Micah Hendler on Contrapuntal Order

The first dialogue of our Tiny Book Club!

I’ve really enjoyed the discussions you guys have started on our announcement post and the “one good graf” post. Next week, I’ll send out one more email with some highlights from your comments there and on this post. Then, on September 1st, we’ll be on to our next article!

This month’s read is John Ahern’s “Contrapuntal Order” in First Things. And my guest for this month’s dialogue is Micah Hendler, the founder of the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, which brings together Israeli and Palestinian teens to blend their voices in song and dialogues with each other.

Leah: Micah, thank you so much for joining me for the first month of Tiny Book Club. Given the topic of our reading, “Contrapuntal Order,” I’d love to start by asking you for an example of a piece of music you love that fits John Ahern’s discussion of “concordant discord.”

Micah: First, wow, what a resonant article for me. I’m so glad that you reached out, Leah! It was fascinating to learn how the concept of harmony has been and can be thought of in such different ways—both musically and societally—and what that means and can mean for musicians, partners, and citizens.

The piece that instantly came to my mind upon finishing the article is a mashup I arranged for the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, an Israeli-Palestinian music and dialogue project which I founded and artistically direct. The piece is a mashup of two different songs from different musical traditions in different languages that share similar themes—birds, singing, and freedom. 

One song is by Marcel Khalife, “Asfour Tal Min Al-Shubbak,” an iconic protest song in Arabic that tells the story of a bird who escapes from a cage and flies to the house next door, coming in through the window and asking for shelter. The chorus itself is a dialogue between the bird and “Nunu,” the young child who ultimately brings the bird back to health, freedom, and song. This song was suggested to me by one of my singers, Sofia, who thought it would be a good fit for the Jerusalem Youth Chorus. She was right. 

As I was learning the song, another song came to mind—a round written by Linda Hirschhorn, a Jewish composer from the Bay Area, who set a translation of some of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry to music absolutely brilliantly: “I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart, singing freedom.” The thematic resonance was stunning, and the intersections of identities involved in the different origins of the songs to arrive at the same point just made things more fascinating. So I began to see whether these songs could actually work together, musically, and how they could comment on, amplify, and enrich one another in the process. The result is the Jerusalem Youth Chorus arrangement of which I am most proud. 

There’s lots I could say to guide you through the arrangement—different musical elements, textual elements, etc.—but for now, I’ll just say, take a listen! And enjoy the gorgeous oud accompaniment by my Arabic music teacher in Damascus, who literally recorded that oud track in one take in between bombing raids near his home, where he still lives, in Damascus. Talk about birds, song, and freedom.

Leah: Thank you so much for sharing that song (and pointing me to your chorus’s spotify album, which I’ve been listening to). I’m glad you unpacked both songs for me a little, so I wouldn’t lose the resonances. 

There’s something very fruitfully unsettling about finding an image you love being admired in a similar way by your enemy. In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis talks about friendship as a love that’s ignited by discovering a shared love. When he contrasts eros and philia, he says that lovers of the former type face inward, looking at each other. Friends look outward, at their shared object. So there must be a little grain of friendship sprouting, even amid enmity when we discover a shared love.

For my part, I’m far from understanding the moving pieces that come together to provoke wonder in the listener, but I can still point to songs that spark it in me. In Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, “Color and Light” is a kind of disconnected duet between Georges Seurat and his lover, Dot. 

The ending harmony of “I could look at him/her forever” is one of the things I point to as an example of the sublime. Though I can’t explain why it’s so good.

In the song, Georges and Dot are speaking about each other, not to each other, and Sondheim gives us a strong sense of where they fit together well and where they strain against each other before they reach that extraordinary shared line and then break apart again. 

Sondheim is always suspicious of singing in unison, and he explains why in Finishing the Hat, his book of annotated lyrics:

One of the more unconvincing things about it is that as a crowd, whether of peasants, soldiers, reporters, cocktail party attendees or any other general congregations, they all sing the same lyric; that is to say, they all apparently have the exact same thought at the exact same time… [A]lthough I happily accept a great many theatre conventions, this one irritates me.

And this leads me back to your work, Micah. Your Jerusalem Youth Chorus is a blend of many voices without asking everyone to become the same. How do you navigate respecting and even valuing the differences among your singers while coming together for a shared project?

Micah: Before getting back to the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, I want to say how much I love the song you chose. Sunday is an incredible musical (which I actually got to music direct my last year at Yale!) and “Color and Light” is my favorite piece in the whole show. I think your analysis is spot on :-) 

In the chorus, your question is the essence of our work together. I could spend days talking to you about this question. But I’ll start at the core, which is the values and concepts that we teach in the chorus that enable us to not only navigate but even cherish difference, while being there for one another and working together to create interpersonal and musical beauty.

What is important about our musical and dialogue work is that we are not just trying to empower these youth to share about themselves and to be friends with one another, but we are actively working towards making a change in their lives by helping them recognize the other, understand their own identity, and see reality in a more complex way. The main premise of our dialogue programming is that we focus on providing our participants with a “vocabulary” that serves as the building blocks to more complex ideas and conceptions of reality. Often this vocabulary is a set of values which we interrogate in dialogue—values like equality, respect for differences of opinion, inclusivity, representation, and more. The long-term dialogue program we embed into the chorus’s musical experience provides our participants with the tools to successfully work together and turn conflict into creativity.

Leah: I’d love to hear you talk more about how you approach respect for differences of opinion. In my college debate group, there was a very unusual kind of respect for difference—everyone had a real fervor for making converts, and, in many cases, you got the sense it was because they took the consequences of difference seriously.

At a trivial level, someone who loves mushrooms might work hard to convince a friend to give up their food aversion—not because of a will to dominate, but because it’s so hard to have something good and not be able to share it with someone you love. It’s much harder to accept a “live and let live” pluralism when the good you want to invite others into is so much bigger than a particular food!

How do you approach the considerable differences among your group, when, to stick with the musical metaphor, when we seek truth, we hope to ultimately have a resolving chord? I find it hard when it sounds like people are praising difference as an end in itself, rather than as a way of vigorously seeking truth, but aiming to eventually leave the difference behind by resolving it.

Micah: Fascinating point, Leah. One of the key points in our dialogue process is explicitly not to try to seek converts to your opinion at all costs—but to recognize each person’s right to a different opinion, and to be heard and hear others with respect. In today’s world, that in and of itself is not to be taken for granted at all. We are not trying to vigorously seek some a priori absolute truth in our sessions; we are trying to help our singers expand their perspectives (which generally are grounded in one or another very clear, black-and-white reality which is not at all representative of the fullness and complexity of the many realities that exist for different communities in Jerusalem) and complexitize and problematize their assumptions that what is true for them is automatically true for everyone. That is actually how we learn and get closer to the truth, which contains multitudes, particularly in a place like Jerusalem.

Leah: The most important things that are true are true for everyone—that’s what it means to be true. I think math is the least controversial thing in this category… and then it gets heated from there. But I can definitely agree that nailing down what that truth is isn’t the main job of a choir—and that a sense of fellowship is a prerequisite for seeking truth together.

One of the other ideas in the article that stuck with me was the canon as a model of leadership. 

Medieval composers first experimented with asynchrony as a game between two melodies. In the game, whatever one melody did, the other did afterward. The first was called dux or leader, and the second was called comes or companion. This staggering of gestural similarity means that, if I am the comes, my identity is determined by what you, the dux, decide to do. But in another way, you, the dux, have no will apart from me.

This paradox can be illustrated if I think of myself as the composer. If I were to write a canon, I could not write just any old melody for my dux. I must think carefully about each note. For every dux note I write will be heard, eventually, against previous notes as the comes sings them, and so the dux can never be written simply with its own ends in mind. Every note is beholden to its own actions in the future. To speak of the dux as the “independent” or “­autocratic” melody would be ridiculous. In a canon, neither the first melody nor the second can exercise its will with complete independence; both must sacrifice for the sake of harmony.

If I may dip into Disney, this idea is articulated in Moana when Moana, imagining herself taking on the responsibilities of leadership in “Where You Are,” sings “I'll lead the way / I'll have my people to guide me.”

But I don’t usually see people frame leadership this way, as dependence on those led. Have you seen any individuals or institutions take this approach to being a dux?

Micah: Another fascinating question—and something that really resonates with me, because this dynamic literally happened to me without my planning it. The chorus was in a major crisis two years ago with some administrative personnel who were sabotaging the program from positions of authority that I couldn’t fight. I felt like my hands were tied and I didn’t know what to do. But the singers themselves organized—literally referencing Dumbledore’s Army—and found their collective power as the real owners of the chorus when they got the dishonest staff members fired and saved the chorus. It was a real shift for me from seeing the singers as the object of the program—a “we are teaching them” paradigm, to the subject of the program—those who are shaping the experience along with the professional staff. Two years later, five of those singers are on our staff.

Leah: Ha! This kind of moment is so joyful and terrifying for a teacher (and, I suspect, for a parent, but Beatrice is a little young to have done this to me). Congratulations to you and your choristers! 

I think the last major point on my mind from the piece is the way Ahern extends this idea of counterpoint to the relationship between men and women. I’m glad of his appreciation of difference. 

It’s frustrating when women are treated as though we are defective men—this happens most egregiously in medicine, where whatever is unique about women is treated as a problem, and restoring “health” is often finding a way to suppress or cover up normal hormonal variations. It also seems like an undercurrent in some of the “Lean In” rhetoric, where women need to adopt more male-coded behaviors in the workplace rather than create a workplace more amenable to different styles. 

I’m grateful for Ahern’s understanding of gender as a source of dynamic difference. And I certainly hope our dialogue has been similarly fruitful, even if we were tilted more toward the “concord” part of concordant discord.

Micah: Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me to share some thoughts and some music!