Choir Dissonant Practice

I am a right-brain prominent writer which must not be confused with a prominent left-brain writer, which I am almost decidedly not nor would I aspire toward such all or nothing thinking and not at all both/and feeling. Like most writers, I feel more like the muses of rhetoric and storytelling and poetry chose me, more than I chose to write like the non-choice vocation of being sensually attracted to older and wiser and more caring unstraight multicultured men in a homophobic society. I also have a long history of chronic depression to write about which seems unsurprising as my story includes growing up gay and unhappily bright in a straight white male privileged monoculture in a hetero-orthodox right-wing white nihilistic church with dualistic theological (evil nature v. holy spirit) and toxic anti-ecological radically xenophobic pretensions fears phobias dissociation repressions suppression absence of healthy polycultural impressions and not at all authentically evangelical because neither "good" nor "news". So, when I hear our beautiful voiced and talented smart and positively energized choir director, in her most fulsome creative rhapsody, want to honor a composer of music by singing his creation uniformly "straight" I become depressed, shrunken, disempowered, unvoiced, shocked again by left-brain monocultural dominance. When someone reads and/or performs their own oral interpretation of what I have written, and, I hear something I had not heard, much less intended, before, I learn something about what that person and I may both care about in a new resonant and/or dissonant way. I may be challenged sometimes but I am always flattered Far more than the prospect of a uniform robotic mechanically slavishly "straight" reading that does not wrap in my reader's own well-being, harmonies, rhythms, experience, emotions, history, culture, tempo, pitch, love, passion, hate, fear, anger, hope for resonance, faith in Earth's healthy resilience, unstraight compassion, I am happy to have been noticed yet vaguely bored and sometimes anxiously lightly depressed by lack of contagious inspiration. This great dichotomy of singing to the choir culture that would celebrate multicultural emotion yet straight-jackets into pre-chorded words and notes as written, predetermined without innovation, without improvisation without contagious color and hope of newly enriching climates of comparative warm re-creating accompaniment... This is much too straight for me. Not a healthy dichotomy for playful music to resonantly be. When it occurred to me, If I do not feel appreciated by musicians who respect composers and lyricists enough to support our mutually democratic innovation, divine and more prosaic inspirations, spontaneous improvisation to make and play with music that invites new dispositions more than repeat performances of someone else's stay within the lines story, Then I could enjoy choir practice, or even feel emotionally safe from retriggering depression's deeply entrenched history if I were to arrive fully medicated And so I know my time to therapeutically invest somewhere else has come Seeking rapture of well-written melody, well-crafted lyrics, could only grow embraced by resonant harmony and resilient themes of pattern and improvised textures, Amplification need not bury beauty, simplicity, transparency, vulnerability, longing or belonging, Uniformity precludes possibility for creation's polycultural integrity, Although inspiration, to remain more ecstatically divine, does sometimes require a warm inviting director to remind the right-brain embellisher, polisher, both/and nuancer, examiner, investigator, explorer, improviser of when it is our time to stop redundant rifts and move on to life's next more democratic piece of not left-brain dominant writing And singing, dance enacting more than monochromatic exacting extracting exhuming exfoliating exhausting straightness