‘Coming Home’ By Erin Kayata
COVID vaccine reunites Norwalk chorale group
NORWALK — The day music died for Norwalk’s Serendipity Chorale was March 10, 2020.
On that day, the group performed an early St. Patrick’s Day show at the Norwalk Senior Center. It was supposed to kick off a year celebrating the group’s 45th anniversary, but the coronavirus, already encroaching on the area, had other plans.
Anxiety over what turned out to be the pandemic prevented Gigi Van Dyke, founder of Serendipity Chorale, from planning much for the group’s anniversary, which in the past consisted of special performances with other groups.
“That day we sang at the Senior Center was one of the smallest groups we’ve ever
sung for,” she said. “People were already staying inside. They’d been talking about it since January and everyone started recoiling. I didn’t think we were heading in that direction but we were.”
After that performance, the group decided to go on hiatus until things with the virus calmed down, putting a halt to 45 years of history.
But with the new COVID-19 vaccines rolling out, the group is starting to reunite.
It took much longer than anyone anticipated, but nearly one year after the group’s last performance, members starting to gather again as one-by-one people get vaccinated. Van Dyke said a group of about five women met in mid-March to sing a few songs while keeping their masks on. The group doesn’t have plans for a full reunion or new performances yet, but just simply being together and singing once more is enough for now, she said.
“It wasn’t necessarily harmonically balanced but it was nice they were together,” she said. “For me it was like I was waiting for my family to come home . ... I didn’t know there was that much joy in the world until I was given the privilege of working with the Serendipity Chorale.”
Last month, Van Dyke got her second dose at the Norwalk Senior Center, the same site of the Serendipity Chorale’s last performance. When she went, she brought over copies of a CD she recorded over the pandemic featuring her piano music. Making such a recording had been a lifelong dream of hers that the pandemic offered the opportunity to fulfill, she said. Copies of the CD, “It’s Love,” have since been given out to groups that once benefited from the Serendipity Chorale’s performances Prayer is a guiding force in Van Dyke’s life and is what led her to found Serendipity Chorale in 1975. Van Dyke grew up playing music in churches in her native West Virginia. She went to school to study education and worked as a teacher.
“But music was always my passion,” she said.
When she moved to Connecticut, Van Dyke began going from church to church playing with different choruses. This eventually led to people expressing
interest in forming a group, which she said she did after praying on it.
“I thought about it night and day and I seemed not to be able to move from it,” she said. “After about six weeks, I called the ones who were involved and said, ‘There are some folks who expressed interest in this going.’”
Serendipity Chorale began rehearsing in Van Dyke’s Norwalk home on Tuesdays.
It started out as an all Black group, but eventually became integrated, which Van Dyke said was unusual at the time.
“That was the way it was,” Van Dyke said. “I never saw anything wrong with it, but that was the way it was when it came to something as important to me as singing and making music.”
What started as a music group evolved to a social one, with many rehearsals kicking off with the members catching up.
“They were integrating their spirits and I love that,” Van Dyke said. “I learned during the pandemic they know so much about each other, and I love that getting them together to sing was a wonderful spirit of love and trust. Someone told me recently coming to my house for rehearsals was like coming home.”