Above all else, have a chorus

Numerous media sites have been paying tribute to the late Pete Seeger. In the car this morning I was listening to NPR whose memorial compelled to me sing along with the choruses of "Goodnight Irene." The broadcast included references by Tom Paxton who shared the following:

Not just through his books but also through his sheer force of presence, Seeger became a model for younger folk musicians. Singer and songwriter Tom Paxton said he learned invaluable lessons from Seeger about how to reach an audience. "Look 'em in the eye. Make a gesture of inclusion, which he did all the time. And above all, have a chorus," Paxton says. "So I learned from Pete to have something for them to sing." (http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2014/01/28/267488551/american-folk-singer-pete-seeger-dies-at-94)

It was upon hearing the recommendation to "have a chorus" that I was inspired to return to Living [Maxine] Greene after a long, dormant phase.  This gesture--or charge--for people to engage in the musical experience to create change can be viewed as a means of the transcendental/existential project that Sartre proposes and Greene picks up in her own writings.

And so I was thinking about the power that can be found in choral music, singing, chanting, text. I was reminded of a rehearsal I attended at the bequest of a director back in the early '90s. Clay Shirky asked me to visit him in Chicago where he was rehearsing A Preliminary Inquiry Into the Methods Used to Create and Maintain a Segregated Society. It was billed as "a theatrical collage about life in America`s most segregated city: Chicago, Illinois." One of the devices that Clay used in his theatrical work was choral text: actors speaking in a clear, unison voice. The power of the device is moving, to the point of being unsettling. I remember the Chicago actors moving me to pay attention, to be present, to be wide-awake.

It is this wide-awakeness that is consciousness in Greene's writings. It is the demand to pay attention and to consider other alternatives.

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My dormant phase with this blog came about after completing and successfully defending my dissertation about Greene's use of lived life in her writings. In the interim I have started working for a university where I oversee a  new general education program while moonlighting as an adjunct teaching philosophy to artists and educators. I have been yearning to return to Living [Maxine] Greene knowing that it can help me keep the wide-awakeness burning bright in my work with students and colleagues. It took Pete Seeger to look me in the eye and get me to sing along with the chorus.