Choral Music: Worth Listening To

We all want people to listen to us, and just about everybody believes they are saying something worth listening to. (Exhibit A: Cable television talk shows.) For those of us involved in choral music, finding listeners is a central focus of our daily lives.

We may love our current listeners, but like love-sick teenagers we pine after new ones because as nice as the current ones are, there just aren't enough of them, and besides, they're getting old anyway. We get grants to help us "serve" listeners who are "under-served," but we're mostly on the hunt for listeners with plenty of disposable income—and lots of other listener friends.

Marketing experts suggest that most Americans are exposed to an average of 5,000 messages a day. Wear this. Eat that. Think this. Buy that. Every one of these messages implores us to listen and act. Like zealots of any stripe, we choral folks make the same kind of play for attention. But what is it about choral music that makes it worth listening to?

"A vacant stretch of grass becomes humanly important when one reads the sign, 'Gettysburg.'" We hang such a sign on every text we utter in every piece we sing.

In a collection of essays entitled Creationists, E. L. Doctorow examines the work of great storytellers. Doctorow argues that stories are fundamentally important because they "propose life as something of moral consequence." By moral consequence, Doctorow doesn't mean the morality suggested by terms like "values voters," used in political campaigns. He is talking about how we live, how we relate to the people we love, and how we interact with those we don't love or don't know. He is not proscribing any particular way of living. Rather, he is maintaining that our stories help us consider how the choices we make matter to those around us, and in the wider world.

Music does the same thing. Choral musicians don't always tell stories, but in our finest hours, by making the effort, enduring the exertion, and succumbing to the ecstasy of composing and performing music, we do assert that our art, and therefore our lives, are morally consequential. And when our listeners—those dear, invaluable, life-sustaining bedrocks—show up to our concerts, download our songs, buy our CDs, and tune in to our broadcasts, they create the engaged community that our art requires.

The poetry critic Helen Vendler has observed, "A vacant stretch of grass becomes humanly important when one reads the sign, 'Gettysburg.'" We hang such a sign on every text we utter in every piece we sing. Be they biblical or poetic, somber or silly, these texts have the potential to shed light on the myriad dimensions of the human condition, and when we marry these words to music and display them to the public in the ritual that is performance, we elevate them in ways no other medium can. When choruses take the time and accept the trouble of singing texts, we put forth those texts (those stories) to be absorbed in a unique way, considered in a fresh context, bathed in a new light.

And in so doing, we assert the importance of this endeavor as a moral matter, not just as an aesthetic one. When we sing beautifully, passionately, and lovingly, we demonstrate the moral consequence of lives that are animated by beauty, passion, and love.

And that will always be worth listening to.