BEFORE THE WHOLEHEARTED CHORUS could gather more than a hundred singers on the Monterey Peninsula, before audiences rose from their seats to dance and sing along at Sunset Center in Carmel, there were six to 12 people meeting in Big Sur. Lisa G. Littlebird, who has now built one of the largest community choruses on the Central Coast, was living in Big Sur in 2006, and struggling with her mental health.
“I knew that if I sang more regularly I would feel better,” she says. She also knew she would not necessarily do it alone. “I needed the accountability, and I needed the community, so I built it.”
Twenty years later, that private necessity has become a public gathering place.
The early Big Sur singers met week after week, developing what Littlebird remembers as an unusual intimacy. A few years later, she started a Monterey gathering through Meetup. About 30 people came to the first meeting. Eventually there were 40, then 50. In 2014, the expanding community took the name Wholehearted Chorus and began performing concerts.
Today, Wholehearted has more than 250 singers between its Central Coast and San Diego chapters. But its philosophy remains rooted in what happened among those first few voices in Big Sur: people gathering to become present to one another. The word “wholehearted” was chosen to reflect that.
“Our attention is constantly divided,” Littlebird says, leaving people “partially present to too many things and never wholeheartedly present to anything.”
Even the songs the chorus learns are meant to become part of people’s lives. Recently, two singers told Littlebird they had sung one of the chorus songs to a loved one who was dying. “These are songs to walk us through the biggest milestones of our lives,” she says.
That philosophy helps explain one of Wholehearted’s most unusual features: There are no auditions.
Littlebird is a trained musician, and the daughter of an opera singer. Yet she rejects the idea that singing belongs primarily to those with trained voices. Across cultures and human history, she says, song and dance have been fundamental forms of expression. She calls singing “an ancient and primal technology of human connection.”
THE CHORUS PRACTICES throughout the season, but they learn without sheet music. Songs are passed on through recalls. For Karen Lehman, who has sung with Littlebird for a decade, that distinction is crucial.
“The songs are taught line by line, allowing the music to go straight to the heart,” Lehman says. Sheet music, she believes, can keep singers preoccupied with getting things right on the page. Learning by ear allows the music to be felt in the body of the singers. The aim of the community singing extends beyond musical performance. “It is a space where people are truly seen and heard,” Lehman says.
Littlebird sees something else happening when dozens or hundreds of voices combine. Singers discover that they do not have to be flawless to belong.
“You get an embodied, not conceptual experience of being a part of something in which your mistakes are absorbed completely,” she says.
For Pauline Allen, that invitation is especially meaningful. Allen encountered Littlebird’s small Big Sur singing group about 16 years ago after returning from a year in Australia, her home country.
“I was not at all confident in opening my mouth to sing,” she recalls.
Singing gradually helped her find her voice and a community. Sixteen years later, she is singing powerfully.
The years have contained losses, friendships, the pandemic and more. Allen has no family in the United States, and the chorus has become part of the social fabric of her life.
Many members have supported one another through difficult passages. The landscape has been supportive, too. Allen remembers singing beside the Big Sur River under the redwoods, sometimes as daylight disappeared and the moon rose.
“What could be more healing,” she asks, “than hiking or traveling to Big Sur and singing next to the Big Sur River under the redwoods?”
Each season of Wholehearted Chorus is organized around an inquiry. Last year, singers explored how to bridge the divisions running through American life. The inquiry for 2026 is more personal: “What is mine to do?”
IN A WORLD OF COMPETING CRISES, Littlebird is interested in how people decide where to place their attention without becoming overwhelmed. The concerts themselves blur the conventional division between performers and audience. At last year’s event, Littlebird recalls, people were dancing near the stage within two songs. Audience members were invited to sing. Other portions were for deep listening.
“There’s tears, and there’s laughter, there’s dance, and there’s a lot of singing along,” she says.
This October, Wholehearted Chorus presents The Way Knows the Way in three local venues. For Littlebird, however, the measure of the concerts is not only what happens onstage. After 16 years in the chorus, Allen remembers something Littlebird has told singers again and again: “If you can talk, you can sing.”
For a chorus born from one woman’s need not to sing alone, perhaps that has been the invitation all along.
WHOLEHEARTED CHORUS performs 3-5pm Saturday, Oct. 17 (with 2pm roundtable discussion) at Hidden Valley Music Seminars, 104 W. Carmel Valley Road, Carmel Valley, $60. 3-5pm Sunday, Oct. 18 at Pacific Grove Performing Arts Center, 835 Forest Ave. $30; $15/seniors, children 5 and under. 7-9pm Sunset Center, 908 San Carlos St., Carmel, $40-$60. thebirdsings.com.