JMB's Random Sampling

Coro will be performing a piece called Shofar in a few weeks, an oratorio about meanings around this Jewish ritual instrument, not a presentation of its singular sound.  At the annual house party last summer, we were fortunate enough to have the composer present to discuss his takes on the piece.  The day of the party also coincided with the Massachusetts legislature postponing their decision about the constitutionality of gay marriage in this commonwealth. Bob Stern, the composer of Shofar, talked about this important legislative milestone and about the idea of covenant, a concept at the heart of his piece. Shofar’s libretto says that we that we have covenants with one another and with God. I would add that we also have a covenant with our democratic government as well.

Marriage is about covenants, public declarations and demonstrations of promises we have to our partner.  Our government is a body who provides its citizens with many covenants, “among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  By denying same-sex couples the right to marry, civil rights are being denied, and another set of promises are broken, the important covenants in our Constitution.  The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has the opportunity to remake the covenant by guaranteeing rights for all to marry. Stern was very aware of the impact this would have on members of the choir who are to perform his piece.  We are blessed to have him as a true ally on more than just a musical level.

Each rehearsal, I come away with the libretto of Shofar entrenched further into my consciousness, and feel its truth on many levels, and this not surprisingly within in the context of my experience with Coro itself.  As people, we have all kinds of covenants – with ourselves, with our partners, with members of communities to which we belong, and many others.  I am a musician, I am a lesbian; as it is a nexus for these central aspects of my identity, Coro is not only my choir, it is my community, a place I hold sacred. Covenants I hold with it are something that comes into the light one way or another each time I sing this music. Coro has its own kind of covenants, too.  In part, these are with its singers around the safety of all kinds of relationships, perhaps especially those that are same-sex, but certainly for GLBT people and our allies generally.

Admittedly, there are a number of tensions in the chorus at times, and not just the ones around sexual orientation, as our artistic director correctly observed. These are tensions of class, gender, professions, parents and non parents, and age, to name a few. But the covenants we have with each other remain paramount, I would argue. We sing together, breathe together, as an impassioned soprano once said, and come together all throughout the academic year to learn and perform some of the most beautiful music ever written.

Singing is about breath, an expression of our life force, and voice - metaphorically and physically. Our voice is perhaps one of the instruments most closely connected to our selves. Choral singing is about joining those potentially selfish or ego driven aspects of our individual selves with others.  When the joining is, well, harmonious, the music is beautiful, and as a group you have power to touch other people.  The covenants among singers, the director and the audience are tacit, but palpable. I stand with sister and brother musicians, some of whom are sister and brother queer people, many of whom I have known for years, and we revisit these covenants each rehearsal and performance with each other.  It is quite powerful. But it is not always easy.

What do we do when covenants are broken?  A member of our section is out of tune, another section takes up a large amount of rehearsal, people are late, cell phones go off, or we ourselves are not prepared, are not paying attention, are not present.  The stability and safety of the music, our relationships, of Coro gets shaken. Sometimes we do not always respond in the most compassionate way.  It is like Bob Stern and Catherine Madsen say in the libretto: we go through a kind of “Golden Calf” period when we give way to our weaknesses and passions.  My golden calf is cast of one of the things I hold most dear, language. The power and value of my words gets recast into a godless idol, and all the power of what I might say loses its value.

Sometimes my own passion and fire come out.  Time and time again I have to to re-examine the covenant I have with myself to try to be compassionate, to try to understand, to be kind, to let people be.  At times I melt down what is reasonable to say in the context of a kind of fear driven fire. I let my ego take over, my private self.  Ego is not just another word for pride, it is a sense of self. As my sense of self is threatened, I lash out, I forget.  I erect my golden calf of anger.

But the beauty of Shofar is its message that rejoining and healing is possible, that covenants are renewable. As singers, we go back into a section that needs work, we go back to relationships with members that need healing after anger or frustration. And we can go back to relationships with those parts of ourselves that are difficult and closed. We do this by the very act of renewing our covenants with ourselves and each other.  At rehearsal, we may wish that so and so would turn off the phone, or pipe down, or that one agenda at a board meeting be more or less visible, that there be more vegetarian options at snack. We can wish Coro, or our partner, or our boss, or ourselves “be a kinder lover”, as Catherine Madsen writes, but we only have ourselves as resources, as the entities and energies that can both heal and be healed.. This is the life we are making, a powerful extension of the free will God has given us in a way.  We can remake ourselves.

We make the world together. In effect, in so many ways, we are all we have in this life. And this is good news, if we let it be.

All things turn towards the center…there is no other labor…Begin again. Begin again.

Barney Frank Urges Gay Activists To Lobby Congress

The National Equality March on October 11 was held under blue DC skies, had a wide representation of ages and backgrounds, excellent signs  — hand made and commercially printed —  entrepreneurs selling rainbow flags, and was attended some 10s of thousands of people. It was many things, but it was not a waste of time.

The drag factor was very low, and I missed the bar floats with the dance music going by, but I was also glad to see this was a political march, not a party.

What is Barney Frank, an initial supporter of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell saying? There were a large number of young people in the 20s and 30s there doing a lot more than texting one another and taking pictures for social networking sites, although I know some of that went on because this 40 something did a bit of the same.

Maybe Frank needs to realize what organization looks like in the 21st century. Like the No on 8 Rally in Boston, I found out about and followed the planning of this event through Facebook and Twitter. I got live texts throughout the march discussing things from kick off times to an instruction to ignore the Christian fundamentalists and to “stay focused.” Excellent practical as well as political advice.

One of my favorite chants at the National Equality March was “Tell me what democracy looks like; this is what democracy looks like.” Such a far cry from “We’re here we’re queer; we’re not going shopping.” It was inspiring, heartening, and an excellent way to show the numbers of GLBT and allies who support, as the Washington Post said, “Making a federal case for gay rights.” Perhaps Frank was just feeling left out, or being a little short sighted, or even acting a tad small “c” conservative — he is a legislator after all. However, I will concede the value of what I hope he was saying.

During Mass Equality’s training for their ultimately successful post-carding campaign in support of gay marriage, we were told in no uncertain terms that the “opposition” was “highly organized”, that they knew how to run political campaigns and collect signatures and lick stamps, and that we had to be as goal oriented. The left leaning intelligentsia attracted to the training meeting at Harvard B School that fall might have had to rethink its process-oriented leanings in order to be successful. We needed X number of signatures in undecided areas like Quincy, MA in order to persuade legislators; our work in the field was not about discussing the cause with passersby. We needed signatures. If we came across people who were going to  blatantly express hostility or disinterest in supporting gay marriage, we were told not to waste our time arguing, just move on to the next person. We were told, in a sense, to fight the same battle in the same style the opposition did, with local political activism, by hitting the sidewalks, not engaging in rhetoric.

As a legislator, Frank, I would hope, trusts in this process. The success of Mass Equality’s work in my home state was gratifying and a demonstration of the power of the political process, to say the least. Maybe this is what he was saying.

But the inspiration for some at attending a huge rally – and parties at night; mine was just private—is not to be undervalued. Michael Apple, a sociologist looking at the value of group membership writes:

“For social movements to prosper, they must provide identities that constantly revivify the reasons for participating in them. They must have an emotional economy in which the costs of being ‘different’ are balanced by the intense meanings and satisfactions of acting in opposition to dominant norms and values.”

OK. The march was fun. Being with a bunch of queer people and allies and checking out at all the clever signs and looking for other “Fellow Travelers” on Amtrak was fun. We took to the streets, yelled in front of the White House, clogged up the Mall and bumped into one another at the Smithsonian in record percentages all day. For one beautiful sunny day in our nation’s capitol, we were not in the minority. Cool. This might inspire those of us who went back to our day jobs or the young people who maybe don’t have as much experience in the political arena as voters or activists in their hometowns to return home to do the work Frank is talking about. It is not as if we cannot multi-task politically.

We need all the ways we can to inspire ourselves, laugh, examine the issues closely and help one another achieve equality. It is disappointing that Frank – whose wit and frequent brilliance I admire – shot off his mouth again. I remember him before he came out, not to date myself too much. People’s support and participation in the March on Sunday doesn’t have to mean that support has been yanked from the other places where it is needed. We need to keep the activism going where it can. Yes. Stay focused. The March wasn’t a problem, it was another part of the solution.