Minnesota dispatch

for the love of the game

Team work makes the dream work at the Source Song Festival

I like to think of Interstate 35 as the Great Choral Highway, connecting some of the best communal singing states of our vast motherland. Keep your coastal protests: the wide (okay, boring) open spaces, harsh weather, and active church life (connected to the aforementioned weather - someone was always losing a trailer or a silo) of the heartland immigrants encouraged choral participation and practice, establishing traditions that still resound through daily life. These days, I live at the south end of this trail. Texas choral life is competitive AF*, survival of the choral fittest if you will. Travel north through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa, and you move from battlefields to enclaves. I grew up in the shadow of a Norwegian college on a Minnesota hill, which cast cool, perfectly matched vowels down over the surrounding farmland. But whether you like your choirs Texas brash or Minnesota nice, people are singing together either way. 

I’ve always appreciated the group music thing, but now it seems less like Biergarten/Kirche good times and more like plasma, platelets, something we need hooked up to stat. We’re losing this communal ability, or at least the ways in which we can participate are changing. My hometown church used to sing in four part harmony, but they haven’t for at least twenty years. I have multiple former students who teach in schools where no student reads music and unison singing is the only option. These last few weeks have seen a string of scary dispatches from the opera world, increasing seismic shocks that continue to crack across our industry, and many people are rightly tying several generations of deep cuts in music education to our industry’s current situation. 

I’m in my hometown tonight, taking a break from such catastrophic thoughts by watching a Twins/Tigers matchup with my family. They are a whole collection of current and former jocks. It is so great to watch sports with sports people, who know deep in their bones what it’s like to throw and run and jump and fall and try and fail and win. I can enjoy a game just fine as a non-sports person, but I prefer to watch in the company of the sporters. I learn geeky sports facts from them, sure, but I also get to be around their engagement and understanding. Something emanates from them when a player is running for home, something that vibrates with their understanding of running. Matt Wallner hits it for the fences, and my family’s bodies tense like his, waiting, knowing it will go over the wall. I catch their energy, and it’s almost like catching their knowledge. 

I felt like this a couple weeks ago when I went to the NEXT Festival at Theater Latte Da, and again last week when I heard a great concert at the Source Song Festival. The Minneapolis venues were filled with an audience cultivated by the organizations for a decade (Source Song and the NEXT Festival each launched in 2013). Both festivals feature new work and are centered around process, every step in the creation of a musical work from writing to workshopping to rehearsal to performance to the feedback that starts the cycle all over again. I had the chance to talk with quite a few audience members at both festivals, and they shared both knowledge and enthusiasm about the festival artists and repertoire. But what struck me was the shared musical background of the people I talked to: Luther and Concordia and Olaf grads, former music and theater majors who work in admin for the opera or the symphony, current performers who also teach or hold desk jobs, folks from different organizations who sing in the same amateur choir or see each other at the same church every week. To be a listener in these crowds is to feel the shared visceral vibe of people who know what it’s like to breathe, sustain tone, project text and emotion, and settle into a groove with an ensemble. 

At the NEXT Festival, I heard the workshop of The Tears of La Llorona: A Border Zarzuela. Crystal Manich was the director and dramaturg for this work by Celeste Moreno and Bethany Brinton; I’ve collaborated with Crystal several times and was excited to see her and get to know this project. The cast and instrumental ensemble were smoothly directed by Sonja Thompson, and there were a couple of standout voices in the cast. All the vocal personalities enhanced the storytelling. I was so happy for the team that they got exactly the kind of workshop you want, their piece done with clarity and depth so that they can plan their next steps with confidence. At Theater Latte Da, each new musical in development gets about 50 hours of rehearsal time, and they’ve been developing new works for a decade, so they’ve got their technique down and everything**. But an indispensable part of this process is their audience and all the musical experience they bring to the table. Some of the people around me really dug La Llorona and some were less crazy about it, but they were all crazy about the NEXT Festival and about being there with each other. They were sold on being the first to hear new things, talk about their reactions, and ask questions of the creative team. 

The same dedication to process was on display all week at the Source Song Festival. Full disclosure - I had plans to attend some of Source’s events, but joined their faculty at the last minute to step in for an ailing colleague. I therefore got to work with the eight excellent singer/pianist duos who applied to be part of the festival, and I also attended (goddess) Arlene Shrut’s master class as well as a lecture on text setting by (goddess) Libby Larsen (if you’re not from inside my tiny classical geekdom, you may not know of these women, so just follow the lead of those who know and be insanely jealous of me right now). Every moment of this festival combined beloved repertoire of the past with up-to-the-minute creation, the duos working with composers on newly written pieces one minute, the next turning around to dig into Schubert. A small but dedicated audience was around for all this insider sesh, asking questions and sharing reactions. It was very detailed and geeky and intimate, so I was quite blown away at the big guest concert (Tamara Wilson, Tony Griffey, and Warren Jones, featuring a world premiere by Juliana Hall, okay then that’ll do) when a huge crowd showed up and filled the substantial space at Westminster Pres. Just like at the NEXT Festival, everyone in the audience seemed to know at least two other people in two different friend/colleague groups, and there was widespread greeting and chatting going on before things got started. The artists made gorgeous music, making us catch our collective breath (Tony, “Long Time Ago,” Tammy, “Beim Schlafengehen,” Warren, every couple of phrases). The ovation was heartfelt and prolonged. And the conversations between listeners, and between listeners and artists, continued long after the music had stopped. 

So, it takes a village, right? Praise clearly goes to the artistic directors of these festivals, Peter Rothstein and Clara Osowski. Peter is leaving after 25 years to become AD of Asolo Rep in Sarasota, and I heard this loss lamented everywhere I went in Minneapolis. Clara was incredible as both organizer and dreamer, and has so much buy-in from her team and working board. The festivals’ artists are of course central to their success, and the audiences are as important as the artists. But for me, what stood out in both festivals was not so much the audience’s appreciation of the product - and they did appreciate it with enthusiasm - but their engagement with the process. 

Or, you might say, their love of the game. 

And so, I realize tonight as the Twins bring it home, the unseen contributors to these festivals are all of the music teachers and theater volunteers and church choir directors who ever existed in the lives of the audience members. Without that room full of shared cellular knowledge radiating from the listeners, without that collection of shared histories enabling that group to connect with the inside story, the game itself, you never arrive at the same flow of love, the same spark between the performers and the receivers of the performance. 

We’ve continued over the last generation to create haves and have-nots in the arts. The highly trained kids from the magnet programs can’t survive, we’re learning, without a whole sea of art and music lovers who might also be nurtured by that training. Our institutions have tried to supplement with outreach, lectures, program notes - but how do you replace the participation missed in a potential music lover’s formative years?

What these weeks in Minnesota have shown me is this: the most important job of musical education isn’t to teach “standards” or “excellence” or even any specific thing about any particular style of music, but to connect people to the process of making music. We’re at our best when we’re like baseball fans, in love with the game whether the team is winning or losing, whether we’re at home or away. And love isn’t just in the brain or the heart; it resides in the body, in the breath. Jacob Collier is onto something when he gets his concert audiences singing together! There’s a bright line between being one voice in a hundred singing, say, “Shenandoah” at the regional choral festival***, and standing to cheer for artists at the end of a great concert, and that connection has very little to do with musical sophistication. It has to do with your own memory of taking in a breath to sing, and putting all your attention on starting off a phrase just so, exactly together with somebody else. Even if you never did it with great skill, it matters that you did it, that you owned it. So when another musician does it, deep in your own body something resonates. It says, oh yes. I know. Me too. 

Audience engagement is at its core that physical engagement deep inside of us that starts growing when we first learn to make sound together. We haven’t been working together to steward that as any help from business or government has continued to dwindle. In performing institutions, we’ve doubled down on explaining the details of our opera plots, symphonic structures, and performing traditions, missing the forest for the trees. In schools, we’ve increased requirements and starved electives, forcing kids to choose early and permanently for music or something else equally compelling and necessary, like athletics or technology. 

Our musical ecosystem needs holistic cultivation, and it is an emergency. Forget the battlefields and enclaves, even as they falter. Let’s figure out how to start singing together again. 

Thanks to Matt Boehler, Clara Osowski, Libby Larsen, Breck McGough, Joseph Li, Tammy Wilson, and Jenny Cresswell for lots of upper Midwest inspo and many of the ideas that showed up in this essay. 

*a great book about the effect of competition on music education is The Ideology of Competition in School Music by Robert Powell. Highly recommended.

**Yes, this is a Pulp Fiction quote.

***Yes, this is a personal All State Choir memory. She-na-na-nan-do, y’all.