Subway Piece by The Digger Choir

In 2003, I initiated a concert series at New York’s Issue Project Room (then located on E. 6th St.) called the Digger Choir, where the audience would be the sole performers in the concert--everyone sang, or in this case read aloud, together. I wanted a name that would indicate that the concert would celebrate both individuality and community; I tried to create the feeling of a short-term self-sufficient community similar to those imagined by both the 17th century Diggers and the 1960s Haight Ashbury Diggers, hence the name “Digger Choir.”

For the first event I contacted a large number of people, and about 30 of them showed up at Issue on July 11th. Many were musicians, some vocalists, and many were not singers or musicians at all. On that night we all performed John Stevens' "Sustained Piece," Yoko Ono's "John Let's Hope For Peace," and a new composition of my own, devised specifically for the concert, called "Subway Piece." My instructions were: "Bring a piece of reading material you've had with you on the subway--newspaper, magazine, book, anything--and a read a passage from it out loud. It would preferably be a passage you had already read to yourself on a subway ride, but not necessarily. You can alternatively write down ad copy from advertisements you see in the subway and read that aloud. These readings will all take place simultaneously--no one will be reading their piece in front of everybody else, we'll all be reading together at the same time. I will conduct the piece and cue the beginning and ending."

The idea was to read something out loud that ordinarily you would only read to yourself. When i was doing readings for my book The Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, I realized pretty quickly that some of the things I had written took on a much different character if I actually read them out loud. Doing that really changes your consciousness. From there I realized that it applies to saying something out loud instead of thinking to yourself too. Part of the point of the piece is that the only way people’s thinking starts to change, and society starts to change, is by expressing your thoughts verbally. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, et. al. came about because people thought something was wrong and then started saying something was wrong—and then started doing something about it. And love only happens when two people tell each other what they’re really thinking and feeling about each other. We’re taught to read silently most of the time, and we’re taught not to verbally express every thought that comes into our head—which becomes a matter of survival in terms of the interpersonal politics of our society. So even though thinking out loud and reading out loud are not the same thing, in that spirit I asked everyone to read out loud as a small step towards a greater consciousness. You would think it would sound like chaos, and it probably does sound like that to most ears, but I also hear a kind of drone that suggests a hive mind, and an inter-connectivity that's sonified by communal action.

The sustained protests of spring 2020 in America and around the world reminded me of this piece and encouraged me to share it. Janene Higgins had made a video of the Digger Choir concert and kindly made a wav file for me so I could post it here. I've remixed it slighted. It's a free release, and i would encourage you to make a donation to an organization of your choosing in lieu of paying for the track; but if you do choose to pay for it I will be donating any proceeds to the ACLU, which is the leading advocate for free speech in the U.S., so bear that in mind when naming your price.

Guitarist from Love Child, the Blue Humans, Run On, Text of Light, Lee Ranaldo & the Dust

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