We are the weavers, we are the web
—chant used during the Take Back the Night marches of the 1980s
…Can you imagine fifty people a day walking in, singing a bar of “Alice’s Restaurant” and walking out? They may think it’s a movement. And that’s what it is: the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement. And all you gotta do to join is sing.
– Arlo Guthrie, from “Alice’s Restaurant”
A single thread is a fragile thing, certainly not what you’d want to be hanging by. But gather together many threads on a loom, and they can be woven into something strong: a blanket to keep you warm, a sail to carry you forward.
A single human person can feel awfully fragile, too. Trying to cross a busy street is a reminder of how easily we can be hurt. But several thousand humans acting together? They can bring Interstate-5 to a halt, as University of Washington students and faculty did during a general strike on May 5, 1970. Tens of thousands of humans can shut down a whole city, as Seattle found out on December 3, 1999, when the World Trade Organization tried to hold a conference here.
There is no doubt that our world is facing many problems. One person who confronts the news of wars and violence, disasters both natural and human-made, and all the other problems of modern life, can easily become demoralized. But when people gather in groups to discuss their worries, and work together as communities to find solutions, we see improvement.
Choral singers have an intimate understanding of how single elements can be woven together into something greater than the sum of their parts. It is what we do, at every rehearsal and every performance. Harmony enriches melodies; even when we are singing in unison, like threads twisted into yarn, our sound is stronger and more sustained than a single voice could produce. Choral arrangements often include individual lines with “boring” stretches of repeated pitches, or “awkward” unmelodic patterns – nothing anyone would want to listen to in isolation. But of course, those parts are meant to be heard in combination, all of them working together to make music; that beautiful, powerful thing that makes us dance, and cry, and keep coming back again and again.
Like a great piece of choral music, social movements require many elements. Unity is important, but so is a multiplicity of viewpoints and life experiences that must be brought into harmony if a solution is to work for all concerned. There are repetitive, boring tasks that are vital to success; there are counterintuitive leaps that produce brilliant strategies. Even dissonance and clashes have value. The meetings held by organizers bear some similarities to choir rehearsals, as groups return to difficult matters over and over, split into smaller groups to focus on specific issues, and prepare feverishly for public events at which they hope to win the approval of their audiences.
Choir of the Sound is not a political organization. We are not organizing a resistance, or even trying to influence your vote in the next election. But we do have a cause, and an agenda. We want to remind you that the world has beauty, and joy, even while it has problems to be solved, and wrongs to be righted. We want to demonstrate that the music of life has parts for all kinds of voices, and that we are better together. We want to show you that pain and grief can give rise to powerful art, which can in turn soothe and comfort those who are suffering. And most of all, we want to tell you that the world is yours for the making. We’re working on it, one song at a time.
