I feel like I'm full of things to say at the moment, so I think I'll take the moment to say them.

First of all, this blog is ugly. I need to remodel. What that means is, I really ought to learn more about this internet thing-y.

Secondly. There are things to act, and things to be acted upon. But I do think it's entirely possible to look totally like a thing that's being acted upon--when in fact, you're not being acted upon at all, but, having considered the options and their respective consequences, you've chosen your course with eyes wide open. This last thought is after talking to many, many people about this subject, and about the activities in which I'll be involved this coming year, the last year of my master's degree. I've decided, with options considered completely, with personal boundaries having been set, with eyes wide open, to allow myself to be acted upon. And I finally feel great about it.

Thirdly. (What a dumb word--or is it a word?) I LOVE teaching. Let me qualify. I LOVE teaching adults. I'm getting over the unnecessary, self-centered nervousness and stress that has for so many years been a part of all of my teaching. Part of it is that I've given up the idea that the teacher (conductor) has to be the end-all expert. And that has helped me overcome the sense of fraud that I've always tried to unsuccessfully to ignore. The teacher/conductor doesn't have to the be the expert. And honestly, I think the students/singers like the teacher/conductor better when she's not trying to be the expert (or, not so narcissistic as to believe that she actually is the expert--neither of which have ever or will ever work for me.) I personally like it so much better when I openly admit my limitations. It lets students know exactly where we are. 'Dear students: this is what you will get from me. I'm still struggling with this and this. Maybe you can help find solutions.' The teaching space then becomes more like Parker Palmer's equal circle, with the subject in the middle. It removes the ego, and the subsequent stress, and it lets me enjoy the students as people, as well as the process in which we are engaged. As opposed to fearing it, stressing about it. In fact, I actually look forward to it.

Ummmm, I think that's all for now.

My most recent thoughts on composition

While it may begin with a spiritual sort of inspired idea, the realization of the idea quickly becomes little more than the working out of a complicated puzzle (i.e work), punctuated by little fits of fancy.

Ok. Here's the whole story. Or--what I remember. Which isn't much.

Definitely the most drama that I've probably ever had. In my life. Part of me enjoys the shock value of the telling of some of it. But mostly I really wish none of it had happened.


I had been preparing all semester long to go to London with the BYU choral faculty, my partners in crime choral grad student compatriots, and a whole slew (...slough?) of choir friends, to study the British Choral music tradition. What could be better. NOTHING could be better. The UK is the very seat, the fertile crescent, of choral music. World renowned conductors, choirs, composers. Sitting in on rehearsals, hearing incredible amounts of professionally produced repertoire... Not to mention: London.


Well, the semester ends, and I'm in high London-prep gear. I'm no stranger to international travel, so I stock up on Tylenol PM for the plane, and of course I'm also very careful to have *plenty* of insulin and all necessary diabetic supplies, which I carefully arrange so as to be kept perfectly preserved and on my person throughout the trip. Fortunately, I had at least 5 people remind me as I was packing: "Don't forget your insulin." And of course I was very grateful, since I've only had this disease for *6* years and I only stab myself about 17 times a day in the process of acting as my own pancreas (that's approximately 37,230 stabs over the years, by the way), so obviously I was in great danger of completely forgetting to bring those medications that sustain my life from day to day.


No, I shouldn't be so ironical about it all. Because the truth of the matter is, savvy international traveler though I may be, and world-weary diabetic though I may be, never have I juggled those two things together. But I thought I was so prepared. I even emailed my professors before I left, asking to take some time in our first class to talk to the group about diabetes, the risks, the low symptoms, do some quick training. I thought I was taking every possible precaution.


What did I forget? London is 7 hours ahead of us. On that first night there, before my educational moment, when I took my night-time insulin shot, which lasts 24 hours, it was 7 hours early. I had 7 good hours of long-acting insulin still in the system when I shot up again. Well, as the story goes (because I really remember none of it--you'll find out why shortly), in the middle of the first night in our flats, I, sleeping on the top bunk, woke up my poor exhausted roommate on the bottom bunk with the violent shaking that was the result of my--first ever--hypoglycemic seizure. If that wasn't enough to scare my jet-lagged roommates half to death, apparently I then started walking around zombie-like, vomiting, swearing?, generally being "belligerent" (Nathan Wright's descriptive word to my parents) until it was determined that something was seriously wrong and the paramedics were called.


At the hospital I was heavily sedated (following any number of shenanigans which resulted in nurses and doctors repeatedly asking if I was on drugs, to which the reply was something like, "Monica doesn't even know how to do drugs!"--one very important advantage of the Mormon lifestyle), and the next thing I knew, I was very slowly waking up in a foggy haze, in a scanty hospital robe (my clothes having been cut off in order to perform all manner of tests and procedures), with two Indian nurses taking turns coming in to poke my fingers and test my blood sugar (I NEVER poke my fingers--always the heel or side of my hand, to save the chops), and my venerable and heretofore appropriately/academically distant professor sitting at my bedside, urging me in the most patient, fatherly way to eat another bite of the egg salad sandwich in front of me.

(That may be the longest sentence I have ever written.)


This is the stuff psychotic dreams are made of. But I never woke up--it was actually real. And even crazier than all of this, is the enormous gap that my hypoglycemic brain induced on my memory, I'm guessing as a result of the seizure. About a week before I got on the plane to go to London, I visited my grandparents in Colorado. Then, according to my brain on hypoglycemia, I woke up in a hospital in London. But it wasn't a complete, irreversible amnesia. As people talked about different things that I did in that lost week, I started to vaguely remember them. But they still feel like they are about 3 million years ago.


My two professors, Drs. Staheli and Hall, and Dr. Staheli's wife Jan, were extraordinarily solicitous through all of this, having been woken in the middle of the night, spending hours at the hospital; Sister Hall even took me home to her flat the night I was discharged to keep an eye on me, fed me, tucked me into bed, prayed for/with me. At this point, I was still partially convinced that I was dreaming--it was all so surreal--except for the incredible migraine and nausea that I felt. That was definitely real.


Anyway, it was determined that I wasn't on drugs, wasn't going insane, I did in fact just have a serious hypoglycemic incident, so I spent the next day or so trying to get my bearings, get rid of my migraine, remember how I got to London and what I'd done in the last week and how I'd been so DUMB not to consider the time change.


Just as I was beginning to think the nightmare part was over--it happened again. I have a theory (I have yet to confirm this with the specialist that I can't get an appointment with for 3 more weeks...) that the second hypo happened because my hormone levels (cortisol particularly) were still upside down due to the time change (international travelers who don't have to be their own organs might never know how long it takes a body to get used to a new time zone). And the insulin, even though greatly reduced, reacted with my day time levels in the middle of the night, causing me to go so low that in the morning my roommates couldn't wake me up for more than 30 seconds. And apparently there was lots more zombie-ish swearing and incoherence. (Just damns and hells, I believe. I'd like to think that hypo-Monica is still somewhat civil... But who knows. Emily said there were things that happened that first time that I never want to know. She has no idea how disconcerting that statement was.)


So off to the hospital I went again, although I do remember the ambulance ride the second time. Sister Hall, bless her dear soul, came with and spent the entire day in the hospital with me, taking notes as I was thoroughly examined by this nurse and that doctor and another diabetologist (they really call them that in the UK). The diabetologist was one Anne Dornhurst who actually understood my disease, recognized all the signs for what they were, and who wasn't considering illegal drug use, brain cancer or Addison's disease as the cause of my troubles.


By this time it had been determined that my mom should come over, either to assist my transition back to normal life or assist me home. She got to the hospital, exhausted, totally jet-lagged, probably worried sick as moms are wont to be in such cases, after I'd been given a different kind of long-acting insulin (that having been determined as the culprit) and a great deal of instruction on how to proceed.
She then spent the next week in London with me.


It's not hard to imagine why, after all this, it was decided that I needed to go home. Although part of me thinks that after those first 4 or 5 days I was adjusting pretty well, and that the swing in my blood sugar that happened in the other direction after I got home, is a direct result of the nasty Euro-flu that I got on the flight home, I do agree with the decision. I really was a liability. I didn't mean to be. I've never been a liability before. I'm not sure how to deal with that knowledge. But I realized that everyone was sort of nervous to hang out with me. What if she goes crazy again and I have to perform some life-saving thing that I don't know how to do? I'm pretty sure that's what people were thinking. Especially my poor shell-shocked roommates. Even though as soon as my mom got there, I slept in a flat with her, and we both woke up in the middle of every night to see what the levels were doing. And, not only could other people not handle me, I also couldn't handle other people not being able to handle me.


See, if God really wanted to irritate an incredibly independent, solitude-loving artistic type such as myself (or change her, I suppose...) he found the perfect disease to do it.


But to be perfectly honest, counter-intuitive though it may be, this whole experience has helped me, more than anything ever has, to get over the irritation that I've tried to suppress lo these many years, toward God, the only being I've thought reasonable to blame for my broken pancreas.


I really do feel lucky to still be alive. I'm very aware that the outcome could have been terribly worse. I also feel an incredible determination and focus about...my purpose. That is, Purpose.* And I honestly feel...well, two possibly contradictory things. 1. That God may be just as sad as I am about these irritations. And 2. that it's quite possible he engineered at least some of this whole experience to help me get over my irritation (I hope the reader understands this as a euphamism--think of it as British understatement..), to focus me, to help me see who I am, and need to be.**


He plants his footstep in the sea, and rides upon the storm.








*There will definitely be more on this later, but this post is a mammoth as it is.
** More on this too. This was definitely more a result of the positive, non-hospital-related things that I got to experience as a student of choral music in London, though it was only for about a week. I am determined to go back and finish the job.

On minutia:

"Nearly everything that you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it." - Mohandas Gandhi

BBC Singers

I wrote this on May 18. I was in London. I knew I was going home in less than a week due to health problems. Which had, incidentally, ceased by that time to be problems. But it was, I think, determined that I was the unsolvable problem that needed to be disposed of. At any rate, I'm not sure why I didn't post this. Probably was just afraid. Damn fear. Anyway, to explain the first paragraph: It was initially intended that this blog become the journal I was required to keep of my London experiences.

Part of me is slightly concerned with what *people* are going to think of this blog, because I started it in preparation to be graded, which judgment will never happen before I withdraw from the classes for which it was intended. So I get to say whatever the hell I want--which I'd like to think I do anyway. But. I don't. I just say that because I'm feeling all kinds of shoulds about what to write this moment, but my head and heart are so full of conflicted emotions that it's got to come out.

I'm listening right now to "And Every Stone Shall Cry", by Bob Chilcott, recording by the BBC singers, which choir and conductor we watched rehearse today. It is so beautiful. It's a rather simple setting of a beautiful Christmas text that I discovered on i-tunes. But speaking of Christmas, the BBC Singers rehearsed Twelfth Night today--an infinitely deeper setting by Samuel Barber of another Christmas text that I find incredibly moving.

Twelfth Night

No night could be darker than this night,
no cold so cold,
as the blood snaps like a wire,
and the heart’s sap stills,
and the year seems defeated.

o never again, it seems, can green things run,
or sky birds fly,
or the grass exhale its humming breath
powdered with pimpernels,
from this dark lung of winter.

Yet here are lessons for the final mile
of pilgrim kings;
the mile still left when all have reached
their tether’s end: that mile
where the Child lies hid.

For see, beneath the hand, the earth already
warms and glows;
for men with shepherd’s eyes there are
signs in the dark, the turning stars,
the lamb’s returning time.

Out of this utter death he’s born again,
his birth our saviour;
from terror’s equinox he climbs and grows,
drawing his finger’s light across our blood
the son of heaven, and the son of God.

-Laurie Lee

Watching the BBC Singers rehearse was kind of like ...when you work for hours to get the cap off your oil tank, and then Dad comes and twists it off easily in seconds. I *labor* so much over choir rehearsals. I agonize. I self-doubt. I question my decisions. It's kind of ridiculous and needs to stop. Bob Chilcott and the BBC Singers showed me: "Look Monica. It just doesn't have to be that hard, see."

And the reason it's not nearly so hard, I'm convinced, for them as it is for me, has to do with the balance of responsibility. This is something Dr. Staheli has been trying to help me understand recently. But it's hard for me because I tend to be hyper-responsible. I can't count the number of times this last semester in lessons when Dr. Staheli said "Let THEM be responsible." i.e. for cut-offs, usually. I'm always trying to micromanage, especially polyphonic music with lots of 't's and 's's.

But getting me out of the picture, I think there's a fundamental difference in the balance of responsibility between a typical British choir and a typical US choir. Not once have I heard a conductor ask the choir to watch him. And very rarely it seems do the singers watch. Not least of all because they might be terribly confused by what they see. But most of all because everyone knows it is the singer's job to cut off at the right time--to phrase, crescendo and diminuendo, to do all the things the music requires. In Britain, it seems, it is the conductor's job to listen, add details of phrasing, direct the singer's minds about meaning... But never to teach notes.

Karen and I were discussing this today, and we decided essentially that a good music teacher teaches singers to be responsible.

God is His own interpreter, and He will make it plain.

Counting my blessings:

1. I am, after all, in London.
2. I can make efficient use of limited time here. I'm good at that. Capitalizing on the experiences I am blessed to have.
3. So much music in my head right now--not just that which I've heard, but that which is sort of welling up and spilling over. I feel a creative surge coming on.
4. Being thrown into somewhat closer emotional quarters with unexpected people. That feels like a blessing. We'll see.


That's all for now.

St. John's Evensong

I've found my calling in life. Singing in a college choir at Oxford. Of course, that will require some important life changes, like converting to Anglicanism, moving to England, studying at Oxford. But this experience, had today, as four of us were guests of this rather great choir, was singular. It used up my musicality in a way that was so satisfying--sight-reading a huge quantity of spectacular music to polish and perform an hour later. Oh how I'd love to do that once or twice a week.







I'm almost cried when I saw Edgar Bainton's "And I Saw a New Heav'n" in the packet of music Richard Moore (the organ scholar at St. John's) gave us for the rehearsal. Unfortunately we didn't sing it for tonight's Evensong, but it was planned for Wednesday. And we rehearsed it today. And then I almost cried while we were rehearsing it: "And God shall wipe away all tears." This line--sung today in the afterglow of a very moving sacrament meeting, following an incredibly disappointing but somewhat love-filled meeting with Dr. Staheli and Sister Hall in which it was decided that I must go home--made me feel that God... probably isn't inflicting all of this on me. I've had the vaguely irritated attitude these many years that maybe He was. The fact is: crap happens. But today I believed this line, when sung by the tenors in a warm D Major following a somewhat austere D minor, to Edgar Bainton's gloriously arching melody. The other altos--they were very good, though they had a very small sound--must have thought I had a rather inconsistent voice, with it shaking all over the place. Oh well. I think God heard me need that music tonight. And I do want to believe that He will wipe away all tears--which is more than I can say for my spiritual state these last few years.

Talking to Richard at dinner (which was in a rather grand sort of hall with high ceilings and tall, ancient paintings of former St. John's students), I told him the short version of why I was so excited to sing that anthem, and he invited me to come back Wednesday and sing it with them... which would mean missing the Holst Singers. But I'm considering it. Since my time here is so limited, I like the idea of quality time making friends...

And talking to Richard at dinner was a joy in so many ways. I think at first we were both carrying on a somewhat obligatory and slightly forced conversation about each others lives/education/future. But then I asked him his favorite composers, and we started talking about the music we loved, and then all joy. He's as much a Bach-ophile as I am. We decided together that no one since Bach has approached him. In sheer quantity of output, in consistency and quality. The St. Anne prelude and Fugue, oh! and then we sang it together. I love musicians.

And I LOVE British choral music. Not to be conceited. But what sucks about this is what Emily and I decided together today: I get this. I really do. And I have loved this music, so deeply, for so long. And that's why I have to go home. That's truly why. It would just be too good to be true for me to stay. We can't have it too easy--it's too obvious for the *true* church to produce the best music. So it doesn't happen. We have to have stumbling blocks. We need as many serious difficulties, unfair ironies as we can possibly stand to prepare us for -- the next thing. Don't we.

The End.

London, chapter 1

Here we go.

One week in London, and I am off to a rough start. I sort of don't want to go into all of that right now, as I'm worried the magic of the day will fade before I can capture it in writing.

So, although I have indeed been here for an entire week, this was my first real day out and about, in what I would call probably 90% health. The group was in Oxford--but I and my personal blood sugar assistant, a.k.a. Mom, spent the day traipsing about London, exploring, trying to get things done like buy a phone and an alarm clock. Neither of which we succeeded in doing, but we did get in to the Evensong at Westminster and also the second half of a concert with the London Belmont Players at St. Martin-in-the-fields, conducted by Peter Dyson. I think that leaves an Evensong at St. Paul for me to begin to be caught up with what everyone else has done. This is an aside, but I'm not sure how to properly... thank Sister Hall and Dr. Staheli for taking such good care of me--and how to properly apologize for the necessity of it. I hate to think that I was so irresponsible as to put them through all of that. But I was. But certainly not on purpose.

Listen, here's what I have to say today. I'm scared to be a person anymore. I've lost my confidence, whatever I had. Actually I think I had a lot. Probably too much. But I've definitely lost it. I've lost a lot of my recent memories, and that is incredibly disconcerting. It makes me feel like I'm not sure who I exactly am right now. It's the strangest thing, but I can't remember who I am supposed to be. Who I've been being lately. Like God hit the reset button. In a way, I could see it as a blessing, a way to start over. At any rate, I do have to start over. Begin as in times of old, vis-a-vis Mormon 9.

I don't like this much as my first journal entry. But the reality of the whole crappy situation is that I've started out with a serious handicap, and I'm trying to figure how to deal with it.

Ok, back to Peter Dyson.




These English conductors baffle me a little. But lets be honest, professional conductors generally don't seem to aim for clarity. I think the ones in Provo are entirely singular in that regard, and I love them for it...as well as for a host of other things, like feeding me egg salad sandwiches in the hospital. After about three movements of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, tonight, which opened the second half, I gave up and decided not only was I in a bad seat for adequately judging conducting technique, there may not in fact be a good seat for that, except the one right in front of him. And it's possible there's debate about that seat as well. Speaking of technique, lets talk about the conductor at the Evensong at Westminster today, which my Mom and I managed to catch. I shouldn't give up on them quite yet, should I, but I saw nothing that I would find terribly useful as a singer. I suppose if that's all I had ever seen, I knew the idiosyncracies of this particular conductor, then I would just know from experience what was expected of me based on this or that hand-wave or circle. But as I listened to the very familiar movements of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and the Mozart Symphony no. 29 in A, I had some very definite ideas in my own mind, based on my own rather long history with those pieces, about how I would communicate my ideas of those phrases. What kinds of phrases need which kinds of movements: when to stay crisp and sharp, when to draw the line, when it needs to be big and grand, and when tiny. And at this level, I think this interpretive conducting movement is so personal. But I wonder, is there a way for it to be personal, for it to be the product solely of this individual artist, and STILL be universal enough to be understood, by guest artists as well as the long-time members who know your every funny idiosyncracy. I'm talking big and philosophical here, but going back to the Westminster conductor--I can be concrete too and tell you what I didn't see: meter. A beat pattern. Nowhere. I'm sorry but that's important stuff. If I had to sift my way through all of those weird arm circles, I'd be frustrated usually. What do those singers see that I don't? I wonder.

And for all this blathering on, the fact is, I don't make a very good spectator when it comes to music. I'm longing for a set of keys, for a chance to sing. I can't wait for our rehearsal tomorrow.

"On their deepest level, problems such as war and starvation are not solved by economics and politics alone. Their source is prejudice and fear in the human heart—and their solution also lies in the human heart. What the world needs most is people who are less bound by prejudice. It needs more love, more generosity, more mercy, more openness. The root of human problems is not a lack of resources but comes from the misunderstanding, fear, and separateness that can be found in the hearts of people." Joseph Goldstein, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--

"This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches: there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self. It takes time and hard experience to sense the difference between the two—to sense that running beneath the surface of the experience I call my life, there is a deeper and truer life waiting to be acknowledged. That fact alone makes “listen to your life” difficult counsel to follow. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that from our first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take clues about living from the people and powers around us."

From "Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation," by Parker J. Palmer. I keep going back to the Amazon page where one can read snippets from the book before buying it. In fact, I did buy it, and I just can't wait for it to come. At which time, I'm sure I will have more to share, dear imaginary readers.

But oh! the joy I now experience at the thought, a slow dawning one over the last months, that not only can I trust and act upon my deepest instincts, but I have the dearest obligation to do so.

I believe there is a groundedness, a deep security waiting for us all--waiting for us to finally tire of the self-serving fictions, and protective masks. "O say, what is truth?" asks the hymnodist Jean Jaques. "Tis the brightest prize that the riches of worlds can produce / Go search in the depths where it glittering lies / Or ascend in pursuit to the loftiest skies; / 'Tis an aim for the noblest desire."

A congregational singer may correctly read these lines as they pertain to doctrinal or religious truth. Important though that may be, I now posit... that we may never fully enjoy the fruits of doctrinal truth without first coming to intimate terms with the truth lying hidden in our own eternal soul.

Indeed, perhaps we have to search in the depths of our hearts, as well as ascend with our minds and spirits to the lofty skies. Back and forth, until we are at home both places...

Ooh, adventure--!

This is what I'm learning about lately. Among... many other things. But we'll start here. I think I must have a very active solar plexus. Often when I talk to someone about deep things--someone that scares me, or deep things that scare me, about whom, or about which I feel passionately--I feel a very physical, inward shaking earthquake. It always begins in the region depicted here as the solar plexus, and emanates out from there to cause tension in my my neck and head, shaking in my limbs and extremities, and general discomfort.

From Wikipedia entry "Chakra": "Key issues governed by Manipura [solar plexus] are issues of personal power, fear, anxiety, opinion-formation, introversion, and transition from simple or base emotions to complex. Physically, Manipura governs digestion, mentally it governs personal power, emotionally it governs expansiveness, and spiritually, all matters of growth."

Fear--anxiety--simple to complex emotions. I feel this issue has something to do with me holding onto my own vulnerability. That shaking, tension, rigidity is my fear of letting go, opening up, my introversion fighting against the clear and present danger facing it: that my very deep-seated inwardness is about to experience a mighty change.

And so there are earthquakes. Which as we've recently seen can be destructive indeed. But I also believe some earthquakes are cleansing, provide new territory to discover, and if we are prepared, an opportunity for re-building, starting afresh...

The danger of earthquakes is when there are tall unstable structures with questionable foundations, in which we live our precious, vulnerable lives. I think my earthquakes are trying to topple those structures. I just hope that I am outside in the open sun when they do.

Education

Just fleshing out some thoughts as a result of my internet research this morning on home schooling, and more particularly "un-schooling"--a term I'm surprised I haven't heard before now.

I just read an interview Mother Earth News did with John Holt, the culmination of my search for information about unschooling. I think I'm decided. About education. I've been struggling to decide whether I want to get a teaching certificate, since I'm here, getting my Master's in choral conducting. It would be so practical, don't you think, I keep telling myself.

Well, reading and researching this morning has led me to believe that in fact all of my misgivings, that I've had MY WHOLE LIFE about public education, my inclinations toward intelligent child-raising that go back as far as the young age of TEN, my aversion to the idea of teaching in the public schools, are to be trusted after all.

Number 1: I don't really want to teach in public schools, and I never have, so why would I prepare myself to do something I don't want to do?

Number 2: I personally believe, in my gut and my head, and this belief is backed up by an entire movement of home-schoolers and un-schoolers and research and writing and people's actual experience, that public education is damaging, mind-numbing, soul-killing. Oh also, the fact that my own soul is about to become extinct from too much school. I ought to trust my own experience. How dare I inflict on others what to me has been so confusing and motivation-sapping.

Number 3: If I try to get a teaching certificate, I will have to submit to another YEAR, at least, of soul-napalm by the hands of public educator types. WHY? What am I thinking? No. Get out at the soonest possible second.

Which I do believe will be next December.

Some of my values

Transparency. That turns out to be a really big one for me. It's kind of like agency: it's a thing that doesn't necessarily have a moral slant to it, but it's foundational to a set of moral values. That is to say: we must have agency, a kind of neutral pre-cursor to both good and evil, but without which we never would have good. Or evil, for that matter, but of course without evil what is good anyway? So quoth Lehi, on a subject for another day.

Me personally, I must have transparency as a way of understanding the truth in the moment, of another person, an institution, myself. If I don't know the quality of what's really there, there's no way to move forward.

The people I love the most are those who hide nothing, hold nothing back. And I almost can't stand to be around people who are for whatever reason hiding. Hiding behind an imitation of someone else, or creating anything in anyway false to obscure who they really are.

My next big value, then, I'm discovering, it individuality. Strange isn't it, that I discover these things in the midst of a degree studying an art form that demands such perfect unity as does choral music. But more and more, I'm having a big problem with the idea of a large choir with hordes of people dressed exactly the same. While I love choral unity of sound, within and between voice parts, I almost feel that if we don't find some way to highlight the singers' natural individuality, that sound means less. If in some way I as a choral conductor am trying to hide the fact that my choir is made up of individuals, by dressing them the same, by hiding the individuals in crowds of choral singers, there's some way in which I am obscuring transparency. Cooler would be for the eye to see 40 totally unique and different individuals, but for the ear to hear one unified voice. Doncha think? And truer to the truth.

In my future career, I never want to create an illusion. I want audiences to see my philosophies of transparency and individuality, and I want them to hear my values of choral unity. Because to me choral unity doesn't mean that we all sound the same, it means that our individual unique voices together create a whole, and we work every day to make something coherent and cohesive out of the disparate parts.

Music is a way for us to experience true unity, and to experience it truly, even before we get to the exalted state of unity in our relationships with each other. In fact, I do believe that music is a vehicle to true unity of hearts.