photo by Lara Herscovitch
One of the exercises in CLP is about identifying and clarifying our own personal values. We each identify our top 5 values, writing one each on 5 index cards. Then we have to drop one… and another… until we are forced to choose our number 1, top value. What is your current One right now and why?
Listening. Specifically, listening before responding, with listening being more important to me than responding. Over the years this has risen higher and higher on my list of ways to live a good life. It is so easy to miscommunicate – whether I am the one making judgements without understanding, speaking too soon or too harshly or too carelessly, or whether I am on the receiving end of any of that.
I think of listening as one of those skills that starts with my art and spreads out through my whole life. As a musician, listening is the most important thing I do. When I’m getting ready to start a new piece, I may listen to other works that I want to draw ideas from, but mostly I’m listening to the music inside my head. While I’m working on a piece, the first thing I do every morning is listen to what I wrote the day before. I listen very, very hard for what works, what doesn’t, what’s extraneous and needs to be cut, what needs to expanded on, and what comes next. There’s always a point at which a piece takes on a life of its own and starts to converse with me about where it wants to go – that is thrilling!
When I’m performing, I’m constantly listening to the other musicians. To me, the joy of making music is the conversations I can have with the musicians around me, and the only way to create that give and take is through intense listening.
In my family, I am listening to what my partner and my daughters need, and am trying to balance those needs and attend to my own. As with a piece of music, I’m trying to hear what’s working, what isn’t, what needs to be ignored and what needs to be nurtured. And like my compositions, I often have to remind myself that my family members have lives of their own and aren’t going to do what my mind says they should!
In community and as a citizen, I try to listen over time, to be patient about letting the important ideas and feelings rise up to the surface, and to let the unhelpful noise settle out.
What is one big, burning leadership question you are wrestling with these days?
Knowing when to and having the courage to speak up and speak out. One result of my focus on listening is that I sometimes forget to respond, and sometimes I avoid responding when I am concerned that what I say may not land well. In those moments, I try to turn the listening inward, to hear and be guided by my own deeper experience and knowledge. I will confess that I am not always successful at this – it is something I really have to work hard at practicing.
What inspires you, gives you hope these days?
I see all around me the awareness that we must create community. I feel like our country’s lifestyle norms right now don’t lend themselves to the organic kinds of communities that used to exist – whether that’s around work, religious, cultural or social traditions, to name a few. The ability to move from place to place easily, to communicate electronically and instantly, to stay home and be entertained by our devices all have wonderful aspects, and they also tend to decrease the amount of time we spend with people face-to-face. Add to that the cultural divisiveness that is being modeled by many of our leaders and it becomes a real struggle to create and maintain community.
What gives me hope is when people – especially young people – are creative and active in creating community. Young colleagues of mine are always getting together to jam, swap clothes, cook or travel. My older daughter has made ties with farmers, beer-makers, adventurers and entrepreneurs in her adopted city of Madrid. My younger daughter regularly hosts her Queer Jewish Ladies Shabbat Club on Friday nights. Maybe these ways of coming together around affinities isn’t new, but the fact that they keep finding ways to do this despite all the obstacles is impressive to me.
This work of transformational change is hard. Stepping in, stepping up, over time, can be draining – physically, intellectually, emotionally, psychically, spiritually. How do you recharge, restore, take care of yourself, rekindle your fire?
I live my life moving constantly between seemingly different worlds – as an artist, a gardener, a home-maker and mother/partner/friend, a bookkeeper for my husband’s office and handler of our backyard farm products… I can’t always predict what will rekindle my fire, so I think I just try to stay open and let it happen. I often walk into a class or rehearsal exhausted and thinking the last thing I want to be doing is working, only to have one of those amazing moments where suddenly we’ve gone beyond just playing notes and rhythms and started actually making music– that wakes me right up! Then again, the incredible joy of running seven successful errands in one afternoon is pretty powerful, too.
Introduce us to someone you are/were close with personally (e.g., family, teacher, friend, mentor), who shaped (or shapes) you and how you view leadership and possibility for a better community/world?
Mr. Edward Mapp, the 90+ year-old business manager of St. Luke’s Steel Band, has taught me so incredibly much. He carries such integrity, clarity and courage, all of which I continually strive to emulate. I was the original band director of St. Luke’s Steel Band; today, I’m a regular band member. He was, without my being aware of it, incredibly patient with my naiveté about so many things. He taught me about community-building in general. About being more aware of and sensitive to race and power dynamics, leadership and (surprise!) listening before responding. Because of his leadership and partnership with me and so many others, St. Luke’s Steel Band has become a very special New Haven family, community and institution.
What do you recommend to us, in each of these categories:
- Reading – Novels, because they are my escape from the noise of the world; books on social equity; anything that helps me be a better teacher.
- Listening – A few things come to mind. Rhiannon Giddens’ new album There Is No Other. She is an artist my husband and I have followed since our younger daughter introduced us to the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and whose intellect and integrity are matched by her musicality and aural aesthetic. This album weaves together all I love about roots music and arts music. I also learn so much from Krista Tippett’s On Being podcasts, in the way they slowly and patiently explore emotional, spiritual, creative worlds through interviews with people I want to be someday. And third, live music whenever I can… just about any genre. I only listen to recorded music when I am studying something. It is the energy of live music – again, the conversation – that captures my attention.
- Eating – From the garden – it’s summer! Right now all sorts of greens are growing and ready to be harvested. Soon it will be peas, then tomatoes, eggplants, peppers. My husband has a rather radical commitment to growing our food, and I have a persistent need to make things look beautiful, so between us we have a backyard paradise with vegetables and flowers.
- Watching – TV isn’t part of my life – we have one for watching movies but never seem to find time to turn it on. However, we do like going out to movies and just saw the documentary The Biggest Little Farm – about a couple that decides to leave Los Angeles and “build a life in perfect harmony with nature.” Thinking about it continues to make me happy every day. I love being reminded that the earth will heal itself if we just get out of its way.
- Laughing – Okay, I’m easily seduced by people making fun of our current president, and can get pulled into watching Stephen Colbert monologues on YouTube when they pop up on my iPad. It’s a habit I sometimes think about breaking because my father taught me to never laugh at someone’s expense, but then I’m not sure how else to get through this time – though that takes me back to Krista Tippett’s podcasts – they’re a pretty good antidote.
- Wildcard – Cultivating joy – in myself, my students, my family, my audiences.
Learn more about Debby at her website.
To get in touch with Debby directly: dfteason@mac.com
On June 22 at 7pm, as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Alasdair Neale will conduct the New Haven Symphony Orchestra for a free 125thAnniversary celebration concert on the New Haven Green. The program will bring together New Haven’s premier steel bands for a “Classical-Caribbean mash-up,” and will include “Trinity,” an original concerto for steel band and orchestra by Debby.