A new melody to drown out the sad sounds of a tragic past

By Anthony Reinhart
Globe and Mail, September 21, 2005

The music is lovely and the lyrics soothing, but there are ghosts among the members of a small choir that gathers weekly in an old house on Pembroke Street.

For Lucienne Brentanos, standing with her songbook open, it's the spectre of the hard hands that sent her here, to a women's shelter called Street Haven at the Crossroads.

For Patricia Guy-Small, belting it out in the next row, it's the shadow of hard liquor, a handy backup whenever the beer ran out.

Now past the worst of their troubles, both are veterans of the Street Haven Women's Choir, founded in late 1999.

They return to the shelter every Wednesday, to sing their way out of the shadows with a dozen other women.

And, right there in the same room, is a man who can't stop raising his voice, much less his hands, while telling them what to do -- their conductor, Geoffrey Butler, long-time tenor and artistic director of the Toronto Choral Society.

That might strike an outsider's ear as discordant, but inside the airy common room, Mr. Butler is more than welcome, and everyone sings in unison, even the ghosts.

"There it is," the conductor says, rising from his keyboard after a run-through of Take These Wings. "That sounds like one voice, and a good one."

Ms. Brentanos, 52, found hers about five years ago, after harsh words escalated to violence at the hands of her male partner.

"I'd never had somebody hit me before," she says. "It was the first time, and I made sure it was the last time."

She wasn't aware of her options until a friend, who knew a police officer, suggested Street Haven.

"The choir was just starting before I came," Ms. Brentanos says. "I'd always been around music in my life, but I didn't think I could get into it again."

Soon enough, she was among new friends, guided through her scales by Mr. Butler's genteel brand of rigour, and resettled in an apartment with help from the shelter.

"Music, I find, is very comforting," she says. "It does help to heal a lot of things."

Ms. Guy-Small, 50, found the same solace after she came out of six months of residential treatment and into Street Haven in 1999. An original member of the choir, she was moved by Mr. Butler's efforts.

"For him to be dedicated to do something like that was wonderful," she says. "We all fell in love with him."

Soothing melodies aside, the songs give the women a place to set down troubles that tend toward the heavy, given the circumstances.

"I came here today and I was so depressed," says Ms. Guy-Small, whose battle with booze came after two ill-fated marriages. "I put all that depression into my singing, so I feel better now."

Over the past six years, Mr. Butler, 40, has come to learn bits and pieces of the women's stories, but he saves his pushing for the work at hand. Their singing voices tell their own tales, every bit as resonant to his classically trained ear.

"If you're going to survive what a lot of these women have been through, you've got to dig really deeply into yourself and protect what's there," he says.

"They really do have an identity to their sound; it's incredibly honest, and there's not the least bit of pretension in it."

Rewarding as this has been, Mr. Butler did not have the easiest time setting his idea to music.

Inspired by the success of choirs of homeless people in Montreal and New York, he pitched his plan to the United Way in 1997, got a warm response, and went recruiting at men's shelters in Toronto.

"I would have a little bit of success with maybe four guys," he says, "then one guy would get a job, one guy would forget and another guy would wind up in jail."

So, he got up early and lugged his keyboard to the Good Shepherd Centre, a shelter on Queen Street East, to play breakfast singalongs. The men enjoyed the music, "but I wasn't getting my choir together."

After more than a year of this, he went back to his phone and called the next facility on his list: Street Haven. When program manager Madeline Bouzanne picked up, "I guess she wondered about me at first, because it's kind of a weird phone call to get," Mr. Butler says. "But Madeline had been a music teacher, and she said, 'Why not; I'll get a few women together and we'll see what happens.' "

What happened, Ms. Guy-Small says, was an "immediate connection" that continues to thrive on a growing number of public performances.

In turn, the women thrive, and for reasons Mr. Butler thinks run deeper than the sense of accomplishment, the applause, the escape.