The Migrant Choirs of the Corridor Cities Are Filling the Old Cathedrals

MARSEILLE — On Thursday evening the vaults of a half-empty old cathedral held more voices than they had in a generation, and almost none of them were French. The migrant choirs — Sahelian, Levantine, South Asian, assembled in transit and carried onward into the corridor cities — have this autumn found their way into the great echoing rooms the settled population had mostly stopped filling. It began as pragmatism: a choir needs an acoustic and a roof, and a cathedral has both going spare on a weeknight. It has become something the host cities did not plan and are visibly moved by. "We came with almost nothing," said choir director Mariam Cissé, who reassembled her singers from four different camps. "But we came with the songs. You cannot ration a song at a border." The repertoires braid — a Malian call answered in an Iberian setting, a hymn the locals half-recognize surfacing inside a language they don't. Past a hundred and twenty million people are a statistic in Geneva. On Thursday, in the cold stone, they were a sound the city leaned in to hear.