When it comes to the basic human love of music-making, it comes to the human voice. And there’s nothing quite as astounding as the kind of music that can be made from massed voices working together in a choir.

This weekend and in the coming week is an important period for choral singing in South Florida, beginning with the performances of the Verdi Requiem currently being mounted by the Master Chorale of South Florida and the Lynn Philharmonia, the student orchestra of the Lynn University Conservatory of Music in Boca Raton.

Last night, the chorale gave the first performance of this 1874 masterwork in Miami’s Trinity Cathedral, and tonight they head to the Second Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale. That’s followed by two more performances of the work at Lynn itself Saturday and Sunday. The performances are part of a resource-sharing agreement between the chorale, Lynn and the Miami Symphony, which on April 30 and May 1 will join the chorale for a concert of music by the French composer Gabriel Faure.

The chorale is the old Florida Philharmonic chorus, reborn as a separate organization in 2003 after the orchestra’s collapse. Last month, it backed the Italian poperatic tenor Andrea Bocelli for a Valentine’s Day concert at the BankAtlantic Center.

The Verdi Requiem is special not only for its being written when the composer was at the top of his game, but because it has great material for its soloists, orchestra and chorus. All three groups have plenty of work to do, unlike some other pieces in the repertoire that stint on one or another of these contributors. In the Requiem, in other words, the chorus is not a bystander or provider of vocal padding for everything else going on.

It’s an actor in the drama, and it’s thrilling to hear it do everything from the hushed opening to the fugal writing in the Sanctus, and from the fire of the Dies irae to the immensity of the Rex tremendae. The chorale provides community residents with a yen for music the chance to take part in monuments of choral literature like this, which is a feature of American musical life as old as the nation; after all, the first musical groups we know about in our earliest history were “singing societies.”

The goodwill and camaraderie suggested by that name reminds us of the pleasure of mass singing, and next week, the professional chamber choir Seraphic Fire (which just wrapped a beautiful series of concerts featuring the St. John Passion of J.S. Bach) holds a fund-raiser at the New World Center for its Miami Choral Academy.

The academy’s choirs and its combined mass choir, which performed at Trinity Cathedral in December, comes out of a Seraphic Fire initiative to create choral groups in “underserved communities” in the Miami-Dade County school system. Shawn Crouch leads the program, and the group’s blog has plenty of charming pictures of kids studying rhythms, and clips of them singing spirituals such as Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel.

It evokes the YouTube videos and Academy Awards performance of New York’s P.S. 22 choir, which have done a lot to remind people of the sheer joy of singing with other people, and the power voices in concord can summon up.

The benefit concert at the New World Center is set for April 1, and will feature Seraphic Fire singers in a night of operatic arias from popular works such as The Barber of Seville. One hopes there’s a good, generous turnout, because choral singing is central to human musical activity, and as the Academy and the Master Chorale demonstrate, it’s one for every age and condition.

The Keep the Music Alive Benefit Concert is set for 8 p.m. Friday, April 1, at the New World Center, Miami Beach. Tickets range from $35 to $250 for VIPs. Call 305-285-9060 or visit www.seraphicfire.org.