She tells us about the importance of music to social change and specifically how she co-created a Peace Choir as a powerful, strategic tool for Peacemaking. In her own unique way, Dana answers the question many of us ask:   “What can we do in our own communities to promote Peace”?  C.L.

THE MAGIC OF PEACEMAKING WITH MUSIC:  San Antonio Peace Choir

by Dana Clark

Powerful music has been at the heart of every important social movement.  Music opens hearts and minds to new ideas, unifies people in common endeavor, and motivates change.  We need only remember the protest songs of the Anti-War Movement and the freedom songs of the Civil Rights Movement to know that the right music at the right time can express the deepest longings of an entire generation and galvanize them to action.

What is it that gives music such power?  I believe that music is the first language of every human being.  In the womb we grow familiar with the cadences of our mothers heartbeat, breathing, and movement.  Though unequipped to understand the meaning of her words, we absorb the melody of her speech.  From the moment in our prenatal development when our auditory nerves conduct the first signal, we are exposed to variations in the pitch and tempo of our mothers' voice in association with physiological components of her emotional states.  Blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh, we learn the meaning of her body music.

This communication becomes a duet at the moment of birth.  Before speech develops, a mother must interpret the "musical" qualities of her infant's vocalizations in order to determine its needs.  Parents quickly learn the difference between the sound of a baby's cry of pain and the whine of fatigue.

If this ability to respond to musical elements is essential to human survival, one would expect it to be "hard-wired" into the brain and indeed, research supports this notion.  In Arts With the Brain in Mind, Eric Jensen writes:  "Music helps you think by activating and synchronizing neural firing patterns that orchestrate and connect multiple brain sites."  Music increases brain "coherence"-coordinated activity in different parts of the brain, and inter-hemispheric brain activity for auditory processing.  Simply put, music activates multiple brain sites and stimulates them to work together.  Could it be that this is why a thought can become so much more powerful and easily understood when expressed as a lyric accompanied by music?  Is this the reason we can sometimes feel so alive, centered, and transformed when participating in a musical experience?   Other activities may activate only a limited portion of the brain, whereas music "turns us on" more completely.  In a way, we are never more whole, more completely ourselves than when we are listening/participating in music. 

Foundational to my work with the Peace Choir is my belief that humans are inherently music making creatures.  Music is a universal human trait, not the exclusive province of special individuals with rare talents.  I endeavor to make participation in the Peace Choir as simple and inclusive as possible.  I emphasize that the Peace Choir is not about vocal technique.  It is about being willing to allow oneself to become an instrument for the music of peace to sing itself into the world.  Here are my guidelines:

1. If you are breathing, you have already passed the audition.
2. No experience is necessary, and you do not have to read music.
3. A single one-hour rehearsal is all that is required.
4. Singers can begin learning the music on-line at the website www.songsofpeace.org.

I hold rehearsals at different times and locations during the month leading up to a concert.  I pass out booklets of lyrics, and the music is learned by call and response in the oral tradition.  I make a deliberate attempt to reach out to a wide variety of people in order to present a true rainbow of diversity.  I encourage people to bring family and friends to sing with them.  No one is too young or too old.  Our age range has been four to eighty-four.  At our first concert we had about 70 singers participating.  At our second concert, we had about 140! 

The members of the Peace Choir rehearse in small groups and never sing all together until a concert.  It is exciting for everyone to discover how many of us there are!  A full band backs up the Choir:  bass, drums, piano, and guitar.  Soloists sing some of the parts of the songs.

At the beginning of a rehearsal I usually notice some roughness in the blend of voices.  Not everyone is perfectly on pitch, and some voices are too loud.  I take more time with the first few songs.  We sing our way through a chorus several times using call and response, and then sing the melody in unison.  I encourage them to look away from the lyric books and instead watch me.  I have noticed in my work with young children that if I tell them to look at my mouth and make their mouths do the same things, the right words will come out.  This also works well with the Peace Choir!  I always encourage people to listen more than they sing, and to think of what they are doing as of "simultaneous imitation."   

There comes a moment about twenty minutes into a rehearsal when I suddenly realize that the voices are sounding balanced, tuned, and very sweet.  We can sing through a new chorus just once as call and response, and immediately sing it perfectly in unison.   It begins to seem as if there is nothing we can't sing!  I am not sure how to account for this, and I sometimes jokingly attribute the phenomenon to telepathy.  It is part of the magic of music.

At a performance, I rarely see someone glance at a lyric book.  Instead I see singers with faces glowing, singing as if their hearts are on fire, passionate about every word.  The added sound of the band and soloists make it exciting for Choir members, and the band and soloists are swept away by the support of such a large number of singers.  I begin to feel as if I could levitate!  The music unifies us, creates a powerful vision of a better world, and makes us all believe we can make it come true.  Singing together with such a large number of like-minded people who are on fire for peace, we are forming bonds and networking in a way that can benefit the world in concrete ways.  We see that we are not alone.  Our allies are all around us.

Our community is responding to the Peace Choir by inviting us to sing at more and more events for the purpose of raising consciousness and building a culture of non-violence.  We have been invited to sing at the opening ceremony for the Texans for Peace Conference at the University of Incarnate Word on Oct 7, and at the Health, Healing, and Wellness Festival at Unity Church of San Antonio on Oct 14.  The Chairperson of the Martin Luther King March Committee has invited us to sing in January (2007) for the largest MLK March on the planet.  We will be singing at opening and closing ceremonies for “A Season for Nonviolence” in San Antonio, and at other events during the Season.  

The size of the Peace Choir doubled from its first to its second performance.  What if we double in size every single time?  How long would it take until the Choir included the entire population of San Antonio? Don't tell me our streets wouldn't be safer!  If we continued to double the size of the choir year after year, how long before we had the entire population of Texas? The US? The continent? The hemisphere? THE WORLD???????????????? 

See how important singing for peace is? 

Here's how Pete Seeger said it in 1992:  "A key to the future is mass participation.  'If the people lead, eventually the leaders will follow' says the bumper sticker on our car.Now we see serious problems.But we also have electronic tools of communication.Within the next few decades billions of people will be teaching things to each other, things that we've got to learn, if this world is to survive.  And much of our learning will be through the arts, overleaping barriers of language, overleaping barriers of hate and misunderstanding.  Hardworking people in every land ask why $130 million a minute can be spent every day and every night throughout this world on guns, bombs, poison gas, armaments of all sorts, and yet leaders in every country tell their people that there is no more money for schools nor for health, nor for saving the planet from death. 

"Against such a background, what can songs do?  I'll stand by what I've written before.  Songs penetrate hard shells.  If we bring life to them, they will bring life to us and to our children.  And to our children's children's children." 

Dr. Ysaye Maria Barnwell tells a story of the Mbuti people of the Congo, who gather their community by walking through the forest singing.  Once they are all together, they continue to sing until they hear the melody no one person is singing-until they hear the music that they can only make when all of them raise their voices together.  It is only at this point, when they have tuned themselves to each other, heart, mind, and spirit, that they allow themselves to move on to discussion and decision making.  Isn't this a beautiful example for how our leaders could make better decisions?  Remember, when we sing and make music many different parts of our brains begin to work together in a coherent way.  Studies cited by Eric Jensen in the book Arts With the Brain in Mind  demonstrate that "the creativity to embellish potential solutions to a mock social problem was enhanced by the use of music."  Doesn't it make sense that using more of our brains would result in better solutions?  

Many times I have seen musicians who have never met before, do not know each other's names, and do not necessarily speak the same language sit down with their instruments and create something beautiful together that none of them could have created alone.  How do they do this?  By listening carefully to each other and being responsible about how they contribute the sound of their instruments to the overall composition.  What if instead of sending our politicians to Washington (or to the United Nations) we sent our very best musicians?   What if they first worked out harmonies with each other and created an improvised musical composition to which they had all contributed?  Somehow I think tackling social/political issues after that would be much easier and more likely to result in peace and justice.

We began the second hundred years of Satyagraha by honoring the power of nonviolence to transform the world, remembering the World Trade Center tragedy in light of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King:  "We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation." 

The Peace Choir performed in San Antonio on 9-11-2006
as part of the centennial celebration of the event which launched Mahatma Gandhi's work of nonviolent resistance, Satyagraha.  On that evening the choir was estimated to be 130 to 140 people.  Many of the finest singers in the show Do Not Pass Me By from the Josephine Theatre (www.josephinetheatre.org) sang as soloists with the Peace Choir.  The eight piece band Synergy provided accompaniment.  Mahatma Gandhi's granddaughter Ela Gandhi recognized our event in S. A. as the official U. S. partner to her Satyagraha Conference in South Africa, which took place during the same week.  It was an honor to be recognized as part of the international work of building peace. 

Besides the performance of the choir on 9-11, Jose de Leon, noted San Antonio actor, portrayed Gandhi in a reenactment of the historic moments of 9-11-1906 which began Gandhi's lifework of Satyagraha.  The Arathi School of dance performed a beautiful program of classical Indian dance, and Imam Omar Shakir spoke eloquently about the Islamic tradition of peace.  Nancy Meyer described the work of  the national group September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.  The dedicated peacemakers of this organization all lost family members in the 9-11 terrorist attacks five years ago.  Nancy lost a member of her family on Flight 93.  Many community organizations were present at tables to provide opportunities for those attending on 9-11 to become involved in working for peace in the world.  

Thus we challenged ourselves on 9-11-2006 and beyond to pursue peaceful solutions to problems like 9-11-2001 using the nonviolent approach born on 9-11-1906.  Dr. King said, "Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.  We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means." 

Singing together with a diverse bunch of peace-minded people can be an important step in creating a peaceful world for our "children's children's children."  By learning to sing together we provide a powerful demonstration of our innate human capacity to learn how to accomplish any goal by cooperating with each other.