Song and Spirit

I drafted this piece last fall, the day after an on-site rehearsal for a concert at Cornell's Africana Center.

It’s hard to sing with conviction when you’re struggling to learn the music. At any moment, the body of sound around you could drop away, and leave your voice standing alone against a sudden background of silence. That happened to me several times last night, on one particular piece. It’s called, “I’ll Stand,” and it’s breathlessly fast: no time to think, so you just have to run with it. In the song the title phrase is repeated in a rapid-fire call and response, and just as we settle into that rhythm it shifts, dropping back a beat and exposing anyone who misses the change.

There’s another new piece, “No Coward Soldier,” that until now I’ve been thinking I just can’t stand. The lyrics are dreadful: exactly the kind of offensive, shaming, guilt-inducing crap that Christians leave the faith to escape.

But Oh My God the music! Last night it just grabbed me and swept me away. We’ve practiced that piece a couple times before, but this is the first time we’ve performed it, and I just couldn’t hold my body still when all those complex rhythms finally came together. If only we could just do the music, the back-and-forth and interplay of voices, and dispense with those awful words.

Much as I love to sing, the music is only one of several reasons I joined this chorus. The group’s focus on “the Negro spiritual” is an opportunity to stretch my musical boundaries, but I also wanted to diversify my social network: the other circles I interact with are almost entirely white. And I have several friends in the group – including a pagan, a Jew, and a couple of Unitarians – so I know I’m not alone in carrying a different faith than the music expresses.

One of the most important reasons, though, is my desire to understand the relationship between music and resilience. The call for auditions emphasized the importance of gospel music in the civil rights movement: the group is named after a local activist, Dorothy Cotton, who worked closely with Dr. King. But how did this musical expression of faith enable the movement to persevere against adversity? To make “a way out of no way,” to borrow a line from Sweet Honey in the Rock? I don’t think it's possible to comprehend something like that intellectually: you have to experience it. So there I was, singing my heart out, in search of a deeper understanding of the connection between Song and Spirit.

 I’ve been imagining myself as an actor when I sing, immersed in playing a role. But at some point last night the reality blurred. My internal observer dropped away -- that part of me that stands apart, observing and evaluating – and I sank into the music, and started to experience it the way a believer might.

It happened on the song, “Anticipation,” a sweet little fairy tale in which we all go to heaven to hob-nob with the saints, and with our loved ones “who’ve gone on before.” I no more believe in that future than I believe in Santa Claus, and I actually appreciate the fact that the song is sung with a sweetness and innocence that resonates with my perception of the lyrics as a child’s fantasy. So it jolted me when I realized I was envisioning Heaven as if it was a real place, where I might someday actually find myself.

I suppose it’s not really that different from suspending my disbelief when I read a novel, and imagining that the people and situations it describes – however fantastic they seem – are real and present around me as I read. But it’s unsettling to know, in a situation like that, that so many of the people around me are absolutely serious about that fantasy. We’re conjuring a world for believers, not just for concert goers in search of an evening’s entertainment. And if our director is right, our ability to conjure that world changes our capabilities in this one.

One of our pieces, "No Ways Tired," is based on a quote from a civil rights activist: "I don't feel no ways tired. Come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. I don't believe He brought me this far to leave me." After singing that song, I can easily see how the music might carry them through.