Contributors: Makoto Fujimura & Jacob Beaird
Heading image: Thomas Webster, A Village Choir, 1847. Oil on Panel. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
A Note from IAMCultureCare
This month, Makoto Fujimura writes below in his regular column on the proven health benefits that come from Culture Care participation in the arts, exemplified by singing in choirs. I pick up the topic of choral music from Mako for a Culture Care soundbite, exploring relationality, extravagance, and expression within this music and art more generally. Finally, be sure to read the Culture Care Events section for an exciting announcement regarding the 15th anniversary edition of Mako’s book Refractions. We’d love to have you join us!
Jacob Beaird, editor
A Note from Makoto Fujimura, Founder of IAMCultureCare
In recent times, an abundance of data on how participation in the arts has direct health benefits have come in. Especially with the advancement in the technology of fMRI machines, we have far clearer data on what exactly happens to our brains and how the arts help to develop “neuroplasticity”. When I was a National Council on the Arts member, a team from The George Washington University reported on their longitudinal, ten-year study on the effect of choir participation in the elderly. The study had hypothesized that those who participated in a choir would have better health and lower death rates. And when they tracked a group of elderly choir members in the D.C. area…? Well, what they found was that NO ONE from the study died during that 10-year period! That’s pretty good evidence of the effect of choir participation on your health.
In her book Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us, neuroscientist Susan Magsamen reflects on her leadership of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University. Yes, they are also called “IAM”, and appropriately so as they do remarkable culture care work (of course, no official affiliation with us) to bring together the most recent research on how the arts affect the brain. She writes:
Research shows us that arts engagement increases our longevity. Living longer is one thing. Living fully and well over the course of your life is another.
It is to this latter statement — “Living fully and well” — that the Culture Care movement is dedicated to. This summer, let’s create and make. Let’s take full advantage of the opportunities that our communities and churches give us to participate in the arts. Whether that is joining a choir, making bread, or (if you are a visual artist) going back to the painting that you have not worked on for a while, the arts awaken our sense of being and attention to the world around us. The arts help us to see, hear, and taste well, for our hearts to be moved by the “minute particulars” (William Blake) of the complex mysteries of our days. Let’s also create Culture Care gatherings to regularly encourage each other in such attentiveness that “living fully and well” requires.
IAMCultureCare is posting regular “#CultureCare is…” statements on Twitter/X and Instagram. Send us yours! Here are some recent samplings:
#CultureCare is to live out our #kintsugi lives, and to create communities of vulnerable beholding.
#CultureCare is to be amazed at a transformation of an artist.
#CultureCare is to deposit into our fallen world beauty spilling over from Eden.
#CultureCare is to weep and pray.
Culture Care Soundbite: Sound & Substance
By Jacob Beaird
If Culture Care is “living fully and well” through engagement with the arts – and choral music in particular, as Mako has observed above – then it’s worth exploring why and how that plays out in this musical context. I see this happening in three interrelated ways that we’ll address in turn: relationality, extravagance, and expression. And while these attributes may not all be unique to choral music compared to the arts generally, the combination and execution of them within this music is especially profound.
First, relationality. It’s worth noting at the outset that while I use the term “choral music”, I use it not stylistically to describe a genre, but rather technically to describe music sung by a group of singers. Choral music is music that is, well, choral. The style and context can range from folk music, protest songs, liturgical music, spirituals, and Western Classical art music (to name a few examples), but choral music must involve a community of voices that together create something bigger than any one individual. It is therefore relational, and it has always been the music of the masses. I think it’s fair to say that singing traditions can be more inclusive (anyone can sing), context-agnostic (singing can happen equally at work as in the concert hall), and therefore communally formative than instrumental music traditions. Historically, this community-driven nature allowed choral music to transcend some of the codification of the Western classical tradition arising from enlightenment ideals of a leisure class listening to music, rather than corporately making it. Strains of choral music kept that communal element alive into contemporary times, such as in Shape Note singing in the eastern and southern United States (one of the oldest forms of “American” music), as well as folk traditions around the world.
Yet, while a song’s social context matters (and indeed, can inform its meaning), the form doesn’t follow function. By and large, the most well-beloved music is extravagantly pleasurable to hear and sing. People did not have to make beautiful music to make useful music, and yet again and again we find beauty that transcends any particular social context. This is often most explicit in sacred music, where the function (liturgy) is only equally important if not second to the form. Sacred music is an extravagant response on the part of composer and singers to an experience of transcendence. But this extravagance is not limited to faith context (many secular choirs exclusively sing sacred music simply because it is beautiful rather than out of devotion), or musical context (not all beautiful choral music is sacred). It’s also important to note that this is an extravagance not only of quality but also of quantity: a natural response to beauty is to generatively create more beauty (see Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just). Whether or not I perform or sit in the audience, I usually leave a beautiful concert unable to stop humming or singing for hours afterward. Beauty gives birth to more beauty in an abundant, virtuous cycle.
Finally, along with being relational and extravagant, choral music is uniquely expressive. Unlike instrumental music, the sound is a vehicle for text, and when paired, the two serve to elucidate and exegete fresh meaning into each other. When James MacMillan was commissioned to compose his setting of the St. Luke Passion, he semi-controversially scored the voice of Christ with a youth girls’ choir rather than the traditional bass soloist. Yet in so doing he made a familiar text refreshingly unfamiliar, prompting new insights. This meaning-making is not unique to this example though. A beautiful text set to beautiful music creates one meaning, whereas an angry, or discordant, or another emotive instance of one paired with a different emotive instance of the other creates an entirely different message. Compare MacMillan to Schütz or Krzysztof Penderecki’s setting of the same text, and you come away with wildly different impressions. Further, this expression of text can also prompt relationality, as it intuitively suggests dramatic elements that can be cathartic for the community. The example of MacMillan’s youth choir is a dramatic choice as much as a musical one. Or, in Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles (a powerfully visceral depiction of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage), the composer writes staging into the score for the singers to physically journey around the concert hall in a musical pilgrimage, bringing the audience with them.
In choral music’s synthesis of relationality, extravagance, and expression, I see the gift economy of art (and Culture Care) at work. Singers are prompted by something external to themselves – whether an encounter with beauty or simply directions from a conductor – to gift sound that communicates to an audience (even if the audience is the singers themselves). This, in turn, prompts a reciprocal, relational response. I was privileged to be a part of an undergraduate choir which periodically sang concerts in prisons and homeless shelters. These concerts frequently ended with collaboration between the choir and these communities; they taught us their songs and we would sing and improvise on them together in a beautiful shared experience that left everyone misty-eyed. This was a generative, abundant, relational response to our musical offering that could not be planned for at the outset.
This generative cycle is also true of other performative arts, but for me, choral music uniquely marries abstract materials (sound) and concrete subject (text) in a multi-sensory and multi-epistemological way. The abstract is given significance and the concrete transcendence in an incarnate, somatic reality, as singers must enflesh a text in the act of song. And once the music and text are joined, it is difficult to separate the two; anyone who has listened to an instrumental cover version of a song understands that something is missing.
Ultimately though, this philosophical meandering is meaningless apart from the lived experience of the music itself. So, with Mako I encourage you to join a choir and make singing with others a regular part of your life. It’s not just a health benefit but a concrete way to live fully and well in the gift economy of Culture Care. Thomas Webster’s 1847 painting “A Village Choir” appearing in this newsletter’s heading is a bit of an antidotal mirror to this heady philosophical approach. I firmly believe in choral music’s power to move and transform. Sometimes, though, that happens not in a mountaintop experience of the transcendent but in the regular, simple act of singing with fellow (extra)ordinary humans. After all, it’s difficult to hate while creating beauty with and for others. May your music making spark abundance in your Culture Care corners of the world this July.
Culture Care Events
- Refractions 15th Anniversary Edition Virtual Event — August 6 at 3pm ET. Join Makoto Fujimura live on Zoom to celebrate the release of the 15th Anniversary Edition of Refractions. Mako will read new selections from the updated and expanded book of essays and host a time for Q&A and sharing what Refractions has meant to readers over the past 15 years. Sign up for the event, share your questions in advance, and get an exclusive 30% discount on pre-ordered copies by registering at the link above.
- Asian-American Abstraction Group Exhibit at Hollis Taggart Gallery — New York, NY, Now—September 5. Makoto Fujimura’s work is exhibited alongside historic and contemporary artists of the Asian-American diaspora.
- LAST CHANCE: Mysterion Makoto Fujimura Exhibit at The Galleries at First Pres — Greenville, SC, Now —July 25. Mini-retrospective of Makoto Fujimura’s works.
- Painters, Prophets, Poets Conference — Oklahoma City, OK, Oct 4 – 6. Makoto & Haejin Fujimura will speak alongside Beth Moore, Malcolm Guite & Miroslav Volf on creativity, imagination, culture, and New Creation.
Do you have a news item or upcoming culture care event? Consider sharing it with us for a possible feature here in the newsletter! Email jacob@internationalartsmovement.org.
Web Links
- June Belonging Conversation from Makoto Fujimura and Julia Hendrickson, on impermanence, bluebirds, and the prophetic nature of art.
- Can birds dream? New research suggests they can, from The New York Times.
- Jared Stacy (recent contributor here of an excellent 3‑part ethics of Culture Care series) writes about Dutch resistance theology as an antidote to political violence.
- AI, Kierkegaard, and self-erasure, from The Hedgehog Review.
- A possible antidote to that desire for self-erasure? Maria Popova turns to Albert Camus and the power of choosing presence, from The Marginalian.
- Stephen Proctor’s new book Wild Wonder is out in September, featuring a foreword from Makoto Fujimura.
- The ethics of thrifting are changing: in a world of ever-more consumption, donating junk can no longer be a therapeutic for our conscience, from Mockingbird.
- Ruth Naomi Floyd on music and Juneteenth. Floyd is an incredible musician, scholar & justice worker. Listen to two older but still fantastic interviews on “Music, Creativity & Justice” and her “Theology of the Blues”.
- Chinese bookstores turn to creative book placement as acts of political dissent, via Language Log and Alan Jacobs.
All content in this newsletter belongs to the respective creators, as noted, and is used with permission. If you would like to submit something for consideration in a future newsletter issue, you may do so by filling out this form or by emailing jacob@internationalartsmovement.org.