our common fate

thoughts from a weekend of choir

part I: art

on the Monday evening bus to rehearsal

In the weird and hazy recovery week after I finished my thesis, I auditioned for two community choirs. I was fairly nervous about this process—after all, I have no calibration for what the caliber of choirs and the difficulty of auditions is like outside of MIT—but it went remarkably smoothly. I ended up getting into both choirs, which was a nice and unexpected confidence boost, but left me with a decision to make. Which choir should I join?

There were a couple of other factors at the periphery of my decision, but the decision boiled down to: I could join a larger, more well-known group that does more traditional repertoire, or join a smaller, more obscure group that does more contemporary repertoire. For me, this was the classic balancing problem of average-case vs. worst-case: for example, I tend to find contemporary music more hit-and-miss, but the stuff I love I really love,¹ while I would be happy with but unchallenged by most traditional repertoire. It’s a hard tradeoff—mean vs. variance, risk vs. reward, etc.—but obviously buoyed by the fact that “what choir you join for a year” isn’t ultimately that important in the grand scheme of things.

I ended up choosing to join the smaller group—the Northwest Chamber Chorus. I figured that this is the time in my life to take risks, to do things that are a little bit more outside my comfort zone, and then to return to the fold as I need to. I went to my first rehearsal the day after my audition, and it was exciting! The people were very welcoming, and we socialized and talked and learned (and forgot) names, and it was really quite nice. Then, the music started and…

It didn’t click for me. The concept of the program was cool—two concerts held the weekend before the November election, with music on different political themes across the ages—but, mired in a musical vocabulary that was highly technical, lots of specific rhythms without a lot of the beautiful harmonies or polyphony that do tend to make something pleasant to learn. I felt a kind of instant sadness; I’d taken the bet and it hadn’t paid off. Another two weeks of rehearsal came and went, and I felt a little better, but not particularly enlightened, either.

Two weekends ago, I spent all of Saturday and half of Sunday at choir retreat. We did a lot of singing, and a lot of socializing. The music continued to be hard. We talked about the music on Saturday afternoon and what it meant to each of us, which I did so kind of half-heartedly. The music felt alienating, Brechtian; I didn’t feel attached to it. The day went by, and I hung out for a while after rehearsal, but I retired somewhat early, happy to be surrounded by really welcoming people but a little frustrated with my inability to really get into it.

Then, on Sunday morning, something settled in. We were working on one of our pieces, “statement to the court,” with sets the text of a speech Eugene Debs, upon his conviction on sedition charges. As you might imagine, the diction is not what you would ordinarily see in a choral piece, and the piece has been incredibly difficult to learn—there is a lot more precise timing of words than I am otherwise used to, and though the notes are not hard, counting for the entire length of a ten-minute speech is not particularly easy.

Yet, near the end of the piece, after you pass through this speech-like setting, there there is the motion towards something greater. The speech ends as follows:

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.

It is truly a beautiful text and setting, and finally, after weeks of work, I felt my heart swell with hope. I had this feeling that everything made sense. I wrote in my notes: “the world will not be changed by beautiful things alone.” There is work, toil, and struggle in the piece, but it emerges or motions towards something greater; it ultimately imagines a better world. And, similarly, although learning this piece has been quite difficult, at least for me, that toil motions towards something bigger, towards the arc of the concert, towards a meaningful art.

I’ve been struggling to write recently—I have the fear of looking at my old work and thinking that it’s not good enough, and not knowing how to fix it. I’m trying to remember this lesson, though, as I return to workshopping my old plays and starting new poetry. Sometimes, it will be difficult, and sometimes, it will be technical,² but that does not mean it is not artistic, that it is not impactful. The effort will pay off; it just may take longer than you expect.

All this to say, you should come to our concert, either in-person or via livestream, on the weekend of November 2nd. Tickets and a livestream link are available here.

part II: community

A bigger, related question I’ve had more recently is “what is my new theory of change?,” which is to say, “how do I actually make an impact on issues that I care about, for the people that I care about?”

One thing I don’t think I appreciated was how clear the answer was at MIT, which is ultimately a small, insular organization with a lot of resources and generally aligned goals of “make the students learn and be happy, in some order.” For example, when I was on DormCon, one of our big ongoing projects was “make sure students get the space in MIT housing they deserve.” Whenever some problems came up, we knew exactly who in the housing office to talk to, and although we couldn’t win them all, we helped out dozens of students each year, if not more. We’d engage at a low-level on a case-by-case basis, and then talk process at high-level. If we weren’t getting results we liked with a certain person, we went higher in the hierarchy, especially up to our regular meeting with the Dean of Student Life. That was about the whole playbook, and it generally worked, partially because the people in the housing office also wanted students to have housing, even if they sometimes got mired in logistics world occasionally.

When you enter the real world, though, and your community expands to become, in some aspect, “society at large”, the question of “making sure people get the housing they deserve” suddenly becomes the hot-button political issue of homelessness. It suddenly becomes a lot harder to figure out where you can put your time volunteering, or who you should be lobbying, or what charities or causes are best to donate to. Things get complicated, and fast. When the systems get complicated, it’s hard to feel like any individual action matters, even as I continue to vote and volunteer at food banks and do these things because they do provide some direct effect, even if they feel like they address symptoms more than root causes.

This example generalizes to so many different issues I care about, especially ones which didn’t exist at school, which tends to be slightly more of a bubble. In the absence of clear ways to make an impact and clear attachments to a smaller community of some kind, I think it’s very easy to withdraw and become apathetic. I’ve already noticed my world narrowing, even during the MEng, where I went from an avidly involved undergrad who could be seen across campus running things and helping people, to a mildly jaded graduate student who mostly hung out with people they already knew. I don’t like this either, even if I feel this desire deep down to just “manage a small area” for a bit. It’s hard to feel like you used to be more helpful, even if it’s true that the structured opportunities for doing so have shrunk.

I don’t have a lot of answers for these questions about community and change yet. I think one which keeps me hopeful is this feeling that it is not hard to change the lives of the people around you. I think of all the people who’ve changed my life over the past five years; my advisors, my professors, my close friends, all of who have taught me to think about both technical and non-technical problems differently, and who have filled me with so much hope and care—and I think of all the people who’ve said that I’ve changed their lives, by getting them more into writing or conducting, or the students I’ve TAed, some of whom, remarkably, still remember me—and I think it might be okay. If nothing else, we can change the lives of the people around us, whether through material actions, good advice, lots of care and encouragement to try new things, or just by being our own, authentic selves, and maybe that is a good start to developing something bigger picture.

1. One particular thing I care a lot about is, of course, storytelling; I really like when choral programs have this coherent theme that tell a story or send a particular kind of message, usually in some way involving the lyrics of some of the music. (The most recent MIT Chamber Chorus programs—Thirsting for Hope and The Book of Love—were exceptional for this.) I think this is a dial that varies significantly from musician to musician, and especially from instrumentalist to vocalist to poet—the average instrumentalist is much more likely to care about how the music sounds than whether it tells a story; poets—not exactly musicians, but of the same genus—are on the other end of this, where they care about how the lines sound but the text needs to shine through. Vocalists can be somewhere in the middle and, in my opinion, tend to have more diverse opinions between these ends. Of course, it’s not either/or—you can have both beautiful music and lovely words—but there is a spectrum of focus.

2. I’ve actually been thinking more generally about this kind of “fear of the technical” in my computer science work; I think one of the biggest things I learned from the MEng is to not fear the nitty-gritty, and it has instantly paid dividends at work. I’m now so deeply unafraid of debuggers and reading assembly alongside C; tackling large codebases head-on and tracing functions through to figure out what’s going on; getting a build system to connect vastly disparate parts; etc.. It’s been very, very helpful and may be a subject for a more technical blogpost, which I have been yearning to write.