Musicking for Peace
- Rebecca Burnham
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
When Nicholas Zork made a presentation to the Braver Angels Music Network about how collaborating together to create music overcomes division, I knew we needed to talk. He was gracious enough to respond to my request for an interview and I was delighted to learn that there’s actual science that backs this up. The phenomenon is, in fact, so well established that Zork wrote a doctoral dissertation about musical collaboration as a tool to integrate and inspire three different, but radically inclusive, church communities. It’s not just a tool for churches, though. It can be used by anyone.
His is a message that resonates strongly with my vision for the Summit Stages brand: to become trusted as the go-to source for musicals that lift and unite, not only in their messages, but also in their creation and production. I’m excited to share his perspective with you today.
Music-making As A Social Enterprise
For Zork, it’s impossible to separate the sounds that we call “music” from the processes of creation and their social impact. So he uses “musicking,” a term coined by sociomusicologist Christopher Small, to describe the whole parcel. Small expands an understanding of music to include not only the relationship between the sounds in a composition but also, the relationships between everyone who interacts with those sounds, “between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world.”
“Musicking” sums up Zork’s daily life in New York City. The music director for Church of the Advent Hope, he also teaches songwriting at Andrews University. And that’s just the beginning. He composes for chamber ensembles and film, writes songs for and with award winning and chart-topping recording artists, has three EPs of his own, and actively creates opportunities for people to gather and to music together. He holds collaborative concerts all over the Big Apple, an eclectic annual Holiday Benefit Concert at his church, and the Carnegie Hill Concerts series that turns chamber music into a celebration of New York City’s diversity.
The Song
His recent release “The Sound of Us” encapsulates his philosophy. So does the history of its creation. He and collaborator Lynette Williams wrote it as a launch song for a not-for-profit. Then, social distancing sped up the pace of polarization and alienation across our divides, and their song morphed, becoming an invitation to come back into connection with each other. “What does it mean to belong—/ All different but in this together?” the song asks. “Everyone has their own song/ And it’s one we long to hear./ It seemed like we'd come so far/ And now I'm not sure where we're going/ But I know despite where we are/ We'll sing louder than our fear.”
Listening to how the song came together, I am struck with how Zork and his collaborators practice singing louder than their fear. Collaboration is a vulnerable process. Sometimes, you throw in an idea that’s warmly welcomed. Other times, it doesn’t connect at all. Zork likes to tell his students about the time a Grammy-winning vocalist invited him to co-write with her. He presented her with ten ideas in a row, and she said no to every one of them. But she saw promise in the eleventh idea, and that turned into a successful recording.
To collaborate successfully, “you’ve got to park your ego at the door,” Zork says. You need to get beyond the zero-sum mentality that says “more of me needs to mean less of you” because “everybody is impoverished by that model.” What he seeks to help create is “a more abundant society where everyone can contribute and have what they need.” For that reason, he supports the practice of splitting credit for and proceeds from a collaborative project equally. This does away with “any temptation to worry about whether or not you, as the artist or writer, are centered enough.” And it frees you up to focus on the joy of contributing to something meaningful.
That’s how Zork and Williams approached “The Sound of Us,” for which they wrote both lyrics and music together. As polarization increased and voices started questioning the very idea that diversity is valuable, their song took on additional meanings. When in 2020, Braver Angels launched a song-writing contest to engage musicians in their mission to depolarize America, they submitted a live recording of their song with Zork on the guitar and Wayna on vocals. But they weren’t finished because the more talent you can assemble for a project, the more likely you are to arrive at something great. They invited vocalist Akie Bermiss and producer Aaron Beaumont into the team to produce the song, and all five contributed to finessing its final form. They all co-own the recording and are credited as co-writers on the song. For Zork, the project “speaks to how inclusive practices are actually enriching for everyone involved. You end up with something that’s better than anyone would make themselves. I think that’s true of our society and it’s certainly true of music making.”
In this case, the final project connected widely. In the seven months since its release, it’s had 249K views on YouTube and 76K plays on Spotify. But for Zork, the song was great long before the track became popular. “I will always say that the primary outcome of artistic practice is not a work of art. It’s a transformed artist… [It’s] the change in us and our collaborators, for the better or the worse.”
"Radical inclusion, equality, and unity ... is a theological imperative"
This is a concept that informed his 2018 doctoral thesis, The Politics of Liturgical “Musicking” about the practice and impact of collaborative music-making in three Christian congregations, each pursuing a mission of radical inclusivity. For Zork, a Seventh-day Adventist, the quest for radical inclusivity is driven not by politics, but by faith. The story of early Christianity is one of reaching beyond entrenched, even religiously reinforced, prejudices and contentious differences to achieve inclusion and equality. Even “the linguistic miracle of Pentecost foreshadowed the cultural multiplicity and pluriformity” that the church was called to achieve. The differences between us may have changed, but “radical inclusion, equality, and unity within the Body of Christ – the Church – is a theological imperative, which the Church and churches are called to fully embody. Disparities of power and privilege between men and women,” between ethnicities, and “the socioeconomic disparities between ‘slave’ and ‘free’ … must be confronted,” he writes.
“You can sing a song that means we should all live in harmony and peace, but if you create it in a way that marginalizes certain people... you’re creating the opposite.”
Musicking is his primary tool for confronting those disparities. It’s not enough to produce songs with powerful unifying messages; you need to produce them in a way that unifies. “You can sing a song that means we should all live in harmony and peace, but if you create it in a way that marginalizes certain people and ignores certain voices and embodies very authoritarian structures, you’re communicating peace but you’re creating the opposite.”
Zork has some tips for co-writing music in a way that builds peace and community. In order of priority, he focuses on people, then process, and then product.
People:
Focus on the relationships between the collaborators. Before you start working on a song, take some time to get to know each other and your styles of communication. For example, does one of you think out loud and give instant reactions to ideas, while another processes internally and needs to be asked what they’re thinking? If you talk long enough to learn how you each communicate, and establish a relationship of respect for each other, you’ll be better able to work as full partners through the entire process.
Identify your why. What are you hoping to achieve with this collaboration? “If you don’t share a why, you’re going to have all sorts of conflict that doesn’t even make sense.” Once you’ve established a shared purpose, “it becomes easier to accept compromises, trade-offs, not getting your favourite idea accepted by the group, and to push back on somebody else’s idea, because you have a shared goal.”
Process:
Establish clear goals and expectations. Is this song for your album or mine? What are we hoping to achieve today? Are we just brainstorming, doing a draft, or planning to finish today? Ask good questions early and agree on how royalties will be split before you start writing. “If four people start something together, I think it’s just good karma to say, ‘Hey, this is a group project; let’s split publishing evenly’ because then, no-one will feel like they need to advocate for their idea in order to get credit.” This produces good vibes and better music.
Divide responsibilities, recognizing that we don’t all have the same gifts. Will you write the melody together, then one of you works on lyrics, and then brings it back? Get agreement on who’s doing what and in what order.
Once you start writing, stay open to new ideas. “If someone has an idea they feel strongly about, and I don’t like it initially, I remind myself that I might be wrong, this might be the greatest idea anyone’s had all day. If tomorrow, or later, I’m really still convinced that it’s not the best idea, I can bring it up again, but I’m just going to give myself some time to be open to getting it.”
Continue to revise together, and don’t take revisions personally. “Having an idea rejected is not the same as being rejected as a person.” Lean into the wisdom of the saying: great songs aren’t written; they’re re-written.
Product:
Hopefully, you’ll end up with a song you’re all excited to share. Even if you don’t, prioritizing people and process means you can still end up with a strong relationship and meaningful shared experience.
“There are a million ways to collaborate,” Zork says, “and the general principles always apply.” The product that gets performed at the end of the collaboration is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the often-overlooked things that happen behind the scenes, when the microphones were off and no-one was looking, that we need to attend to. They are what define the meaning and impact of our music.
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