A choir is a musical ensemble of individuals singing in unison; different voices that together form a single, yet non-homogeneous voice. Many cultures boast historical choral traditions. One of the earliest forms of choir known in Western culture is the Greek chorus. It evolved, in fact, as part of a religious ceremony which celebrated man’s place in the universe, but most of us are familiar with its later manifestation, as a group of actors-singers playing a key role in Greek tragedy. Already then, the chorus held political power by virtue of its momentous role as mediator between the actors and the audience, between the live human drama taking place on stage (praxis) and the eternal myth underlying the tragedy. It illustrated a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints within a hierarchical civil structure, and reflected the meaning of being a citizen to the audience: the audience watched the actors, but at the same time – was observed by the chorus that addressed it directly, and remembered that it, too, was a part of the same political sphere in which the protagonists operate.
The chorus is the voice of the writer, and simultaneously – the voice of the people; an entity that represents law and order, and at the same time indicates the possibility of their violation. It thus constitutes a communal space. The audience experiences the characters’ deeds in a manner which creates a sense of responsibility and renders the other present, not via representation, but through identification and understanding, by way of solidarity. Hence, it is not surprising that choirs have played a major role in demonstrations and protests wherever processes of political change have shown themselves recently. Through the performative occurrence defining them, they call for solidarity, since they operate as a single body, yet make oom for the individual voice within the crowd. They discuss specific local occurrences, yet call for collective responsibility that goes beyond geographical, religious, or ethnic boundaries.
Choirs have evolved in different ways throughout Western history, and have, in many instances, tried to generate unification rather than encouraging a democratic multiplicity of voices. Church choirs served as a vehicle for religious elevation which prompts obedience to religious laws, while in Communist countries, singing was an important instrument for identification with the values of the regime. Workers’ choirs were used to raise morale and to create a professional “esprit de corps,” which would dull the mundane difficulties and social gaps. In Israel, for instance, singing groups and military choirs fostered identification with the values of Zionism, primarily – the motif of sacrificing oneself for the state. Concurrently, from Brecht’s epic theater through cinematic musicals, choirs were also used in a manner reminiscent of the self-reflexive complexity of the Greek chorus. Such choirs produce estrangement and defamiliarization, deviating from the dimension of illusion and fantasy, and calling for critical observation; they suspend the everyday to raise questions about the human condition.
In his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali observes that musical structures typical of a given time and place can anticipate and prophesy historical and political developments. They not only reflect the social formations of their time, as maintained by Theodor Adorno and Max Weber before him; the reciprocal relation etween music and political events can foreshadow future occurrences. It can indicate new, liberating modes of production, while introducing a dystopian possibility which is a mirror image of that ]emancipation.[1
The works in Preaching to the Choir juxtapose representations of the individual with perceptions of the collective in various Socialist traditions. Some of them attest to the transformation of these concepts following the collapse of the Communist bloc and the disillusionment with the utopian view of cooperative life. At the same time, the works reflect the current crisis of Western capitalism, which extols individuality, but in view of the uncontrollable expansion of globalism and the growing economic gaps, in fact flattened and trampled the individual. Both these political structures – communism and capitalism, with all their differences and nuances – ]erase the distinctions between the unique entities comprising society.[2
If we adopt Attali’s model to examine the return of choirs to contemporary culture and art as a phenomenon that links the artistic-aesthetic with activist-political spheres, we may regard choirs as the harbingers of a new social structure; that structure was to arise from the protests we have witnessed in recent years, and from their artistic manifestations; a structure which does not rely on the nation state, but rather, creates solidarity between different nations; a formation which is neither communist nor capitalistic, but rather indicates a new type of collectivism (one which binds togetherness and individuality into a whole greater than the sum of its parts). At the same time, some of the works echo the dystopian possibility, whereby inequality, economic gaps, and distorted power relations encumber civil solidarity, and in which the choir serves as an instrument for brainwashing and deepening the gaps. By virtue of singing it is possible to produce a democratic public sphere of negotiation, but at the same time – it may also give rise to a tyrannical space of despotism.[3] The works convey the dual potential at the choir’s core: on the one hand, it reflects the luring power innate to a manifestation of uniformity; on the other hand, it enables imagining a new, more democratic political system.
The artists’ work with choirs is, essentially, work with communities which may be ascribed to the genre of participatory artworks. The artists furnish an artistic platform that spawns a joint narrative through the combination of different voices. This is not, however, a utopian or harmonious experience, but rather a negotiation of differences that reflects the difficulty in creating a solidary community unanimous with regard to its goals. The artists address their process reflexively, externalizing their role as outside onlookers, as participants, or as disruptive foreigners.
[1] See: Fredric Jameson, “Foreword,” in Jacques Attali,Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 10.
[2] Attali, ibid., p. 17: “No organized society can exist without structuring differences at its core. No market economy can develop without erasing those differences in mass production. The selfdestruction of capitalism lies in this contradiction, in the fact that music leads a deafening life: an instrument of differentiation, it has become a locus of repetition.”
[3] Interestingly, Attali’s text was written in 1985, several years before the collapse of the Communist bloc. Since then, the countries of the bloc have absorbed capitalistic influences; today some of them tend toward totalitarianism, and power is concentrated in the hands of small nationalistic interest groups. Israel too, a state with a socialist-idealistic past, shows signs of totalitarianism in a hyper-capitalistic system of privatization.
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