Two years ago, The Minnesota Orchestra programmed a new chorale work by the American composer Charles Wuorinen, called “Genesis.”

It was a huge and fiendishly difficult piece of mass dissonance for chorus and orchestra, and the choir called on to do it justice was the Minnesota Chorale.

After the dress rehearsal, Charles Wuorinen turned to me and said: “I’m simply stunned by the quality of this choir. They have half the paid soloists of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, who sang it first, and yet they’re so much better.”

Charles, I said, it’s all these Lutheran church choirs in Minnesota, demanding excellence for the Lord alone.” And the light came on in his Finnish-American eyes and he smiled with pleasure.

As the leaves turn color and we are embraced by the finest season of the year, an equal wonder has begun to work its magic again, in places grand and humble, with numbers large and small, as men, women, and children gather for the ancient purpose of singing, together. It’s choir season.

Although (and I admit this with heavy heart) radio and recordings have displaced the parlor piano and the family-and-friends string quartet, choral singing has survived all modern bombardments to remain the last bastion of amateur music-making in America.

And I do mean amateur. True, many church choirs have some paid soloists, although the pay is not what any of us would consider life-sustaining. It’s also true that the finest of the community choruses (Plymouth Music Society, Dale Warland, the Bach Society and the aforementioned Minnesota Chorale) have a professional core, which means they get a regular paycheck signed by Philip Brunelle or Dale Warland or Paul Oakeley. But next time you meet one of these core singers, ask them how many day jobs they have just to sustain life as a “professional” chorister.

The truth is, when the rich cream of “paid singers” is skimmed off the top, what’s left is a large corpus of true, gifted amateurs. People who have day jobs: bankers, teachers, journalists, physicians, students, full-time parents, CEOs, secretaries, lawyers, even broadcasters, gather each Wednesday or Thursday evening in dank, freezing basement rehearsal rooms. Some have eaten dinner standing up somewhere; others have not been so lucky. Some have had a chance to change; others arrive still wearing the uniforms of their professions. They arrive in various states of disgruntlement and harried end-of-the-day weariness and, in a few moments, as they warm up through the first hymn or two, are transformed into a community of glorious sound.

So, if it is not for the money, why do we do this? Why do people, largely successful in life and relationships, leave it all at least one evening a week and every Saturday or Sunday?

Is it for the same reasons other people join folk dancing clubs, take endless evening classes, swallow hard and join singles groups? Are these just people with good singing voices looking for company, for new friends, for relationships? Or is it just another form of religious obsession, fueled by guilt and duty?

Escape, that’s it, isn’t it? Escape from relationships, home, kids, life? And what more justified escape from the duty of domestic life to the higher duty of the Lord?

And how about that choir trip to Europe? Aren’t half the singers in that choir just for the subsidized travel?

The truth is, and this may bring a shudder to every therapist looking for more clients, we do it for the sheer joy of it. To those who don’t understand or who have no experience of the physical thrill of sitting among a group of men and women and being surrounded by the blended bath of voices, I describe the experience as therapy.

I am one of those who dashes from work to that basement rehearsal room, imagining on my way all of the other places I’d rather be, arriving tired, hungry and out-of-sorts, only to feel the care and tensions of the day lift from my shoulders through each succeeding verse of the first rehearsal hymn. There are, of course, more indignities and hard work ahead on each rehearsal evening, depending on the favorite rituals of your particular director and group of singers. But after all the fools are suffered, after the monotony of vocal exercises, and after the dull repetition of “woodshedding” notes by each vocal section to get difficult passages down, comes that magical moment when it all falls into place.

Choral singers lust for that moment, that cue from  the director to put the vocal jigsaw together. This is where we are repaid in the fullest measure for all the evenings, all the child care checks we’ve written, all the abandonments we’ve committed for our singing. The moment when, finally, we know what we’re doing, when we feel the full pleasure of creating sound in our own individual voices and the harmonizing with those around us.

The truth is that whatever pleasure we give others by our singing isn’t half the pleasure we give ourselves. It is the double magic of choral singing, and explains why it has survived to this age of pillaging distractions, like a legible grace note on a battered score.