In my view, my side gig as a musician took off when I was 5 years old. That’s when my big brother, who was 14, taught me to confidently sing “A Teenager’s Romance,” Ricky Nelson’s big hit of 1957 – which I performed before a captive audience of about three dozen at the annual family reunion. I must’ve killed it, because after that, I considered myself a singer. And as devotedly wedded as I have been to my journalism career, music has remained my tender passion.
So I found myself recently once again on a stage, performing a great work of choral music in the fine ensemble that has been my musical home for 23 seasons, Albany Pro Musica. There’s something that choral singers know, and so do actors in a stage ensemble, or people playing on a softball or a basketball team – and it’s something important for all of us in a society to understand: It’s that individual success doesn’t necessarily improve the whole.
Great soloists often detract from the musicality of an ensemble, which requires the blending of voices to create a whole sound. And our individual performances are secondary to the music itself. A good choral singer knows that hearing other singers is key to the music-making — that the ears are as much a part of musicianship as the voice.
This, by the way, is my favorite argument for the value of teaching music in our schools. While a child who sings a solo at a holiday concert gets to feel a sense of personal achievement, everybody in an ensemble learns the satisfaction that comes from joining together to make something of beauty. It is the opposite of the training in selfishness that seems nowadays to bombard us all — children and adults alike — in the guise of advocacy for individual rights. And you see that all the time in matters that overtake public dialogue.
Consider last year’s hullabaloo over gas stoves. No, the federal government has not proposed banning them – despite the outcry you heard from the right wing: you know, “Biden’s coming for your stove!” Not true. Yes, New York State did put in place a regulation that will eventually stop new gas appliances in homes. That’s because we need to control carbon emissions to fight disastrous climate change – and, also, the blue flame from gas burners in homes and restaurants emits benzene, which is linked to cancer.
But, you know, how important are cancer and climate change compared to the right of individuals to cook their supper however they want? (You don’t have to answer that.)
You would think that with the effects of human-induced climate change apparent all around us, there would be some greater recognition of our responsibility to do what we can to change course. Yet plenty of politicians eagerly fire up voters with warnings that fighting climate change puts their freedom at risk, suggesting that personal freedoms like choosing what kind of a stove you buy are more important than any peril that we may all share.
So many successful politicians have emerged as so fully self-absorbed, that we’ve all but lost the sense of shared responsibility across partisan divides for the good of us all.
Nobody better exemplifies this reality, of course, than Donald Trump, who is surely the most selfish figure in American political history. His appeal is based on making people feel that they have been victimized, so that nothing is more important than getting what they want. His lie about the 2020 election, repeated often enough that it has persuaded most Republican voters, is destroying faith in democracy — though that clearly troubles him not at all in comparison to his demand for glory.
Yet governing is a shared experience, in the sense that in voting for our leaders, we assume the power to create our own government. And our government exists to care for the needs of all the citizens, not to stand aside as either individuals or special interests take whatever their might enables. There’s a great point made by Robert Kennedy – the father, that is, not the self-absorbed guy now running for president. RFK said, “Government belongs wherever evil needs an adversary, and there are people in distress.”
Society is like a musical ensemble, really. We each need to play or sing our part for the good of the whole, creating great music — or a just society – that inspires and sustains us all. No more than choruses want singers who are loud and off-key, we don’t need public figures who intentionally sound discordant notes or assume that everybody has gathered in the hall to admire them. Our audience assembles to share the inspiration. There’s nothing selfish about any part of that.
Sometimes I think of America as being something of a great chorus, with many different voices creating a glorious whole. But just now the voices sticking out are hard to tolerate, and we are straining to hear the sweeter notes.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
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