Is there something unique about music, and singing in particular, that can galvanize people?
All the arts can do that. Even cooking. For a long time we’ve been hosting meetings here at our home to help clean up the Hudson River. One day my wife said, “Don’t call it a meeting, call it a potluck supper.” After that, we went from having maybe a dozen people show up to 70 and more. Political and social change can be frustratingly incremental. Where do you find the motivation to keep working for it? The happiest people I’ve met were people who were struggling. They were happy because they were doing something. It makes me think of a great book by Paul Hawken called Blessed Unrest. He named it after a piece of advice that Martha Graham gave Agnes de Mille in 1926. Graham said, “All us artists are filled with a blessed unrest, trying to reach the infinite and never of course making it, but never giving up trying.” Are there issues you have advocated for that you later came to reconsider? Well, I was a member of the Communist Party. I first became interested in politics when I was a s
