We met in a former synagogue, a vast room with hardwood floors where the sound could echo freely. All were strangers, many former choir nerds, united by a love for group singing. Our goal was to learn and perform, in a single day, a classic of our time: a song from the Hannah Montana movie.

The event, near downtown Los Angeles, was a one-day choir hosted by the Gaia Music Collective – a three-hour gathering where more than 100 people rehearsed a choral arrangement of the song and sang it three times, with ourselves as the only audience.

“There’s just something so ineffably spiritual about singing with such a large group of people,” said Kristen West, 29. “I think they call it collective effervescence. It’s basically what makes church so magical.”

One-day choirs are growing in popularity, and not just in Los Angeles. In New York, Gaia, which launched in a Brooklyn apartment as an effort to create connection during the pandemic, has brought thousands of people together since. Similar groups have emerged elsewhere in the US and around the world, including in Toronto and Brisbane.

“We have friends all over Europe who are doing this, we have friends in Asia who are doing this,” said Asher Blank, a Gaia organizer and conductor. “People are hungry for opportunities to make music, but they’re also hungry for opportunities to connect with other people.”

Though it remains rooted in New York, where Broadway stars including Leslie Odom Jr and Jessica Vosk have taken part, Gaia has held events in several other cities. Its choirs have recently sung For Good from Wicked, Olivia Dean’s Man I Need, and Beyoncé’s Ameriican Requiem. It also hosts a range of other public choral events, including improvisational singing groups and open mics. Several TikTok clips of Gaia events have gone viral, including a Brooklyn performance of Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten with nearly 10m views.

The gatherings come amid what the US surgeon general identified in 2023 as a loneliness epidemic. The past two decades have seen a decline in time spent socializing among every age bracket; over the same time span, the share of American adults meeting with friends for dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has dropped by 30%, according to an article in the Atlantic announcing the “anti-social century”. The percentage of Americans who attend religious services weekly fell from 42% in the early 2000s to 30% in the early 2020s (though some reports suggest church attendance is ticking back up), and reliable third spaces – where people can get together away from home or work – are hard to come by.

With both human connection and spiritual outlets in decline, it’s no surprise these choirs are such a draw. Participants at the LA event described the event as filling a void, offering a way to gather and even a sense of transcendence, albeit in secular form.

It restored “a piece of my soul that was missing”, said Darcy Calabria, 30. The organizers encouraged the sense of healing by inviting – but never pressuring – singers to shout out what was on their minds in moments of downtime. It was essentially therapy for $15 to $35 a ticket.

Singing offers a sense of “somatic belonging”, Blank said. “Feeling my actual body resonate with the sound of my voice, and feeling my body be sort of the vessel and the carrier of that sound, in community with other people who are doing the exact same thing, is just an incredibly powerful experience.”

‘Extreme, bursting joy’

In late May in LA, that sense of connection emerged quickly. The evening began with the conductors, Gaia founder Matt Goldstein and Blank, taking us through warmups without saying a word. Instead, they tacitly guided us, the newly formed choir, to echo vocal patterns. Then we split into parts. The arrangement of Miley Cyrus’s The Climb was more difficult than I expected, with six distinct parts and some surprising harmonies – but getting it perfect was very much not the point, and you don’t need to be able to sing well to take part.

“You obviously want to appeal to the broadest audience, but I also think that people like being challenged,” said attender Jaimie Ding, 29.

After working through each section, both on technique and feeling, we discussed the song’s meaning. The Climb is about focusing on the journey rather than the destination, remarkably appropriate for a choir with no audience. Then we sang through the whole thing three times – first standing in sections; then walking around the room while singing (not easy when you were depending on the guy next to you to remember your part); and finally all intermingled with piano accompaniment.

“You come out of it feeling so high, and so optimistic, and like anything’s possible,” said Kevin Duffin, 43, who has attended several similar events. “It’s almost like connecting to your inner child, as woo-woo and hokey as that sounds.”

I was keenly aware of the risk of hokeyness when I arrived at the event. But I was surprised at how easily I was swept up in the moment. After another day of headlines about fraying social ties and mind-boggling cruelty, it was almost jarring to be among dozens of upbeat people receiving uniformly enthusiastic welcomes. Surrounded by others, engaged in a collective effort, I forgot my skepticism. It was impossible not to feel, as West put it, “connected to something bigger than me”.

Choral music has, of course, been connected to religion since time immemorial. “From the very earliest days of Christianity, believers sang,” wrote the music critic John Rockwell in 1979. The roots of choral music, he wrote, “lie in the music of the late Roman empire, which in turn goes back to Greek, Hebraic and other still more ancient and mysterious sources”. Though Gaia has no explicit religious angle, the overtones remain.

“I am an ex-vangelical person. I left the church in 2022 in a big way, and then I turned out to be gay as hell,” said West. “When I left organized religion, the act of singing with a collective was something that I really grieved and I really missed. So there was something so healing about having a space like this.”

In the name of healing, we took breaks to discuss what was going well in our lives and what was difficult. People shouted out words like “divorce”, “downsizing” and “the collapse of democracy”. Afterwards, one singer, Andrea Cammarota, 52, said she and her colleagues had been facing layoffs this week. So “it was a perfect night to have this beautiful, communal coming together of people of literally every age. The diversity in the room was just so beautiful to look at.” Ayla Rosebarreau, 39, was recovering from a difficult period of travel and said the choir “really pulled me out of that sadness into this extreme, bursting joy”.

That joy is also reflected in the music the group chooses. “We’re often looking for music that welcomes a lot of different kinds of people in,” Blank says. That’s often pop music – songs that can draw people in through their lyrics, their message, or simply their familiarity. There is also “a pretty big contingent of people who come to Gaia who are excited about being part of queer community, and so oftentimes it’s programming things that really create space for queerness and create space for self-expression”, Blank says.

Other one-day choirs tackle social issues outside the choir itself. New York’s Mycelium Choral Project, founded by Kenter Davies, a Gaia alum, incorporates activism into its events. Each one-day choir gathering donates half its proceeds to a cause, ranging from immigrant advocacy to climate defense to trans youth (the accompanying songs were, respectively, Bring Him Home from Les Misérables; Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas, and Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club).

Davies says one-day choirs help foster hope and a “shared vulnerability” that builds connection quickly. He says he’s witnessed how they help participants transform. One woman, he recalled, “showed up and she was really, really nervous, like barely opened her mouth to sing”. But over a year and a half, she kept coming back – and recently, he said she told him: “Everyone in my family is telling me that I’m way more relaxed than I used to be, and I just feel so much more at ease with myself.”

Shyness didn’t seem to be an issue for David Goryl, 53, at the LA event. A longtime actor, he sang with particular gusto in a corner of the community center. He had once found community in acting classes, but that had petered out during Covid.

“So tonight, 100-plus strangers coming together and immediately becoming like a family, I got the chills just thinking about it,” Goryl said. Typically, when he walks into a room full of strangers, he might head straight for the bar to ease the awkwardness, he said. “But here it was: hey, introduce yourself. We’re immediately trying to create something beautiful.”

And despite my initial reservations, I think we did. I’m generally skeptical of excessive smiling, especially in a city full of performers. But my inner curmudgeon evaporated with the first notes we sang, like a weight off my back. The joy in community didn’t feel new, exactly – more like a reminder of something I had forgotten.