Musical Happenings

April
-I sang my first full Messiah—a choral volume indeed.
-I played octaves in public (!) during A Recital for Trans Voices, accompanying bass extraordinaire Sam Kaseta on The Catalogue Aria from Don Giovanni.
-On April 29th, the Upper School Orchestra at Friends Seminary NYC premiered “The Land Shifts” Movement I, featuring woodwinds, classical guitar, and three pianos.

May
-My flute music was officially published by Coleman Page Publishing! These physical editions and cover pages look incredible. Send them to your flute folks!

June
-An arrangement of mine was featured in ChamberQUEER’s June Festival on the 7th.
-”A Boy with Baleen for Teeth” was performed by The Big Gay Trio on June 20.
-“Joy and Truth” received its world premiere by Triangle Pride Chorus at their 10th Anniversary Concert on June 27.

July
-Next week I head to Ogontz Arts Facility to sing Brahms Requiem and Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli.
-On July 31, DeShaun Gordon-King will perform “The Highest Arm” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

August
Next month, Brittany Trotter will be performing “Stagger" at the National Flute Association Conference in Portland.

Burning World, Community Choir

I. Performance Practice

How do we practice interdependence? Well, we could join a choir.

I have sung in choirs for over two decades, most of my life. From balancing a harmony to singing a choral fugue, one rehearsal contains hundreds of bids for cooperation, generosity, and big-picture thinking beyond ourselves. Choirs are some of the largest recurring gatherings devoted to embodied togetherness, consisting of dozens and even hundreds of people.

These ensembles provide a safe container to rehearse an interdependence that will carry us through the changes of the 21st century. We are going to need each other, badly. If choirs can use our teamwork muscles in service of not just music, but each other, our neighborhood, and strangers we may never meet, then the organizing possibilities are endless.

***

I think back to a lyric from an old choral program: "Sing for the work that's still undone!" Every time we rehearsed it, our conductor would add "there's plenty we could think of, there!" Yet, it was never phrased as a question for us to discuss. It was almost as if assuming we already had similar, fully realized answers was preferable to a genuine discussion of our values.

When performance preparation is our largest priority, understanding a lyric like this becomes a performance in and of itself. Without the conductor's question, the comment just washed over us each rehearsal, eyes fixed in our scores.

Choirs like to keep busy. Ensembles run the gamut of repressive and transformative experiences, from subordinate worship of conductors and composers, to a vibrant collective of discerning and reflective participants. These parameters—along with how much power the conductor prefers to hold—determine how much we can grow together through our singing.

Singing repertoire next to each other each week, even for decades, does not guarantee we know each other any better than we did on day one. In some rehearsals we can hear a pin drop, and in others we can't stop gabbing. Both modes have their time and place.

There is also real incentive for choirs to be perceived as well-prepared, cutting-edge, and close-knit, especially when grant funding and institutional reputation are on the line. Unfortunately, this performative context brings about a mess of interpersonal shortcuts, and we owe it to ourselves to reconcile with the contradictions.

So concert time arrived, as did the lyric. "Sing for the work that's still undone!" The audience looked at us with wistful eyes, pondering what it might mean. I looked around at my choirmates, and thought about the work undone amongst us. I thought about the thousands of choirs who sing about a better world, take their bows with full hearts, and leave the work undone.

II. Barriers to Language and Action in Choir

In The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, Audre Lorde says: "We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid." As choristers, us "bottles" are very much unmuted and even tuneful, but the language of our ringing is wholly borrowed.

Our repertoire is chock full of poetic calls for hope, peace, solidarity, and justice. Much like scripture, the concrete shape of our problems and their solutions lie deep beneath the surface of these texts:

"When every heart joins every heart and together, yearns for liberty—that's when we'll be free."

"I'm the one who can make the difference. Against all odds, I can live to share my love with others. Take my hand as we make this journey across the land."

"Gonna shout and never tire! Walk together children, don't you get weary."

"I will find you, stand beside you. I will meet you, see you, be there."

Initially, borrowed text serves a galvanizing and transformative purpose. It allows newfound singers to long for a better world, finding their emotional “why” before they parse out the specifics. Yet, as a means to an end, we are outsourcing our original thoughts and experiences to composers and poets—people not necessarily engaged in liberation work. Leaving metaphor unexplored renders us stuck in the transitive state between creating a desirable sound, and creating a desirable world.

What exactly does it mean to 'join hearts'? Across what borders, ailments, empires? What would 'make the difference' for you? For a stranger you saw in passing, or someone in the local prison? Rather than vaguely pointing towards goodness, these questions point toward our collective obligations.

The habit of performing without discernment did not begin or end in our rehearsal room. Habits travel. What is this collective impulse, if not a glaring precursor to our outsourcing of opinions to algorithms, and of thought—even music itself—to water-wasting data centers?

These are just some of the struggles we face in pursuit of language and action. If we continue to leave ourselves unmade, how much longer before we also lose the right to our own silence?

Discussion brings specificity, clarity, and multiplicity to our singing. Where there was once absent-minded mimicry, our performances turn into multifaceted sonic tapestries, humming with our varied experiences and interpretations of text.

Action performs a different miracle. “Joining hearts” might mean that we help another chorister find employment after navigating workplace harassment. It might mean we stock the community fridge after rehearsal, splitting the bill 40 ways. “When every heart joins every heart” is now a collective memory sung aloud, no longer an impersonal declaration.

What I am proposing is a new working definition of "Community Choir."

Community Choir: a community that uses singing to intentionally develop the relationships, education, and skills necessary to take collective action for themselves and for others.

Rather than staging dramatic revolution after singing Moses Hogan's The Battle of Jericho, Community Choir is about intuitive opportunity making. Here I provide several examples from my own experience. I address organizing with different personality types, and then dream what Community Choir can look like if we love each other enough to make it happen.

***

III. Building CC as a Singer, Short Term

This spring, I brought a stack of postcards from the NYCLU to two choir rehearsals. Their campaign supported New York for All, a bill that would prohibit state resources from going to ICE, and expand protections for undocumented people. NYCLU planned to flood the Governor's office with the postcards, and unless you plan on using water, flooding a state office is a numbers game.

My first rehearsal was a church choir where ICE had been the subject of their last four sermons. I gave a quick spiel during opening announcements, asking folks to sign before they left. As we finished up, I could have shouted "don't forget the postcards!", but I am still unlearning the part of me that stifled that down. Around a third of the choir signed them.

The following day, I emailed the second choir's conductor:

Thankfully, she was all for it. Not only did most of the choir sign the postcards, but they contacted family, roommates, and friends for permission to sign on their behalf. We collected 45 postcards—more than the number of people in the room.

In Albany, activists laid nearly 1000 postcards face down on the capitol building's Million Dollar Staircase. I looked, wondering which of them had been signed by choral singers. After just two rehearsals and a call on social media, I was able to provide around 100 postcards for this action.

This small choral undertaking revealed that action can precede language. I had acted as though our repertoire’s values already belonged to us, and that reality sprouted more actualized than discussion alone might have allowed.

I keep coming back to my conversations with singers about how many postcards we signed. The eyebrow raises, surprise glances, "hms" and "wows". These choirs have gotten a taste of their people power. I felt a precedent set, a door open, a future appear.

Above all, our next action would no longer be the first.

As a singer, an action like this can feel as though I've quietly climbed into the driver's seat of a Mack truck, co-opting our people power for a slew of collective tasks. As an organizer, however nerve-wracking, I should be thankful for the Mack truck that is choir.

***

IV. Building CC as a Leader, Long Term

As you might recall from The Minor 9th, Vol. 3 - The Thing from All Sides, a sea of choral musicians sat behind Wayland X Coleman in support of his first parole hearing in nearly 30 years. What preceded this level of support?

For over a decade, we deliberately built politicized relationships.

In 2012, our conductor met Wayland while teaching in Massachusetts prisons. In 2016, our ensemble was founded. Thanks to our conductor, action illuminated borrowed language. We collaborated with incarcerated artists nearly every concert season, and formed lasting friendships with folks inside. Several of us even started co-teaching the prison music program. Some singers left, some returned, and new folks auditioned as we, collectively, became.

In 2021, we had our first in-person gathering since the pandemic began. As an active member of the group’s leadership team, I composed a text-based score for us called Three Short Prompts on Radical – "The Root."

We sang through three musical gestures, and skimmed texts I excerpted about the “roots” of oppression. The group split in two, and created short improvisations with our favorite bits of the text as lyrics. We used the provided musical gestures, and added movement as desired. We then came back together and shared our creations.

I had three goals for this activity:

1. Create a choral discussion tool that could route any text through music—or as I often call it, "the helpful third thing between you and me."

2. Encourage reflection and shared understanding through play, not performance, centering non-metaphorical language.

3. Expand and solidify our politics, using (often censored) abolitionist perspectives.

Music has the power to depersonalize political stance. It does not pressure us to immediately and coherently respond to an idea or one another. Three Short Prompts allowed us to sit with new ideas, and set a precedent for our internal education initiatives.

***

Fast forward another year: I was planning a workshop for a new staged work, linking slavery to mass incarceration. I archived artistic work from incarcerated participants, and outlined the weekend schedule. Required readings along with a Zoom Social the week before helped us arrive acquainted and on the same page. Covid testing, while imperfect on its own, allowed us to gather more safely.

Throughout the weekend, (formerly) incarcerated participants shared stories about growing up in Boston, navigating the Prison-Industrial Complex. We sang their compositions and improvised around their poetry in a manner similar to Three Short Prompts. We worked with movement artists and composers, recording everything we drafted.

The weekend was clarifying and transformative for all of us, especially the choir. If we didn't before, we now viewed mass incarceration as an important issue independent from our artistic work.

In 2023, one of the formerly incarcerated participants was pulled over and harassed by Boston Police. Several singers were his main line of support, attending court to support him afterward. In 2024, Wayland X Coleman received notice of his parole hearing. Several of us formed a Defense Committee with a team of organizers to ensure his freedom.

Before their boldest actions could be taken, organizations like the Black Liberation Army and the Zapatistas built power for decades. Actions with the most risk require the most trust. With every small step—singing being our earliest—we are planting seeds to combat the worst of our circumstances.

***

V. Organizing with different personalities

Speaking as a tenor, the basses always have something going on.

Choirs are a colorful menagerie of communication styles, political beliefs, and quirks. Season after season, we prove that staunch ideological agreement is not a prerequisite for accomplishing a common goal.

In End Emotional Outsourcing, author Beatriz Victoria Albina describes the personality types we develop to navigate difficult upbringings. If your caregivers have high standards, you might become a "Saint" who can do no wrong in front of them. If you were parentified, you became a "Fixer" always swooping in to save the day. If you only got your needs met when you exaggerated, you contorted into a "Victim" by performing daily affects of crisis to get noticed.

Reading the book, I couldn't help thinking about choir. I don't want to suggest that we pathologize our choirmates; not every quirk is a trauma response. Yet these archetypes prevent us from writing off persistently puzzling interactions, especially for the sake of organizing.

That alto who is unable to find her music five minutes before a concert, yelling "you'd only make it worse!" when you offer to help. You are the music librarian.

A bass who introduces himself with his entire CV—perhaps a Saint who has found a familiar home in the classical music industry.

The tenor who says "yes" to singing a solo service in Spanish on New Year's Day, with less than 24 hours’ notice. No music ahead of time, no rehearsal beforehand. That's a Fixer. (Dear reader, that was me.)

Are these “Survival Selves” entirely unjustified in their persistence? Ensemble directors are navigating budget cuts and high administrative expectations from their schools. Organizers face constant burnout, and marginalized folks have their lived realities gaslit each and every day. In these contexts, I cannot accept that Albina's personality types are exclusively childhood adaptations. They are alive and well in adulthood, and under systems like capitalism and white supremacy, they are a mandate.

Yet, that alto who's routinely in crisis? She brings post-rehearsal snacks for the choir more than anybody else. The bass always arrives early to help with room setup. "Fixers" like our tenor have taken a crash course in some of life's most absurd and generous tasks. Utilizing those skills for collective good when we feel respected is a profoundly healing experience for everyone involved.

These are our times, our comrades, and our choirmates. We are trying to survive.

What we do not yet understand about ourselves and our circumstances can be graciously put aside for a common goal, choral concerts and direct actions alike.

***

VI. Brick by Brick - Devising Your Own Actions

In Community Choir, music becomes the moral lighthouse, the emotional release, the helpful third thing that keeps us coming back each week. The concert program and its themes become The Unanswered "If". Organizers and action-oriented folks mobilize us with The Necessary "Then”.

(For example, if a choir is singing about freedom, then they will want to sign postcards about New York for All.)

When an action aligns with our repertoire and shared experiences, singers are most likely to follow through. The "Then" should be driven by both need and ability. Not everyone will participate in everything, or anything. Work with community organizers. Avoid perfectionism, saviorism, and resting on good intentions.

Some Example Actions:

-Petition signing
-Postcard writing to elected officials or incarcerated people
-Teach-ins on zines and book chapters (perhaps with musical improvisation)
-Splitting costs, supporting community members
-Help Desking: tech support, application help, rhetoric drafting
-"This week I need / I have / I'll give" forums
-Phonebanking
-Zine making assembly lines, Little Free Library distribution
-Community Fridge shopping or cooking
-Land stewardship / planting
-”Good Trouble” Action Trainings (e.g blockades, property alteration, wheat pasting with crowd coverage)
-Office / Public Sit-Ins
-Court Accompaniment, Jail Support

Even one or two actions from this list each year is a great starting place.

Logistical Recommendations:

Gather after rehearsal, ideally in the same space as the singing. Gather around food.

At your first gathering of the season, poll for action proposals and leaders, as well as collective interest. Distribute recurring rolls: snack signups, PPE tallying, monthly pickups and drop-offs. Do this work together—not over email—and make a shared spreadsheet.

In the same way a conductor prepares us to navigate a concert’s grand finish, we can guide each other to take action. Among us are teachers, tradespeople, cooks, accessibility coordinators, visual artists, organizers, and lovers. What are we waiting for?

***

VII. A Note on Access, Four Tenets

We have the most people power, and the worst air quality.

Since 2020, 12 viral surges have affected our bodies and our rehearsal seasons long-term.

2023: nine infected (myself included). 2024: better ventilation, five infected. 2025: maybe four infected (myself included). 2026: fourteen infected alongside a flu outbreak, including the conductor.

These were just the choristers who tested. These were just the choristers who were symptomatic.

Community Choir's Four Tenets of Mitigating Airborne Viruses

1. Ventilation
Well-ventilated facilities, open windows, CO2 monitors in rehearsal. Bring sweaters in winter; no crying in baseball.

2. Air Purification
"What about the noise?" Anna RG puts it best in (in)filtration + a welcome (noise)

3. Masking
Good Comfort KN95s are loose enough for dropping the jaw. Fit them with adjustable ear loops by using an unhooked paperclip.

4. Testing
Local mask blocs may offer masks and tests for free. Use your people power: how magical is a $200 access cost split by 20-40 people?

Singing is a human right. Humans are beings with bodies. No matter how unpopular, it is time we acknowledge and protect them.

***

VIII. Conclusion

Governor Hochul's office rejected the postcards. The state did not pass New York for All.

The Massachusetts Parole Board denied Wayland X Coleman’s freedom on October 14, 2025.

We do not join a choir because it is easy. Notes are missed, performances go awry. Organizing comes with its own disappointments, and choristers are among the fortunate few who are primed for them.

The truth is that the state does not want freedom for Black and Brown people. They have maintained this position for over 250 years, and don’t plan on stopping now. May Community Choir wake us up to this once and for all.

In a case like Wayland’s, working through the state is inevitable. Choirs have the power to sustain these fights, as if stagger breathing for years and years. Smaller groups trying their best in the shadows should be so lucky.

***

Choral music alone is not enough from our gatherings on stolen land, in a burning world. Appearing diverse and progressive can no longer take precedence over building diverse and progressive space.

Utilizing our people power solely for concert performance must be considered abhorrent. The container has become a prison.

This work can take decades, but sometimes it takes one gathering, one sentence. Our participation is as vital as our apathy is irresponsible. We need to gather in this spirit, and we need to gather now.

Today’s Minor 9th

Out of all the minor 9ths I sang this year, this one takes the cake. In Sydney Guillaume’s A Taste of Freedom, “America” is sung on a G2 against Ab3. You can hear it at 27:55 below, conducted by the composer.

Lighting a Candle 🕯️

🕯️ George Kent, June 17, 2025.

George Kent was my first choir conductor. He started The Chorus of Westerly in 1956, laying the foundation that I stood on over 40 years later. The first time I heard an orchestra live was behind them, in his choir. (Verdi Requiem, 2004. I was nine years old.)

When I sang my undergraduate Senior Recital in 2015, George Kent showed up in a suit. I have no idea what my life would look like without the seeds he planted, which hundreds of other adults (especially women and femmes) watered before I got here.

Thank you, Mr. Kent.