Covocation Address

Covocation Address - Simon's Rock College - Great Barrington, MA

Sounds of Invitation, Sounds of Liberation

On behalf of my colleagues, I would like to invite you to this celebration of our 40th Academic Year, which is now in full swing. I would also like to invite you to participate in a kind of sonic journey, which has parallels with our academic journeys at Simon’s Rock.

Our journey begins with the Writing and Thinking Workshop, the first landmark in our General Education curriculum. The faculty always precede the workshop with an intensive training period of our own, in which we subject ourselves to the same techniques and exercises that we will share with our students.

It is the second day of our faculty training. My colleague Joan DelPlato, who as Coordinator of the Workshop models the role of a workshop instructor, has just invited us to write a response to some visual symbols we have drawn. As we put our minds and pens and pencils to work, Joan starts to write some announcements on the board for us. I briefly close my eyes to frame a thought or two, and hear her confident strokes of chalk on slate - a decisive impact followed by a smooth, softer sound of friction – Suddenly, the sound reminds me of the sound of brushes on a snare drum - evoking a musical response. Both sounds are full of meaning for me, because I regard both the drummer’s brushes and my colleague’s chalk board strokes as friendly invitations to express myself.

In the parlance of Writing and Thinking Workshop, we refer to this kind of invitation as a “prompt” – we are asked to write a response to a line of text, an idea, a concept, or even an image or piece of music. These prompts often grow into extended pieces, taking on a life of their own; sometimes expanding through other techniques and evolving into Senior Thesis projects, or even Convocation Speeches!

Elizabeth Blodgett Hall offered an invitation to the first Simon’s Rock students 40 years ago. A good invitation has to convey strength and confidence. She could have told these students, much as we do today, that you will be supported if you respond to our invitation, to step outside conventional expectations and start inserting your own ideas in between the lines of the material that we share with you. This is something that musicians have done for centuries, in a process known as trope-ing. An existing fragment of melody, such as the last few notes of a Gregorian chant, might be extended and stretched out, forming the foundation for a faster moving melody layered on top of it. Eventually, great polyphonic masterpieces emerged. Centuries later, American jazz musicians began elaborating on simple popular tunes, inserting structures of such beauty that their new melodies and improvisations took on a life of their own, and came to be regarded as works of art. Then these structures could in turn be elaborated upon by new generations of musicians. The result is much like the geometric progression of fractals, and it is potentially infinite.

From the perspective of someone who makes music, I can affirm that this is an intensely satisfying, even joyful process. And some of the stories that you may have heard about musicians being seekers and givers of pleasure – are true. But it’s not the pleasure of immediate gratification. Rather it’s the pleasure of transcendence that can only come from complete immersion, eagerly embracing the hours; the hours turning into years, the years turning into a lifetime. This quest for ecstasy often follows a vector that extends between boredom on one hand and the stress of too much challenge, on the other hand. The vector extends between redundancy, when the rules of a symbolic system are followed too blatantly, and chaos, when expression occurs within no recognizable framework.

Transcendence of a symbolic system requires mastery of a symbolic system. But very few of us can remember the exact moments when we first made the connection between a sound and a symbol, the moments when we began to acquire our first spoken language. When my daughter Lisa spoke her first words, there was no clear division between the symbolic and expressive dimensions. Now, I hear her discussing abstract topics with her fellow Seniors at Simon’s Rock, and both dimensions are clear. In a sense, all verbal communication is the sound of invitation, and we often forget to notice the musical qualities of the sounds we make as we speak. Only when we hear an unfamiliar language can we appreciate its qualities with the innocent ears of a musician.

At the highest levels of musicianship, we find that practitioners become especially interested in inflections, the subtleties of tone, and structures so minute that it becomes hard to describe them. Indeed, as we turn to the world of science and metering tools in order to understand the complex, constantly shifting energies of the overtone series, we find that each human being is already in possession of a unique voice - as unique as a fingerprint. To verify this, one only needs to make a phone call to a close friend or family member - your voice will immediately be recognized - millions of years of natural selection has made sure that you won’t have to waste a lot of time explaining who you are. Even if our voices are already unique at the biological level, musicians often try to cultivate and extend that uniqueness into the artistic domain. “To find one’s own voice” is a shared goal of many in the arts and humanities. Extending the musical metaphor to Simon’s Rock, we can say that here, we aspire to nurture not just the strength of each voice, but the uniqueness of each voice.

Awareness of sound is not just a channel for symbolic communication, but also for communication on an even deeper level. In the practice and experience of time-based art forms such as music, dance and theater, there is a phenomenon known as entrainment. This word is used to describe the way in which our heartbeats and other biorhythms tend to align themselves with an audible pulse. Ethnomusicologist John Blacking, when staying for a time with the Venda people in South Africa, was amazed to learn that all members of this society, including children, seemed able to stay in tempo while playing seemingly complex rhythms, without requiring the presence of a coordinating musician to beat out the time for them. Inspired by their ability to regulate themselves, Blacking described this shared ability as an “invisible conductor,” a metaphor for the shared perception of absolute time. This shared perception, affirming our presence in the world together, and making it possible for us to regulate ourselves without the need for an external authority, has profound political implications. At the very least, as with voice prints, it tells us that rhythmic synchronicity is not the exclusive domain of professional musicians.

Our curriculum includes voices of tradition and even offers the experience of multiple traditions, or multiple canons. But we also present the challenges to those traditions. This inevitably leads to tension. The musical term for tension, “dissonance” is often used in other contexts, and it is not uncommon to speak of social dissonance. As our first-year Seminar members can tell us, the root prefix, “Dis” was used by Dante to name a level of Hell reserved for those who consciously rejected the love of God. Musicians, however, spend our whole lives working with dissonance and consonance, tension and release. We find that a certain amount of dissonance is healthy. Many musicians have found that in order to reflect the complexity and tension of our modern experience, we need to use a broader range of materials, including those that might sound very dissonant to the uninitiated.

As subjective as the perception of dissonance might be, people have found that applying just the right amount of tension can create the conditions for harmony. Plato once suggested that the human soul could be tuned just like the strings of a lyre. While Plato was speaking of the benefits of internal tension for the individual, the same could be said of societies. Creating a safe space for people to present opposing views, while maintaining cordiality and the balance of power, is a delicate task. In musical terms, the jazz soloist has continuous interactions with accompanying musicians, with other soloists, and with the audience, so that the tension of being able to respond and yet at the same time keep track of one's own musical intentions becomes very challenging. The connections of jazz with democracy are well recognized, and most likely have something to do with the “invisible conductor” concept mentioned earlier. True democracy should be a constant challenge, and include the promise to be increasingly more responsive, not just a smug assertion that we are the best, and that others should imitate us. For me, teaching improvisation is much like teaching Seminar classes, encouraging people to speak and share their ideas, to express themselves clearly and decisively. The medium is different, but the process is very similar.

40 years ago, when Simon’s Rock was born – the Cold War was in its second decade, and the Vietnam war was intensifying. The Civil Rights struggle had exposed the ideological hypocrisy that infected the very heart of our nation, and many young people were starting to question the basis of all authority, in any form. According to all accounts, Betty Hall was very patient with her first students, even when they questioned her own authority. The youth of that period, including some of my colleagues here today, were eager and hopeful participants in movements for change. Some of us even had the arrogance to think that we could create our own culture. I would like to think that we are changing the world, in slower but more profound ways, by teaching at an institution like Simon’s Rock. But maybe we don’t want to change things too slowly. Now, 40 years after Simon’s Rock was founded, progress on many social fronts has stagnated or even atrophied. We are in the midst of another contentious war. Eli Pariser, a relatively recent Simon’s Rock graduate, is standing up to challenge the authorities of this day and age. His organization frequently sends me e-mails in his name, reminding me to vote, and asking for my help in various activities. I don’t mind.

Although Betty Hall passed away last year, new visionaries have come forward, to generously and patiently contribute their resources, so that Simon’s Rock, a great experiment in higher education, will not lose even a single beat in the great jam session of academe.

Hopefully the sounds that I make today, inviting all of us to reach beyond ourselves, but also deep inside ourselves, and echoing Betty Hall’s first invitation of 40 years ago, will evoke responses from those here today, especially from our students. This is what we hope for; that the sounds of invitation will evoke the sounds of liberation.