Does the fact that leadership may make unusual demands on people require that leaders be unusual people?
On the two occasions that I took employment in West Africa, I had the good fortune to meet a man who, through motives of faith and the joy of music making, established a choir and chamber orchestra at the university where he taught. His purpose was mostly to rehearse extracts from Handel’s Messiah that could then be performed in concert and on important occasions. The man, who was a professor of geology the rest of the time, also founded a children’s choir. In all cases he took a certain amount of heat. Local people didn’t believe that children could be taught to sing together and in harmony, and learned colleagues regarded European choral music as an expression of the old colonial cultural invasion that should be resisted rather than embraced. The geology professor, however, was a non-confrontational man who prevailed despite this opposition. The members of the choir were students who shared the same purpose, and the orchestra, aside from him on first violin and me on viola, was made
