Shoppers Were Just Browsing at Macy’s. Then 650 “Customers” Put Down Their Bags and Started to Sing

It was a normal Saturday at the big Macy’s store in the middle of Philadelphia.

October 30, 2010. People were trying on shoes, looking at handbags and checking price tags. Families wandered through the huge open hall in the middle of the store.

Nobody noticed that many of the “shoppers” kept looking at their watches.

At exactly 12 noon, a man standing next to a customer in the handbag department opened his mouth and sang one word.

“Hallelujah!”

Then another voice joined him. Then ten. Then hundreds. All over the store, on every side of the huge open hall, ordinary-looking people stood up straight and sang the famous Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah”.

They were more than 650 singers from 28 choirs and church groups across the city, led by the chorus of the Opera Company of Philadelphia. They had rehearsed that same morning in a hall upstairs, then slipped into the store one by one, dressed like everybody else.

And above them all, the walls began to shake.

The store is in the old Wanamaker Building, home of the Wanamaker Organ, one of the largest pipe organs in the world. Two organists, Peter Conte and Fred Haas, played it together with four hands while conductor Elizabeth Braden led the singers.

Watch the faces. Shoppers stop mid-step. Phones come out. Some people laugh in surprise, others just stand still and listen, and a few quietly wipe away tears.

Even the city’s chief cultural officer, who knew it was coming, told a reporter he was “a little verklempt”.

The whole thing lasted less than five minutes. When the last “Hallelujah” rang out, the shoppers burst into applause, and the singers simply went back to shopping as if nothing had happened.

The surprise was part of a project called “Random Acts of Culture”, funded by the Knight Foundation, to take classical music out of concert halls and into everyday places.

The opera company posted the video a few days later. Within a month it had more than five million views and was shared all over the world. Today it has been watched close to ten million times.

Would you have joined in, or just stood there with goosebumps? Tell us in the comments.