Singing for integration : Swedish choral singing in new expressions

Singing in choirs is one of the most common hobbies in Sweden and different sorts of choral singing has been organized in Sweden for over 200 years. The tradition of choral singing stems from church, school, universities, communities and different sorts of movements, but like every society and all music, the Swedish culture of choral singing has been through a lot of changes due to social, economic, political and technological changes in both the Swedish society, Western Europe and the world as a whole. Swedish choral singing today consists of a wide spread of different sorts of choirs focusing on different music and genres but also on different purposes. Except for being a music activity, choir singing is a way to meet new people, be part of something and also a resource for happiness and wellbeing. This has given ground to new types of choirs that want to use the communal feeling of making music together as a way to bring together people that might not had met otherwise. Since the 1970s, Sweden has been an immigration land and in the so called refugee crisis in 2015 over 160,000 people sought for asylum permits due to having to leave their countries because of war, political conflicts and poverty. This, and the long history of accepting refugees, has turned Sweden into a country characterized by multiculturalism. In order to help with integration, different project has started to create places where immigrants can meet other swedes. Some of these projects are the integration choirs that seeks to create a place where immigrants and swedes meet through singing, and the singing also becomes a way to learn the Swedish language and about Swedish culture. In this study I seek to find how the choral singing can help people integrate and what function the music has for that purpose. I look to four different choirs, where two are coined integration choirs and two represent choirs in the pop music spectra. I study how the choral singing becomes integrating and what happens with the Swedish choral tradition in the meeting of new cultures. I take an ethnomusicologic approach and follow out a music culture analysis by using participant observations and interviews to find answers. The results show that choral singing can help with integration, not only by being a way to learn the language, but more importantly because of musics power to bring people together, and this way of using choral singing is actually not something new. But there is a new society that needs it. The result also presents an opportunity for future research and gives a starting point for how this sort of knowledge could be applied in more choirs to help with issues of integration and segregation