“Desert of The Heart”:

Subjectivity and Connection in Arts Advocacy

Eugenia Siegel Conte
(University of California, Santa Barbara)

In the summer of 2020, a Boston social justice activist choir I sing and do fieldwork with, Voices 21C, collaborated with a new consortium of choral practitioners and activists on creating educational materials. This collective, The Choral Commons, hosts a detailed website dedicated to providing advocacy and activist discussions and materials for choral practitioners in their classrooms and communities. They also host a podcast, in which they talk to choral practitioners about programs that approach issues of activism and advocacy.[1]

During that summer, two podcasts highlighted issues around race and incarceration, discussing programs that bring group voice practices into prisons as collaborative art and community- building for inmates. Featuring the voices of incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated people, the podcasts walked through what these participants thought community art making, group singing, and choral experimentation meant to them. The podcasts focused on the silencing and violence within prisons that made vocalizing, collaborative creative practice, and emotional vulnerability exceptionally powerful for incarcerated people.

I was asked to curate a virtual audio project to go along with the second of these podcasts. This episode featured founders and participants in the Empowering Song Project at Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Norfolk.[2] The commission was to create a “conceptual” choral prompt and piece responding to the Empowering Song Project. I was encouraged by one of The Choral Commons’ founders, Emelie Amrein, to consider including the last stanza of W.H. Auden’s poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” (1940), that is often set to a Conrad Kocher hymn tune (1858):

In the desert of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

As I developed the project prompt, I hoped to inspire creativity, empathy, and, perhaps, instigate community action to support inmates or the formerly-incarcerated. What resulted is a choral sculpture based on “restricted voice”—voices that have been constrained, monitored, and policed.[3] In trying to imbue the prompt and sculpture with an emotional touchstone that might be understood in choral community contexts, I transposed vocal restriction into a realm that might provide common ground for people outside of the prison system. The aim of this piece was to encourage the sculpture participants to think deeply about their own voices, embedded in their own nexus of power, privilege, and responsibility—and to try to genuinely do so myself. Inspired by the collaborative and vulnerable activities I had done in rehearsals with Voices 21C,[4] as well as the generous and creative work of Tomie Hahn[5] and Pauline Oliveros’ sonic meditations,[6] this prompt was all about finding discomfort through embodied voice and openly sharing it.

Keen to emphasize the policed boundaries of the voice and the freedom it often metaphorically signifies,[7] I reached back into my own physical experiences and thought deeply about a period of several months when my own voice was publicly targeted—inhibited, discounted, mocked—by repeated faculty abuse of power when I was a student attending classes. I collated some of the embodied experiences I had during that time; how it felt to be silenced, chastised, and baited in that setting and how it changed me as a person and scholar.  From that, I created the project prompt for participating Voices 21C singers:

Think of an instance when you felt you needed to say something, but couldn’t. Breathe. Try to awaken that memory enough that your body, mind, and emotional center are inside it.

Bring an awareness to your body’s posture; to where you feel pressure or tension. Think about what you wanted to say. Think about why you couldn’t say it.

Begin recording on this Soundtrap[8] project. Do some vocalizations in Am or CM/m (of any type, but using pure vowels) that “plug in” to this feeling of impotence, frustration, or hesitation that you feel. Feel free to extend consonants or change from vowel to vowel. Make whatever noises come out. Try not to censor yourself; but allow your body to take a break when needed. When you submit this recording on Soundtrap, please edit out long periods of silence; but don’t try to edit in the moment. Do whatever feels authentic and don’t worry about the product. This does not have to be super performative or theater-driven. This is about you, and your experience. Please do not listen to anyone else’s vocalizations on the Soundtrap before you record your own.

Stop the recording. Breathe. Center. Find your way back to your full, unhindered voice doing whatever works for you.

In espousing this approach, I hoped to invite participants in the “choral sculpture” to consider their own embodied relationships with their voices and what physical and emotional feelings of restriction can be felt when voice is curbed or silenced by cultural forces. This exercise was intended to encourage engagement and empathy when considering the choral experiences of incarcerated people. However, the prompt also provided an avenue that allowed me to aestheticise and obliquely make public my own experiences of being silenced—experiences that still affect my day-to-day life. As much as I might have experienced this kind of abuse in a university setting, at least I could talk about it, however obliquely—at least I was allowed in the classroom in the first place—at least I had robust support networks of family and finance—at least I wasn’t battling constant discrimination and violence on multiple fronts every day. The incarcerated participants in these prison choir projects the podcast highlighted had few, most likely next to none, of the privileges I enjoy. Yet I wanted to create a work that could link my body to theirs’ in whatever empathetic capacity I had to draw from, and encourage the other choir members to do the same.[9]

However, when choir members had returned their recorded snippets and I was working to edit together a kind of choral sculpture that would become the audio piece “You/Don’t/Say,” I thoroughly considered ethical implications. How much of this piece was to encourage the choir’s singers and podcast’s listeners to consider the inherent discomfort of silenced or mangled voice, and how much of it was a vampiric codicil to the activist/advocacy intent that framed the piece, specifically for me to express my own unresolved embodied affective issues?

As I thought more about these questions surrounding privilege, advocacy, affect, and voice, I began to realize how embedded these questions are within my personal, artistic, and scholarly life, and that they should be centered explicitly in my work and interactions. Increasingly, my scholarship focuses on the affective experiences that undergird, guide, and motivate how we engage with others in shared spaces, sonically and otherwise. However, the particulars of individual affect are rarely transposable or fully understandable to another embodied person. This leads me to radically, often unattractively, center my own body and affective experiences in my own work, to identify some of the cultural privileges and hegemonies that encourage affective response in my own body and to suggest how some of the culturally-wrought mechanisms of affect function. I’m constantly analyzing and theorizing my emotional responses to better understand my “voice” as a scholar is situated. How can I collate my emotional experiences within an ethical framework that shows the personal affective impetus and payoffs of engagement within activist and advocacy work? How can my own affective experiences offer something of theoretical value to the people with whom I attempt to communicate?

As I edited the choral sculpture, these questions lingered. I realized I could not afford a pat resolution in the piece if it was to reflect my personal construct of ethical investment in social justice via radical empathy and self-knowledge. The last part of the audio track was a presentation of the Auden/Kocher hymn, and, in the first iteration, I made it an intimate communal rendering of individual voices singing “together” through technological means. The second iteration centered around a solo soprano, with interruptions of inhibited voice from earlier in the piece invading around the tune. And the third, final presentation was of the choir, together again, but both clarified and warped—with cleaner ending consonants and better-synchronized movement, but under a disturbing old-time-radio-esque filter that made the group sound distant, disengaged. Auden’s words seemed to denote a certain self-satisfaction, particularly in the pedagogical suggestion that we could “teach the free man how to praise.” Ending the piece in this way was my attempt at an admission that I was so far away from experiences of incarceration that my investment in public advocacy needed to be self-aware enough to avoid self-righteousness. I tried to create an ending to the piece that served as a reminder to never feel as if activist work is “done,” and to avoid feeling as if one’s role in changing cultural-political landscapes is universally that of “underdog” (as I had felt in the classroom) or “advocate” (as I hoped to be in working with The Choral Commons). But these reminders were “notes to self,” red strings implicitly tied to my fingers as aides-memoires. What did it mean that I, as curator of this piece, was highly invested in corralling my own motives and experiences?

I’ve been encouraged, as a writer, to believe that my scholarly “voice” is best served when I offer some kind of final “take,” a denouement that cleverly uses language to wrap up the argumentative threads and theoretical through-lines. I’m beginning to distrust that, as it offers self-satisfaction antithetical to continual renegotiation and cyclic questioning. I would like to find a way to avoid finishing this reflection with its own circumscribed resolution. This aesthetic-ethical realm should be boggy, shifting, dangerous, and difficult to traverse. Thinking through the questions inherent should be a constant job, and should inform future decision making, instigate deeper community connection, compel gratitude and grace, and, most of all, subvert ego and ill-temperament. [10] As we work toward a more equitable and kind world, the necessary adjustments to our thought processes, cultural understandings, and community engagements will constantly change—which means we need to change with them. “Teach the free man how to praise” ultimately could mean embracing a more questioning and examined life, rather than relying on emphatic justification of an unchanging self. Or perhaps I should not articulate what the piece “means” when released from my own subjectivity. Perhaps I should accept the ethical responsibility of voicing without the privilege of maintaining an aesthetic meaning after the piece has been shared with others, as I simply cannot know how the piece will reflect their own divergent experiences. Perhaps my residual memory of making “You/Don’t/Say” should only lead to more recriminations and questions, chanted in cyclic meditation in the desert of my heart.

Acknowledgements

 Composer and Voices 21C founding member Michael Genese was instrumental in helping me to formulate and edit “You/Don’t/Say.” His thoughtful response to this essay has also been invaluable—he drew my attention to Zadie Smith’s “Suffering Like Mel Gibson,” and offered generous encouragement as I developed this conflicted reflection on activism and advocacy.

Notes:

References

Hahn, Tomie. 2006. “‘It’s the RUSH’: Sites of the Sensually Extreme.” TDR: The Drama Review 50 (2): 87–96.

———. 2021. “Troubling Failure(s): Situating Bodies in Research and Art.” AMS Committee on Women and Gender Endowed Lecture at the 2021 American Musicological Society Annual Meeting (online).

Meizel, Katherine. 2020. Multivocality: Singing on the Borders of Identity. London: Oxford University Press.

Smith, Zadie. 2020. “Suffering Like Mel Gibson.” In Intimations: Six Essays, 29–36. New York: Penguin Books.