"John Anderson, my jo, John We've climbed the hill together, And many a canty day, John, We've had with one another . . . "
After four years of practice, we sing this old Robert Burns song together easily. Without looking at each other, or with just a few glances, we sing parallel lines and crossing phrases. At our best, we pronounce the words together, two voices as one. I imagine us taking on the roles of the couple in the song, who have spent years together, both looking in the same direction, following fortune's chosen path. We are not married, but for the time it takes to sing this song, we are partners.
Like the marriage described in the song, music so nearly right grows out of time spent together, out of repetition and comfort, and out of affection and mutuality, but also out of rehearsal, argument, calculation, error. The best musical moments -- like the times when "John Anderson" works -- result from effort as well as a shared love, not only between myself and those I sing with but even more between each of us and the music. That combination of shared work and shared love makes any kind of collaboration worthwhile and productive, but this is something I've only recently come to appreciate.
My musical career began in 4th grade, when I played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. On opening night, I stepped out between the curtains in the elementary school gym, lights making the audience as large as I could possibly imagine, and sang. Alone. I don't remember what it felt like. Perhaps I had stage fright. More likely, I felt pleased to be getting so much attention. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that I did it, and at that moment I became recognized by others and began to see myself as "the singer." From the time I was nine, I sang in choirs. Later, as a teenager, I took voice lessons and spent afterschool hours sitting at the piano, singing show tunes and arias to an empty house. In choirs, I always sang soprano, the lead line, the melody, so I never had to think much about the other parts or about how the whole piece fit together. When I was sixteen and failed to win a place in the top choir at my high school, the director said it was because I was too much of a soloist, that my voice wouldn't blend with the others.
Until recently, I always preferred to sing solo. Left to my own devices, singing alone, I could revise the music as I saw fit, often adding unneeded breaks and embellishments. And I suppose, too, that I always liked the idea of having all those eyes and ears on me, though my voice always falters when I actually perform by myself. I suspect I was also just too lazy to learn any part besides the melody. I kept singing soprano even after it caused nodules on my vocal chords, which put me out of commission -- on doctor -prescribed silence -- for several months. But I wouldn't switch to the alto part. I preferred to sing the lead even if it sometimes strained.
I had my first significant experience as a group singer in college, in a choir that spent seven hours a week rehearsing under the demanding, idealistic lead of Dale Warland, who now conducts one of the few professional choirs in the country. Not only did I begin to sing second soprano, the part just below the melody, but more important, I also experienced the power of well-wrought collaborative sound. I can still recall the sensation of being not an individual singer but part of an instrument, of creating such rich, synchronous, deeply textured music. I felt almost physically connected to the twenty other singers. Some I hardly talked with, but when we sang together, we became one being. We achieved such moments only occasionally, and only after hours of repetition and experimentation. Often, the work frustrated us, and sometimes rehearsals were boring. But those few perfect minutes ruined me. I have never since been able to tolerate a community choir, with its rough choruses and ragged stops, even though I would love to sing that kind of music again.
I've come close to repeating that experience over the past few years singing in a band with three friends. We started out sounding awful, enjoying the music and each other's company but having no illusions that we were any good. We're still pretty amateurish, regularly forgetting words and chords, our unison singing almost never in synch, our performances entertaining but uneven. But with these friends, I have learned to sing harmony, and while it hasn't made any dramatic change in life, it has brought me a new and different experience of musical pleasure.
At first, I sang what I was told, following the lines taught to me by a man who hears music more fully than anyone I've ever known, with his whole body it seems, and who always insists on intricate harmonies instead of simple ones. Then I started to get brave, to risk my own renditions, and more and more lately, my harmonies work. I'm learning to hear a part of the music that used to be silent to my ears. Even now, as I become more confident of my ability to find the patterns by myself, I am still surprised and delighted by what often feels like luck and magic. I have begun to be able to hear the notes that aren't obvious, the ones that live beneath, above, around the melody. I'm learning the pleasures of not being heard, of blending in so well that listeners can't tell the melody from the harmony.
I'm learning the same lessons about the other work I do, teaching and writing. In the past few years, over the same time that I've been learning to sing harmony, I have collaborated with three friends on various projects. As with music, each experience is different, and each requires its own rehearsals, its own patterns. With two of my collaborators, I've found that a clear division of labor, punctuated by conversations and many traded notes, creates programs and texts that appear relatively seamless. We can each identify the parts we're responsible for -- the section I wrote in an article on teaching, the tasks I completed for a grant proposal -- but the final product could easily pass for the work of one person. In another case, nearly all the work so far has happened in conversation. We question each other, interrupt each other, offer and reject ideas in a slow duet of shared creation. The products of this most recent collaboration -- a team-taught course, some presentations, and an article or two -- are not yet completed, so I don't yet know if this more interactive, intense version of shared work will result in a significantly different kind of product. But the process is absorbing, entertaining, sometimes stressful, always exciting.
These collaborative projects yield good work, but it always includes aspects that I'm not fully comfortable with -- a sentence that seems awkward, a conclusion I don't fully believe, some mistake I thought someone else corrected, an idea I wish I could take credit for but that I know came from someone else. Always, something that marks the text or program as not completely my own. Of course, I'm never fully satisfied with the work I do on my own, either. But with collaboration, I recognize that these errors, rough spots, uncertainties result from negotiation, shared effort, compromise, and conversation. And while I'd like my writing and my teaching to be as perfect as those few "just right" performances of "John Anderson," I take pleasure in the process of collaboration no matter what the product. These markers of an other's presence don't disturb me. In fact, I find them reassuring, reminders that process is as valuable to me as product. I've learned to appreciate the effort that goes into creative work -- singing, writing, or teaching -- as well as the work itself.
Somewhere between fourth grade and now, I've become, perhaps, a more sociable person, someone more interested in conversing with others than in talking at them (though my friends and colleagues would no doubt remind me that I'm still quite good at lecturing, hogging the stage, being bossy). I've learned that working with someone, not taking the lead but also not hanging back, can help me both personally and professionally. When I came up for promotion last year, a large portion of my work was collaborative, and I would not have succeeded without those projects. And throughout the process, four of us, colleagues, friends, but also competitors, shared drafts and ideas to help each other create the most impressive promotion applications. And while I can't credit this collaboration alone for our success, the fact is that working together did help us all get promoted. Our model of collaboration instead of competition was validated.
It sounds idealistic, and I don't think I'm naive enough to believe that collaboration always works, or that cooperative approaches are all good. But more and more, I find comfort in the challenge of singing harmony, despite all the wrong notes I still stumble onto. It's rarely perfect, but that's not the point. I listen more attentively to "John Anderson" these days. The lyrics emphasize "climb[ing] the hill" and "walk[ing] on together," pleasures of partnership that apply in any good work.