You Our Music

Performed by Ember Choral Arts. (recording not yet available)

You our music. You are music. You’re music. Your music. Our music.

There’s something that has always fascinated me about the connections we build with each other while making music, especially with elements of improvisation. It feels like a celebration of a powerful and profoundly human relationship: listening to each other, learning from each other, and responding to each other, with everyone bringing their own unique voices into a choir of musical interplay.

A crowd of people stand together in a room, all talking to each other. One person from far away approaches the crowd, bringing a lone voice of song into the rustling of spoken voices. They proclaim to the crowd “yours is the music”, reaching out for them to join in. However, the crowd responds only by briefly congealing into a whispered chant, parroting the words of the lone singer back at them. It is only through the act of direct connection – in this case physical touch (putting their hand on the shoulder of one of the singers) – that the melody of the soloist travels to a singer in the chorus. One by one, through touch, the music spreads through the crowd of whisperers, growing in intensity and complexity, as the offer of “yours is the music” and the command “sing” finally culminate in the crowd becoming a choir: “ours is the music”. We connect and join together in the act of music making: listening, watching, reacting, and responding to one another in a cascade of real-time interplay between conductor and chorus.