with the strumming of a guitar, the group finds its way to O Sole Mio. One man, who, according to his wife, barely talks anymore, closes his eyes and sings every word without hesitation. A woman in her 80s reaches for the hand beside her. When someone misses an entry, the laughter becomes part of the song.

As a researcher working with Italian migrant communities, I have been watching scenes like this for more than 15 years.

I have become convinced of something aged care policy has been relatively slow to recognise: the community choir is one of the most powerful cultural institutions in multicultural Australia, and we are at risk of losing it.

Italy has one of the richest choral traditions in the world. When Italian migrants arrived in Australia in the post-war decades, they planted vines, built parishes and founded social clubs. At the heart of many of those clubs was a choir.

These were not simply hobbies or nostalgic habits. They were acts of cultural survival, quiet assertions of who these men and women were in a country that often expected them to become someone else.

Reaching people through song

More than 411,000 Australians are currently living with dementia, and numbers are projected to more than double by 2058. More than one in four people living with dementia in Australia come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

For migrants living with dementia, memory loss weakens the link between language, culture, and the ability to express and be recognised as belonging.

As the condition progresses, it strips away the most recently acquired language first. Migrants who spent decades speaking fluent English may revert to the dialect of their childhood village, leaving them unable to communicate with carers, other residents or sometimes their own families.

But, as I have witnessed again and again, song can sometimes reach people in ways conventional care struggles to.

In a project I conducted at a community-based aged care centre in Fremantle, one woman, Nina*, had largely stopped communicating. She sat quietly through most sessions. But when a Calabrian lira was played, a traditional bowed string instrument used by shepherds in Calabria, something shifted immediately. Its sound was ancient and deeply earthly, carrying something of the mountains and pastures and communal life of a world she had left 60 years earlier. Her face changed. Her hands began to move. She hummed, then sang, every word clear, every note in place.

Familiar songs are often preserved in what is known as procedural memory: the same deep-rooted system that remembers how to ride a bike or tie a shoelace. This type of memory is far more resistant to dementia than the memory that stores recent events and languages learned later in life.

The art of witnessing

There are several words and phrases sociologists use to describe what I am witnessing.

“Habitus” is a form of cultural “muscle memory” we build over a lifetime. When Italian migrants sing songs they first heard as children they are re-enacting something written into the body through years of shared practice.

“Collective effervescence” is that electric feeling when a group of people share an intense experience together and, for a moment, feel like one. The community hall near Fremantle becomes, for those two hours each Friday, something closer to sacred space: the Italian tricolour on the wall, the smell of food from the kitchen, a dozen voices locking into harmony.

“Embodied selfhood” is the idea that who we are is expressed not only through conscious thought, but through the body itself, in gesture, movement and interaction.

I see all these elements in action every Friday morning.

A new way for ageing

The choir I helped establish three years ago in Fremantle was built on the conviction that culturally specific music is not a luxury in aged care, but an ethical obligation.

Second- and third-generation Italian-Australians are now joining it.

One woman, Josephine* comes every Friday with her mother, who has dementia. Josephine told me “this is where she comes alive”.

The wife of the man who barely speaks anymore told me when he leaves the choir on Friday afternoon he walks differently. He stands taller.

Australia’s aged care system is undergoing significant reform. The question of what meaningful care looks like for a diverse ageing population is urgent, and so far, largely unanswered.

The Italian community choir in Fremantle has been answering that question every Friday morning for a few years now. It would be worth listening.

*Names have been changed.