Guest article (repinted with permission from Editor Bill Ross, "Melisma," newsletter of the North Central Division of ACDA)

Sing Me a Home
A Collaboration with Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity
Larry Fuchsberg,
Minnesota Chorale & St. Olaf Church, Minneapolis

Home—its pleasures, its elusiveness, its fragility—has been a subject of song for hundreds of years. There’s no shortage of music that probes the emotions associated with home and with the closely related themes of family, safety, and community. Some of that music, created in places from Aruba to Zimbabwe, was heard in the course of the Minnesota Chorale’s 2006-07 Bridges community program, Sing Me a Home. But we wanted to do more than present selections from the existing choral repertoire. We wanted to sing the stories of our neighbors—to meet a representative group of families living in homes built by Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity, to listen to their experiences, and then to set those experiences to music, powerfully and memorably, for others to hear. We also wanted these new songs to have a life after their initial performances, to circulate and resonate in our own community and beyond.

To do this, we first asked our friends at Twin Cities Habitat to connect us with several of their homeowner families. These families were interviewed on tape by Chorale Artistic Director Kathy Saltzman Romey, assisted by a Habitat volunteer. (Romey devoted much of a sabbatical leave from the University of Minnesota to her work on this project.) Transcripts of these conversations were provided to selected students at the four urban high schools most closely involved in the Chorale’s Full Voice education program.

Under the guidance of poet-teacher Heid Erdrich, these students wrote poems and prose based on the families’ stories. Their words, in turn, were set to music by four of Minnesota’s most accomplished composers: Jerry Rubino, William Banfield, Abbie Betinis, and David Evan Thomas. The resulting songs were premiered on May 19, 2007, in a program for the St. Olaf Worship and Sacred Music Series at St. Olaf Catholic Church in downtown Minneapolis by the choirs of the participating high schools: South and Patrick Henry High Schools in Minneapolis, and Central and Como Park High Schools in St. Paul. St. Olaf’s organist, Dr. Lynn Trapp, Director of Worship/Music, Organist/Pianist at St. Olaf Church, served as accompanist; the schools’ choirs were conducted by their own directors. Pertinent images were projected on a screen above the performers.

A fifth new song titled “Sing Me a Home,” with text by Ms. Erdrich and music by former Chorale composer-in-residence Janika Vandervelde, served to knit together the program’s many threads; it was sung at the conclusion of the concert by the combined high school choirs and the Chorale, all under the direction of Ms. Romey.

Media coverage of the event included a broadcast piece by Minnesota Public Radio’s Karl Gehrke that recounted the story of Mohamed Dahir Hadi, a Somali émigré. Hadi lives with his family in a Habitat-built house in St. Paul; their story was the basis of the song “Here We Can Dream,” by Anne Goetz and David Evan Thomas. Gehrke’s piece is archived, with photographs, at mpr.org, and may also be accessed from the Chorale’s web site (mnchorale.org).

Following the conclusion of the program, the members of the high school choirs and the Chorale’s 270 singers (most of whom conduct, sing in other choirs, or teach music) were urged by Kathy Romey to function as advocates for the new songs, carrying them back to their respective communities, teaching them to friends and colleagues, and arranging performances at local Habitat dedications and similar events. (To facilitate this effort, the composers have all prepared simplified, downloadable versions of their pieces, available for performance without payment of royalties.) We expect that the ripple effect produced by these multiple acts of singer advocacy will be powerful and sustained, reaching into lives we could not otherwise touch.

The Chorale is fortunate that this program has been extensively documented, first by Shekela M. Wanyama in “Transformative Polyphony: Choirs, Community Engagement, and Social Change,” and subsequently in a book chapter, “The Active Voice: Cultivating Intention within Choral Programming and Community Engagement Practices,” by Ms. Wanyama, Kathy Saltzman Romey, and Emilie Sweet (forthcoming). In addition, the experiences of participants were extensively surveyed using online questionnaires, which have an uncommonly high response rate.

A definitive evaluation of “Sing Me a Home” cannot yet be written. The program, in Ms. Wanyama’s words, has helped “initiate and advance a conversation about community life and the place of art therein.” Happily, that conversation now has a life of its own.
Note:  “Call It Home” by Heid Erdrich text below.

Larry Fuchsberg has worked part-time for the Minnesota Chorale since 2001.  Previously an academic and a diplomat, he freelances as a writer and editor in the Twin Cities, and contributes regularly to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  He is married to former Chorale composer-in-residence Janika Vandervelde; they live in St. Paul with two highly musical cats.

Call It Home   
Heid Erdrich

We call it hope
before we call it home.
Hammers, heat waves,
paint fights, help from family---
Hundreds of service hours, now it’s ours.

Call it jai’ning from the East
Call it gouli from the South
Call it casa from the West
Call it wiigiwaam from the North

In the sacred center
of the four directions,
there’s an inner circle
we call home.

We call it ours---
No one can trespass
our neighborhood now
we tell crime it can’t stay.

We live next door---
we all learn to get along:
Native, Asian, Latin,
African and everyone.

We open our home---
family, foster kids and friends.
We lock up, safe now,
these keys are ours alone.

We called it hope
before we called it home.
Open access and garden fences:
strangers worked so hard---
Hundreds of service hours, now it’s ours.

Call it jai’ning from the East
Call it gouli from the South
Call it casa from the West
Call it wiigiwaam from the North

In the sacred center
of the four directions,
there’s an inner circle
we call home.