Repair the World
The following was given as the graduation address for the University of North Texas College of Music in May 2015. I hope there is something in this address that strikes a positive, motivating chord within you. But, also please be aware that this writing is copyrighted and portions of this address will be included in my new book, Becoming the Choral Poet, to be published in 2020 by GIA Music Publishers.
Repair the World
Dr. Jerry McCoy, © May 15, 2015
Good Afternoon! What an afternoon it is! What a moment this is for you and your families, your friends, your colleagues, and your teachers. What a thrill of accomplishment: the payoff of all those long hours of practice and study, the expectation of going out into the world to make your mark. Wow, what a feeling! No more cramming sessions for that next exam. No more overnight writing when you’re too tired to think. No more moments of panic like the one during your voice recital when you forgot the words to the aria and made up an Italian sounding phrase only to learn later from your teacher that you sang about making love to a chair!!
You are not alone. All of your teachers remember their own moments like these.
For at least the time being there are no tests, no papers, no juries. Savor the moment!
Okay, so now that you’ve savored that moment, what’s next? What will your mark on the world be? How will you use what you have learned here at UNT to change the lives of those around you?
Perhaps one of the first elements of changing lives is to find your own contentment. This question of how to achieve contentment has been at the core of human life for centuries.
The 13th century Sufi poet Jalal-ud-din Muhammed Rumi wrote:
Today, like every day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and start reading. Take
down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what
we do…
Rumi’s final line lies at the heart of a musician’s, of an artist’s hope for success. “Let the beauty we love be what we do…”
Craig Hella Johnson, the GRAMMY Award winning conductor of Conspirare, a professional chamber choir based in Austin, served one summer as guest lecturer for our graduate choral techniques class here at UNT. In one of his sessions, he shared his keys to success and personal contentment in life. Craig taught the class these four principles:
Show up (on time),
Be prepared,
Do your very best, and
Don’t be tied to the outcome.
If you follow these principles, you can find contentment and inner peace, and you can then share that contentment with a world that sorely needs it. You will pass on to others ‘the love of what you do.’ Love of life; love of people; love of your art form; love of beauty, peace, and community are indeed contagious.
Another element of making one’s mark on the world is perseverance.
We all need to know that the path to happiness isn’t the same for everyone. There isn’t just one way to get from point A to point B and beyond. For instance, during his senior year of college a young man dropped out of school in order to play in a rock-and-roll band on the west coast. As it turned out, needing to establish more secure financial support for his family, he eventually left the band and went to work for the US post office back home in Texas.
After the first year of a ‘real job,’ his yen for the studies he’d left behind began to grow and crystallize. So, he went back to school in order to complete his music-ed. degree while working a 40+-hour week at the post office. But, the personal training life had in store for this young person was not yet complete. During one music education class, he was told by the professor that he should do something else with his life; that he ‘just didn’t have what it takes.’ Well, the young man took the teacher’s advice and within the year had dropped the dream of being a choir director for a second time.
As it often does, life slowly but surely led him back to what he was supposed to be, what he was born to be: a teacher and an artist. The young man eventually completed his teacher certification and ultimately left the postal service after seven years to pursue his graduate degrees in choral conducting at UT Austin. With the help of a lot of people and a good dose of perseverance, that young man stands before you having spent more than thirty-six years as a successful university choral conductor, eventually developing and leading one of America’s foremost university choral programs, in addition to leading festival, all-state, university, and professional choirs and giving lectures and master classes in thirty-nine US states and twelve foreign countries. But then, ‘he didn’t have what it takes.’
The lesson is: the road toward attaining one’s dreams is not the same for everyone. But if you listen to your heart, you too can persevere.
But what do you do when you deeply want something and life seems to shout a resounding, ‘It cannot be done!’
Let me tell you another short story: In 2001 my wife and I founded a professional chamber choir in Dallas, the Texas Choral Artists. When talking with friends and colleagues about this dream, I was often told that ‘it couldn’t be done.’ On a day following one of those disheartening conversations, my wife presented me with a card that still hangs over my desk at home. The card cites a Chinese proverb that says:
Those who say it cannot be done shouldn’t interrupt the person doing it.
Our professional chamber choir survived for six full seasons, receiving some lovely reviews and an invitation to sing for the state meeting of the Texas Choral Directors Association in San Antonio. As both our careers took off here in Texas and across the US and abroad, my wife and I couldn't sustain our performance and teaching careers while maintaining the choir. So, we ended the choir’s run with a performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass. Later that December, our Bach performance was listed by the Fort Worth Star Telegram as one of the top three classical music performances of the year. The choir indeed changed more than a few lives. But then again, ‘It couldn’t be done!’
What is the mark an educated person should aspire to make on the world, even a person whose path is perhaps complex and difficult? What is the real calling, the real responsibility of an educated artist?
Consider this: In Judaism, there is a form of rabbinic literature called a midrash. One midrash, written in the 16th century by Rabbi Isaac Luria of Mashed, speaks of the fracturing of certain vessels which held God’s light at the time of the world’s creation. When the vessels broke from the power and intensity of the light held within them, the shards of God’s primordial light were spilled across the world. The story tell us that until the shards of God’s light have been gathered together again, the task of creation will not be complete. The Jews call the gathering together of the shards of God’s light Tikun Olam: Repair of the World.
Few careers are so well suited to even the momentary changing of a life than is a career in music. Whether we teach, perform, or compose, we are life changers, which, of course is the real definition of an artist. Our role is the creation of beauty, the creation of what the author Frederick Beuchner calls ‘the reality beyond time.’ It is to join the thousand-year old song of our ancestors, our idols, our heroes.
Our participatory art form is the largest and in many ways the most influential in the world. In its myriad manifestations we have the opportunity to shape personal and national character, to enhance communal ethics, to deepen worship experiences, to stoke the fires of creativity and self-expression, to heal and elate, to sing into existence a world of unity, justice, and hope.
You have achieved a hugely important step toward attaining your dreams, toward attaining the keys that will enable you to ‘repair the world’ in whatever manner life affords you. What you have learned here --whether it was playing, or singing, or composing, or the concepts of study, responsibility, and creativity --is an invitation to ‘repair the world.’
The university degree you now hold is your passport to change.
Music is your chosen tool for this task. It is your language, your palette and your clay; the stone from which the shape emerges. It is the expression of your soul’s need to affirm its being, its place –its need to create and to belong, its need to deepen humankind’s spirituality.
I came across the following passage in Ian MacEwan’s book titled Saturday:
There are these rare moments when musicians together touch
something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals
or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically
proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful
as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what
we might be, (a glimpse) of our best selves, and (a glimpse) of an
impossible world in which you give everything you have to others,
but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist
detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceful realms, all conflicts
resolved, happiness for everyone, forever-mirages for which people
are prepared to die and kill… But only in music, and only on rare
occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community,
and it is tantalizingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes.
What a beautiful thought this is. But, I disagree with one aspect of MacEwan’s excerpt and that is the frequency at which this dream of community actually happens. I don’t find it to be a rarity at all. I believe it happens in thousands of schools and churches and synagogues, and in band, orchestra, choir, opera, and jazz rehearsals and concerts… daily.
Thus believing, I read MacEwan’s passage as a personal and moral charge for musicians, teachers, artists. Our inborn duty to create community in the world should inspire us, indeed require us to work at a deeper, more committed level than some others. Our expressive artistry is a profound gift and ‘to whom much is given, much is required.’
So, when you grow weary of the rehearsals or the personal practice or the study or the fund raising or the paper work or the day-long, emotionally and physically draining schedules we maintain, I hope you will always recall today’s youthful eagerness and remember this charge: Love what you do, persevere, repair the world, and let no one tell you ‘it cannot be done!’