GLP Imagined Community Concert: We Are the Change

 
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GLP Imagined Community Concert: We Are the Change

Natalie Fasheh (author), Angie Joseph, Karen Rodriguez, Julian Bernal, GLP ‘22 Cohort

05-18-2022

Editor’s Note: The Global Leaders Program develops music for social impact leadership through an intensive year of learning that includes small working groups. One of the learning modules is on teaching artistry, and the culminating project for small groups is to apply what they’ve learned to design a music project for a particular program the group has been investigating for months. The assignment is to imagine and design an interactive community event that would deepen connections between the program and a community it wants to engage with more fully.

The projects were so imaginative that the Ensemble editors thought it would be interesting, even inspiring, for our readers to discover what these working groups have imagined. This is our fourth entry of the series, sharing an imagined community concert in the hope that the Global Leaders’ ideas can spark your own ideas for concerts that might deepen your program’s community connections. Our thanks to the Global Leaders teams and program leaders for sharing their visions of what’s possible.

My Global Leaders Program team had the honor of studying and imagining a concert program for the Sister Cities Girlchoir. Operating in Philadelphia, Camden, and Baltimore, the El Sistema–inspired choir brings together girls who live in low-income households and are primarily people of color. In the choir, these singers compose their own works and sing repertoire outside of the Western canon; they do this in their authentic voices, supported by women teaching artists. Our group was inspired to see the singers shine while performing for their families and communities and saw an opportunity to celebrate their empowered selves in our imagined participatory concert, “We Are the Change.” Based on the lyric poetry book Change Sings by inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, the concert melds aspects of choral music and teaching artistry to create an engaging, out-of-the-box community experience.

Written for children, Change Sings tells the story of a young person’s journey in using their voice in the name of justice. Our proposal frames the choral performance as an immersive progression through that story, with instrumentalists not only playing during songs but in between each poem excerpt or activity, to maintain the atmosphere. To honor the story’s visual elements, we incorporated every instrument that is illustrated in the book. Audience members are also provided with the tools to make their own tambourines upon entering, to be used at various points in the show.

With both audience and choir members sitting together in a circle, the performance is interactive and alive; singers compose and perform excerpts from the poem, leading the audience in musical activities—singing, playing, improvising—so attendees can share the choristers’ rehearsal experience. Additional songs and spoken recitations are woven throughout the concert as well, all under the theme of being a changemaker. Working together, those in attendance are free to explore the story and build community.

At their core, these sorts of choral concerts are about the communities the choir serves. In creating “We Are the Change,” we wanted to honor those communities by highlighting the unique and powerful ways that Sister Cities Girlchoir shares and shapes their values. To do so, we sought to transform the performer-audience dynamic into a facilitator-participant dynamic. Group singing allowed us to think this way—it does not necessarily adhere to the performer-audience dynamic and enables us to explore different approaches to choral programming. Inherent in that programming is a fluidity—a creative flow—that guides the process for those in the room. Through this process, the choir grows organically with its community, so that both can thrive.

Angie Joseph, Global Leaders Program, Julian Bernal, Karen Rodriguez, May Basket 2022, Natalie Fasheh

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