The Chorale's flagship educational outreach program is the Young Singers Project. In its 11th year, the YSP is a highly competitive HS honors chamber choir selected from students across southeastern Virginia. This year's roster includes students from Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, Suffolk, Newport News, Williamsburg, York & Poquoson.
During tonight's rehearsal of our challenging upcoming program, I shared the quote that is the subject of this essay. It is found on page 5 of Daniel Barenboim's new book, Music Quickens Time (Verso Books, 2009). If you keep reading this, I hope you'll be even more interested in Barenboim's engaging book.
I have written previously on music and consciousness, art and society, and how vital culture is to society's well-being. The YSP program is entitled Lift Every Voice, which is the name of the Chorale's 2009-2010 season. The African-American national anthem will not be performed on the YSP program or during the Chorale's 26th season. Rather, the title reflects a year of programming that is eclectic and diverse, surprising and new, and full of meaningful connections across styles, periods, and categories.
The ability to hear different voices at once is as important a skill to develop in music as it is in life. Barenboim, like Robert Shaw before him, speaks of the language of music as being "a necessity rather than a luxury." The different voices we are articulating in this YSP program will, I hope, be but one example of this axiom. Barenboim expounds on this vital aspect of music education:
"The education of the ear is perhaps far more important than we can imagine not only for the development of each individual but for the functioning of society...Musical talent and understanding, and auditory intelligence, are areas that are so often separated from the rest of human life...The ability to hear several voices at once, comprehending the statement of each separate one; the capacity to recollect a theme that made its first entrance before a long process of transformation and now reappears in a different light...Perhaps the cumulative effect of these skills and abilities could form human beings more apt to listen to and understand several points of view at once, more able to judge their own place in society and in history, and more likely to apprehend the similarities between all people rather than the differences between them."
At the heart of the YSP concert are several works reflecting such consciousness. Following two inspiring arrangements by the eminent American composer, Alice Parker, we will offer several songs that give voice to the two World Wars of the twentieth century. The young Canadian composer, Paul Aitken, has written a mesmerizing evocation of his countryman, John MacRae's elegy to the victims of the so-called "Great War" in the minimalist-inspired "Flanders Fields."
Hugo Distler, like his more renowned contemporary, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, resisted the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany and became a martyr. Where the theologian was executed for his role in a plot to eliminate Hitler, the Lutheran composer Distler martyred himself to avoid being conscripted into the SS. The Jewish-American composer, Michael Horvit, has written a stirring memorial to one of the infamous episodes that presaged the horrors the Holocaust would unleash. "Even when God is silent" is a setting of a poem scratched into the walls of a basement during the anti-semitic pogrom from 1938 known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), in honor of its 50th anniversary.
We read through these and other consciousness-raising works by composers as varied as James MacMillan (an elegy to the victims of the first school shooting in Scotland), Clare Maclean (a minimalist setting of the first Aboriginal poet published in Australia), Chen Yi, Ysaye Barnwell, and closed with Paul Caldwell and Sean Ivory's partner-song setting of the South African freedom song, "Senzenina" with the Civil Rights era anthem, "We shall overcome." I mentioned Barenboim's book to the Young Singers, and told them a bit about the conductor's bold and original initiative, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
The orchestra is named after a group of poems by the great German poet and polymath, Goethe. As Barenboim points out, Goethe was not only an intellectual giant but was one of the first European authors to express interest in other cultures and started learning Arabic at the age of 60 (this would have been c. 1800)! Co-founded with the late Palestinian critic, Edward Said, the Orchestra is made up of young musicians from across the Middle East. Players from Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt play alongside one another.
The heart of his book is devoted to this boundary-defying orchestra, and while the story is interesting enough itself, I find Barenboim's observations about music and society even more engaging. To make music in any type of ensemble,
"one has to do two very important things simultaneously. One is to express oneself--otherwise one is not contributing to the musical experience--and the other is to listen to the other musicians, an imperative facet of music making...it is impossible to play [or sing!] intelligently while concentrating on only one of these two things."
He goes on to say this constant dialogue between expressing and listening was a primary motivation for founding the orchestra (Remember, these are peoples who would have no contact with each other, to the point of not having the freedom to initiate such dialogue if they wanted to. It should give us pause that in a country where such freedom not only exists but is a source of immense pride that differences of race and religion--among others--are not the source of more dialogue. Rather, they stand around like elephants in a room, ignored until something gets broken. But I digress...)
I have often remarked that music is a necessity because it not only inspires, entertains, promotes community, teamwork, improves discipline and self-esteem but moreover, it involves and thus edifies the entire person.
"It requires the perfect balance between intellect, emotion, and temperament."
Indeed. Barenboim goes on to say
"I would go so far as to argue that if this equilibrium were reached, human beings and even nations would be able to interact with each other with greater ease."
Any idealism which dares to imagine such progress in a world so saturated with discord and violence immediately smacks of naive Utopianism. I am proud to join Barenboim as so-accused. I told the Young Singers that if world peace was ever to be achieved, music will play a vital, if not central role. Examples like the West-Eastern Divan orchestra are steps in the right direction. Barenboim acknowledges his group is
"unable to bring about peace. It can, however, create the conditions for understanding without which it is impossible even to speak of peace. It has the potential to awaken the curiosity of each individual to listen to the narrative of the other and to inspire the courage necessary to hear what one would prefer to block out."
Barenboim says his venture is not a political but a human one. I would say the same about the YSP program, and the upcoming Chorale concert devoted to women in music, "Ears Wide Open." No agenda exists except to sing music which otherwise might not be sung in a context inviting connections within and across the music and the poems composed into melody and harmony. Put another way, the aim of every program I lead is to create a space where one experiences the interconnectedness of body, mind, and soul. Again, Barenboim is more eloquent:
"The power of music lies in its ability to speak to all aspects of the human being--the animal, the emotional, the intellectual and the spiritual. How often we think that the personal, social and political issues are independent, without influencing each other. From music we learn that this is an objective impossibility; there simply are no independent elements. Logical thought and intuitive emotions must be permanently united. Music teaches us, in short, that everything is connected."
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