https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DrIeOMi13JU
So hello everybody, I am here with Benedict Sheehan and Talia Maria Sheehan. They are a couple that have been kind of in my circles for the last several years. They’re good friends also with Andrew Gould that you’ve seen on this channel. Benedict also participates in the Orthodox Art Journal, but mostly Benedict is a composer of sacred music. He is also a conductor and he is the director of music at Santicon’s seminary and monastery. And his wife Talia Maria is a vocalist and she also teaches music as well. But mostly they really work as a team in all kinds of projects. And in this discussion we’re going to look at a particular project, which really I find very fascinating and which is the Artifact Institute. This is Jonathan Pajot, welcome to the symbolic world. So Benedict and Talia Maria, I will give you a chance to maybe introduce a little bit, introduce yourselves a little bit. I know that you are very involved in the community there at Santicon’s, involved just in music in Orthodoxy in general. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about the things that you’re working on that you’ve accomplished and we can move into the Artifact Institute as well. Yeah, sure. Do you want to start? Oh, no, you go. I’ll start. Okay. Yeah. And whenever I speak to anybody I haven’t seen before, I like to explain that I do speak with a stutter. It’s not your imagination. And I also explain to people that I do it deliberately to get attention. It’s been a long-standing tactic of mine and it works beautifully. So I’ll continue to do it. No, so yeah, so as you said, I’m a composer and a conductor. And I started in church as a teenager. I just began to get interested in the music of the Orthodox Church. My parents are converts to Orthodoxy. When I was nine, you would never have guessed that I would become a church musician. I had no interest in Santicon sacred music at all. I really didn’t have a lot of interest in church until I was probably 14 when my grandmother, who was not religious, sent me a recording of a Russian male choir singing Orthodox music. And that recording basically kind of changed the whole trajectory of my life. And from that point on, I just became interested in music and music of the church, but also just music in general. And that kind of set me on the path that I’ve remained on ever since. So I do all kinds of things. It’s not easy to make a career in America as an Orthodox church musician. That’s the understatement. I would say so. Yeah, so I’ve done all kinds of things. But for the last 10 years, I’ve been at Santicon and been really trying to create a job. And so 10 years later, it’s really kind of the only job of its kind in the country. And I’m still trying to expand it, but we now have a music staff. We’ve started a professional ensemble under the auspices of the monastery called the Santicon Choir, which is the first pro-choir under the auspices of an Orthodox institution that’s ever been created here in America. And we’ve made some recordings. We just recorded, or just in 2019, we recorded My Divinely Liturgy, which was a new piece that was commissioned by the Petrom Institute. And that’ll be out this coming fall. I’ve started to work with a group on the West Coast called Capella Romana. I’ve been out there a number of times to conduct them, and they’re going to be performing My New Liturgy in November with me conducting. I at least, that’s the plan. We’ll see if there’s still such a thing as live arts come fall. But let’s pray that it continues. I don’t know. I recently finally broke through into the world of choral publishing and got a publisher by Oxford this year, and they recorded a piece of mine. And hopefully there’s more to come on that front, too. So I can’t even keep track of it all, but that’s okay. One day at a time. Good problem. Yeah, and one of the things I forgot to mention is that you, both of you have seven daughters, which is amazing. Yeah, right. We do. So it’s genuinely one day at a time. We have, well, it was diapers to dating. So now it’s college to preschool. So like that’s, we’re edging the monolith forward. Yeah, you’re kidding. We’re not edging it forward. Let’s be honest. It goes on its own. It does. So no tenors, unfortunately. Well, one of our daughters has the same tenor. She’s great at it, too. Not me. I don’t do that. Well, I’ve seen some of the things you’ve been putting on social media, some of the family choir stuff. It’s really touching to see. It’s very beautiful. You know, you’re doing different styles as well, different traditions, and it’s very beautiful and touch. For those of us, like for myself, who’s not very musical, you know, I like music. I’m just not very musical. I have that dream and I have this vision of, you know, the family singing together. It’s very beautiful. Yes. You’re really not alone. Yeah. It’s a really powerful design. I mean, honestly, that’s one of the things that we found in our work, which is, you know, you can work. You can work in the sort of like, you know, the technically kind of high proficiency level in an art. And that’s one kind of way to be. And then you can work with beginners. And that’s another kind of way to be. And what we found in our being here at St. Ticans is that partly because of what the vision of the abbot, Father Sergius, the abbot of the monastery is, and then the mission of the seminary too, you know, they’re kind of two sides, two different. They’re symbiotic. Yeah, exactly. They’re separate, but they’re such a strong value for liturgy here that partly just because it gets done every day, which is almost incomprehensible. It’s just such a huge job. It’s an insanely huge job. So all the resources that get put into this high frequency reiteration of liturgy mean that problems get, they come up more frequently and they have to be addressed and solved more quickly. So it’s, I like to use the metaphor that this is kind of the fruit flies of the liturgical world. So we see the evolution of the species as it were at a faster rate here. Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. So problems will, that a community that only serves once a week, it would literally take them seven times longer to come up with the problem that comes, the kinds of problems that come up here. Right. So, you know, my end of this is that I’m a vocalist and a music teacher. And so we kind of tag-team really nicely because I help prepare the individual musicians to be able to work with him. And then as he works with them, then he brings them to higher and higher levels. So we kind of have this cyclical process. Then they have to go back to you. Yeah, and get a little bit better. Because they need to get to the next step, right? Yeah. So it’s really interesting to see how that combination of work, you know, just me working with the singers in some abstracted way of trying to get them to sing better, be better, have better musicianship skills, wouldn’t have an application. And just him working with them on repertoire and trying to get the services done, it was kind of, you probably hit a plateau. And I think a lot of people who are trying to make beauty in the arts, they only have one or another of those things and have to search for the other one on their own. And we just, I guess, providentially just came like ready bundled. So Father Sergius is definitely responsible for that support. I mean, it takes somebody with a vision to support artists in a way that he supports us. And the seminary too. So we’re really lucky in that. Yeah, I mean, all great, maybe not all, but a lot of great artistic work of the past has depended really on patronage and to a certain extent that we get to benefit from that. Like we’re provided a context, you know, we have to work for our daily bread, obviously. But there’s a sense, and I think that’s one of the things that’s really remarkable about the leadership here at SIGACONS is there’s a sense that the work we’re trying to do is valuable, that we’re given a context in which to basically figure it out and to try to solve problems on our own and to offer what we can to offer new ideas, to offer new creative work in that context. And we’re really, as the years go by, we really, really believe in this idea of content text that you can’t just produce art or produce, you know, do anything creative in a kind of vacuum or just for yourself. I mean, there’s a certain element that you do it for yourself because that’s what you need to do. So if you’re alone and you’re an artist, that’s what you do because you need to make art to survive. But it’s still important, like we really believe that art is about communicating with the other. So you do the art because you need to, but how much better is it if there’s a context in which you can communicate and a context where what you communicate is both valued and understood. Yeah, that’s one of the things that I’ve, let’s say, even let’s say there’s this aspect of communication, but one of the aspects that I’ve been trying to emphasize a lot is the idea of participation, you know, where we have a sense in our culture that art is something that you look at or something you listen to, that it really is a passive act. Whereas what I’m seeing with what you’re doing in terms of choir music, in terms of also this Artifact Institute that we’ll talk about, is trying to create a laboratory that is not just a laboratory for artists who are making things, but the community which is also going to be receiving the fruits of this art, right? So it’s this symbiotic relationship between what’s not really a public and the kind of, you know, modern way of understanding public, but is really those who are benefiting, who are participating and who are kind of collaborating with you to create this symbiotic art, you know, that’s in the community, like you said, that’s in a, that’s being communicated through people, but also with them as well. Oh yeah, I mean, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, the thing about singing and singing together is, I mean, is that it’s really, it’s a really old idea. People have been doing this for a very long time, like since the beginning of humanity. Like some of the oldest, some of the oldest prehistoric artifacts, there’s the word. See what we did there? See what we did there, yeah. Are actually musical instruments. There’s a 41,000-year-old bone flute. I can’t, the name of it escapes me, but it will come back at some point. But it’s actually one of the oldest artifacts that exists, and it’s a flute. So if we have that, it’s not like some guy just had this idea, I’m going to make a bone into a flute. I mean, it’s got ways to actually change the pitch. So if we’ve got that, it means that it was an older idea than that by far. I mean, it’s a thing that had to be generated over time, over a long period of time. But the thing about singing is that, of course, to make music with your voice, or to make musical sounds, or make rhythmic sounds, is a thing that’s a lot more intuitive than it would be to carve an animal bone into a flute. So yeah, that can’t be preserved. The only preservation is in our biology. So if everybody seems to love this so much, if in contexts where there’s no explicit instruction to sing, we sing, I don’t know, like at soccer games, or when people are drinking, or when people are fighting, like what is it about singing that makes it so that that seems to be a reasonable thing to do in such an intensely, not terribly celebratory context, maybe necessarily, but somehow deeply, deeply human? So we really believe that it’s something that’s really, really deeply rooted in mankind. And in that sense, it’s just part of what it means to be a person. That’s what people do, people think. So to speak about your idea of art that’s participative, sorry, there’s no more kind of fundamental, participatory art than when we sing together. Where is the song? I mean, the song doesn’t exist on the sheet of music. Right. You know, it doesn’t exist even in the recording. It only exists either in the experience of hearing the song, or in the act of actually producing the song. So in and of itself, it’s already assumed that there’s two people there, you know? Which is super interesting. I think one of the things that really define, I mean, this is to my understanding, this is my own speculation, is that one of the reasons why music is what defines human beings, one of the aspects which define this is because it does have to do with patterns. It has to do with our capacity to see, but also engage in patterns. And so the idea of music, it really is a pure pattern. It’s one of the purest forms of patterns that you can find, you know? It’s almost mathematical in its purity. But then as you said, singing together, it brings the pattern not only as this kind of mathematical or, you know, participation in opposites and in variation in all of this, but it’s also doing it in a way that’s creating a social pattern at the same time. Right? So it’s connecting the two together. Yeah. Right. Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, because it’s a pattern, but art, like visual arts are patterns kind of in space. What’s so interesting about music is that it’s a pattern in time. It turns time into a pattern. And that way, the liturgical year, the cycle of east and fast, the, you know, the rhythm of the days of the week, you know, all of that is in some sense, it’s a musical phenomenon. It’s turning time into something rhythmic, into something ordered, something patterned. And therefore, it’s both infinitely various, but also familiar. And it kind of roots itself in the memory and in the experience. So in that way, I mean, it’s music. My dad used to say that my dad was not a musician. My dad was a literary very kind of figure. But my dad used to point out that the only art that we know from scripture that exists in the age to come is music, is siftinging. Like, because we know the angels sifting and the song at the end of time and, you know, all the images in Revelation. We don’t know that there’s going to be iconography. We don’t know that there’s going to be architect… There is that city. There is that whole city, you know. Well, there is that. It’s true. It’s an architectural… Fine. I don’t mean to… Give me that. Thank you. I don’t mean to dismiss that. But yeah. Scrappy. Yes. Well, it’s a… But I do think that there’s some… Like this idea of turning time into a pattern is really important. No, I think you’re right. And I think it’s interesting because when you read the ancients and they talk about things like the music of the spheres or they talk about music itself and you see this idea that music was part of the, you know, the core curriculum of the ancients. There really is a sense that music is bigger than just even what we understand as music today. It really is this idea of the world as being patterned, a time being patterned as the whole idea of participating in the patterns, you know, was… The word music was used to manifest that, you know. Right. But it is in a way the purest form because… Also because it is spiritual, right? It’s non-physical. It’s not like architecture or like images or like objects making a chair. It is a pure pattern. It’s a pure pattern that you can pick up, you know, like you were saying, where is the song? If I can sing a song in the morning and then I sing the same song at night, you know, it’s like I’m… It’s the same song, but I’m resonating it, but the song exists really in this spiritual pattern. And so it is a way to… It is a way for us to connect to the patterns of the world and to understand also what it is that we mean when we talk about spiritual things. You know, and to your point, Benedict, the idea that we see the angels singing, that we have this image of the heavenly choir is also to help us understand that there is a relationship even with principality, with angels and with this idea of singing, that they are manifesting the… The pattern back up to God. They’re kind of, you know, they’re glorifying God by using these patterns. And they’re also manifesting it to us as we kind of hear this glorious singing that is going up to God. That’s… Yeah, that’s beautiful. One of the most spectacular things that I enjoy intensely is the… Although I don’t ever feel really entirely capable of dealing with it, is the closeness of the soul in the singer. And I think I tell our students that there’s no mistake that the church says that we are to sing in our worship. That is not accidental. It’s not because we didn’t have the resources to have instruments or something like that. So the singing, the process… It’s not because instruments are evil. Yeah, good point. That’s the term that we’re having. So the experience of trying to, you know, expressing the ideal of a certain kind of sound in singing, it’s entirely individualized. The ideal of a singer’s voice is totally peculiar to that individual. Because what makes up that voice is totally, you know, the unique shapes and sizes of the various pieces of tissue and lung capacity and all that kind of thing. And what’s going on in their mind. So, yeah, well, let alone their psychology. So just the act of trying to find the ideal voice for every individual is a personal journey. And when you then try and actually use those tools to their most efficient and most effective and most beautiful end, what you invariably come up against are basically your wounds. And so I joke that I’m so sorry, all my students, but your voice lesson is a therapy session. And it’s even worse than therapy because in therapy you can be like, yeah, the next time I come up against this difficulty, I am going to behave this way. That’s how I want to be. That’s the ideal I’m going to shoot for. Well, in a voice lesson, there is no the next time. It’s right that second. And if you don’t do it, you’ll be able to tell that you didn’t do it and you will be disappointed and you will have to try the immediate second afterwards to do it again. To do it again. So it’s like the most real time self-soulcraft that I have found in frankly any of my teaching. And then when you get a bunch of people trying to do that, and that frankly that process sounds a heck of a lot like repentance, like active repentance. You get a bunch of people, individuals trying to do that who come together to then try and do that at the same time towards the same end. That’s why seeing it together with people is transcendent. That’s exceptional. And so, you know, part of our work here has been to say and to be completely honest, a lot of people who feel drawn to the church don’t necessarily feel that way because they feel like they’re good. I’m fine. I’m comfortable with who I am. This is great. They want more for themselves. And sometimes that wanting more is a desire to share with other people. And then you get a pastoral impulse. Well, a lot of those folks don’t tend to have the, let’s just be blunt, the requisite ego to be able to actually use their bodies confidently. And that’s why kind of, you know, the performer is almost a psychological type. You have to have a huge amount of actual psychological and physical confidence to be able to make a good sound. And so the process of trying to get people who are already somewhat inclined towards self-criticism or somewhat inclined towards putting themselves definitely second, you know, in order to care for others. Or who feel like what they’re being told by the churches, they have to… That they’re bad. Or they have to have basically like the idea that for us to repent and have humility, it means that we have to tell ourselves that we’re bad. That there’s a way. I just add that as a plus. This is like these are actual impediments to doing the job that we’re supposed to do. And you know, it’s stuff like this that you wind up coming up against when you have to sing together every day for hours a day. And you have to sing better. So what we found in our work here and, you know, I think it’s possible that educational institutions and even, you know, educational institutions that are founded in a church community, which there ought to be more. They could come up against these issues and try and figure out how to solve them just as we have. But we have this advantage of the frequency. So we… And the other thing is, too, is like when you sing, you can’t pretend that you’re all together. There’s no… I mean, like there’s a certain act… Sorry. There’s a certain way in which you do have to pretend when you sing because even if you don’t feel like the, you know, the thing that you’re singing about, you still have to act like you do. But in terms of the act of actually singing well, there’s no way to pretend that you sing well when you don’t. So it’s like… We all know this. So, but like we have this thing like in the church, I think, where we’re like… Like, where we can… To a certain extent, we can pretend to be really spiritual and we can do all kinds of other things that aren’t really spiritual at all. But we think that they are. They look like they are. And so we can get by and like we can all be really religious and devout. But then when we try to sing, it’s like, uh-oh, nope. It’s not happening. So you’re pretending there. Yeah, right. So that’s a great thing too. It’s like if we all worked a little bit more to get together on trying to sing well, then we might find that we can solve some of our other problems too. Interesting. So we kind of got artifacts from this process of continually coming… How do people come to us and say, please help me? Please, please help me. Maybe tell us what… Tell us what Artifact is. Give us a sense of what it is. Because I know what it is, but I want people to get a sense of what it is. Because it’s a very fascinating mission. It’s one which just makes so much sense when I saw it. So please tell us what it is and then we can put in there the story a little bit of how it came about. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, okay. So the Artifact Institute is a collective… What we’re calling it is a collective of culture creators in very basic terms. It’s a company that we’ve founded in the past six months. No, something like that. Well, what’s time? Yeah, I don’t know what… I don’t even know when it is anymore. Especially now. Who knows what date it is? Oh gosh, every day is the same. We talked about the rhythmic ordering of time, but like there is no rhythmic ordering of time. Welcome to eternity, everybody. So we kind of started with the idea and this evolved out of our discussions with our friend and colleague Nick Kotar. And also to some extent, but later on with Bishop Alexis who is… He lives at Teagon, he’s a newly elected bishop in the USFCA. To kind of figure out a way to solve what we think of as the problem. Let’s say the problem of context. We’re religious, yes. But we all kind of understand that nobody can be religious all the time. Or there has to be… There’s an ebb and flow to life. There’s an ebb and flow to the week. There’s an ebb and flow to your lifetime. And we go to church, but it’s like, what do you do with the rest of your time? Or should the rest of my week start to look like church? Is that the idea? It’s like, well, people have tried that. We’ve tried that. It’s not really the answer. And I don’t think it’s sustainable for most people or maybe for anybody. Interestingly, that’s not what the life of the monastics here necessarily looks like. No, I don’t think that’s what even a life in a monastery… Maybe some people can sustain that. So it’s like, well, what do you do with the rest of your time? And we’re also starting with this question of like, we have a church, but where is the church? What’s around it? What’s the context of the church? And so one of the things we came to realize is that a church exists in a culture. It’s not just a thing that stands on its own. It’s, you know, the church is in a town. The town is in a region. The region is in a country. But it’s like, so what is it that sustains the life of the church? Well, it’s a culture. And in the past, the whole idea of culture kind of evolved. And a lot of what we think of as culture is just the way your people have grown and adapted and evolved to live together, to work together, to eat together. In great part, just so they don’t die. It was not some lofty ideal. So we form a town. We form a tribe. We form a village so we can eat, so we can be safe, so we can raise our children and our tribe, our species. I don’t think anybody’s going to tend to things like that. But, you know, so that it can continue. We now in our time have this really interesting problem. Yeah, and again, it’s all precarious to a certain extent. But we’ve managed to solve a lot of the kind of practical problems of humanity. And we are continuing to solve them. I mean, that’s what we’re doing right now. I mean, infectious disease was just a part of life for all of time. And the idea that it would just wipe out a quarter or a third or half the population was just understood, like that could occur. What’s really interesting is that we have a lot of tools and a lot of systems and mechanisms to actually, like for us to think like that’s not the norm. That’s not what is going to occur. Or at least we’re trying to make it be that. And I think to a greater extent, we’re being able to succeed at that. But what’s interesting is that’s a new thing. Like humanity’s never really pulled this off before. And so I use that as an example of the ways in which like most of us now, most of humanity, most of the time has enough to eat. Most of us have a place to live. Most of us have, you know, in a sense, we’ve managed to create a remarkably secure, stable society all over the world. And we’re, you know, it’s still a work in progress, obviously. But compared to basically every other time, it’s pretty miraculous. So we, in a sense, like we don’t have to have a village or a tribe in order to survive from day to day. That’s a remarkable thing. But that’s introduced a new problem, which is that we now, because so many of our needs are provided for, we don’t know what we’re doing with our lives. We don’t know where we belong. We don’t know, we don’t have to connect with other people in order to eat, in order to not be destroyed by a band of marauders. So, you know, but yet, so but yet we’re, then we don’t have to connect with people. So we don’t connect with people. We don’t do things with other people. We don’t eat together. We don’t sing together. We don’t celebrate together. We don’t really work together. And right now, in the midst of quarantine, that’s more true than it ever has been. So but we find that as a result of that, we’re like really missing some key things. We’re kind of dying inside in some way. And so what we think of is that in the past, the phenomenon of culture kind of created itself out of necessity. But now we actually have to create culture still out of necessity, but a different kind. We need to do it in order to know who we are, in order to know where we belong, in order to know what the purpose of our life is, in order to connect with others, just, you know, for our souls to survive. So that’s part, that’s kind of the big picture, idea of like, well, so if we’re going to create these things, if we’re going to like deliberately create culture, rather than it just being able to occur on its own, how would that be done? Well, to a certain extent, it’s an issue of scale too, right? So what we also have in this time of rather extraordinary, practical resources is insanely high quality entertainment. And I don’t mean that like just, you know, really, really produce stuff is amazing. I mean that the actual technical level of your average piano student is considerably higher, even just in this past, I don’t know, 40, 50 years than it previously was. And, you know, recordings we have of really exceptional ensembles from the early 20th century, they’re kind of like, okay, it’s powerful, it’s emotive, it’s really beautiful in that way, but technically, it’s like a little lacking. Yeah, I mean, I think musicians are better now on the average than they were in the past. So, but the funny thing is that we have this sense of all of this culture creating being the responsibility of a specialized class. And that being the responsibility of a specialized class has given us this exceptional entertainment, but we didn’t realize what we were trading for that sort of exceptional resource. We didn’t realize that it was actually sort of psychologically and spiritually necessary for us to be working at this ourselves, not in order to kind of like take down the ideal, but we all were supposed to be working towards this ideal. It’s not to be on America’s Got Talent. No, no, it’s not. But it’s so we can know how to spend our time to hear. Yeah, but it’s shocking because in Quebec, we had a very traditional culture not very long ago. And my grandparents, in their generation, they would still take the table out of the living room and get the local fiddle guy to come in and call the dance. And it was just a normal part of life that you would do during the holidays, you do during for special occasions, and that is gone, right? So now you get a DJ to come and play recorded music. You know, you dance, but you don’t dance together. Everybody dances individually. So all the manifestations of culture are showing us that the problem that you talked about, which is in our moment of self-sufficiency, also in our moment of our desire to move away from meaning and move towards, you know, just this kind of material wealth, we’ve lost something. We’ve lost this togetherness. Yeah. So in that circumstance, if you were going to, admitting that that is an ideal that you like, like it pulls at your heart somehow, if you were going to try and reproduce that, what is the first question that would come to you? If I was going to try to reproduce that, I would be completely lost in every manner. Like I would be lost in exactly like how to do it. Exactly. How can I do that? You know, and I mean, I don’t just mean technically. I mean, how to do it in terms of even want getting people to want it. Like even that is already the first beginning. And then getting myself to want it deeply. I can want it intellectually, but to put the effort in to like do it. Whoa, that’s a whole other world. So, so, so yeah, to me, it’s like it feels like that world is completely lost. So the easiest way to navigate those treacherous waters is with a guide. And that is what our collective is. We because a we’re pedagogues. So not only are we working in a specialized sort of like, you know, we work in the professional world and that really that we could devote all our time and energy to that and we would still be struggling and there’s no question about that. There’s no end to how good you can get. But then it’s kind of like, you know, the the the Which is not to say I think we’re prophets, but there’s a certain job that a prophet has in a community. It’s like go find some go have some revelation go have some exalted experience and then you better go back to your community and be able to communicate that experience. Right because how the heck else is everybody going to know what they’re supposed to be working towards and you need to demonstrate it. You need to model it. You need to explain it with language. And so we’re trying to assemble and to a certain extent we have to do task analysis on ourselves. We have to say well, why how do we do that? And then we’re trying to assemble the technique that’s required in the team that it is at well the team to communicate that technique. To be able to guide people in this process of being able to just for just have one experience just one experience of the stuff you’re lacking and you don’t have to change your life. Just do it once and then maybe do it again. And so what we’ve worked towards creating are are it’s kind of a couple tiers of activity one. There’s the educational tier where we really assemble we kind of break down what what is is necessary for the taking the first steps in any of these. We call them elements and then being able to impart that now whether that’s one-on-one instruction or or creating a social context in which the technique can have life. And you know, what you said about how to get yourself to want to do it and how to get other people to want to do it. We all know the awkwardness of a party where you’re really not sure why you’re there. So it’s like well, I guess let’s just drink because that will numb the question of what we’re even doing. Right, right. So that’s probably why there’s a lot of you know, yeah, it’s like we think like people drink too much at a party, which I mean, I mean, that’s fun too. But you know people drink too much at parties because they’re partying too much. But actually we can tell that they do it because they’re not partying enough because they’re using alcohol to do all kinds of other things that like that actually like singing together or listening to a story or doing doing a contrary dance or playing an instrument or playing game. Even sitting on the edge of the party in a room that’s well decorated and you know, carefully. And has a fire and you know, I mean like, so we’re using like a single thing to do the job of all those other things. So our interest is, well, we should talk about Louisville. Yeah, so the first big event that we hosted was in Louisville and it was in January and it was over the feast of of Candlemas of the entry of the Lord into the temple and we Meaningful. Meeting. Meeting. Yeah. Go back to seminary. Sorry. The one of the really extraordinary insights that our friend Bishop Alexis brought to the process of coming up with this was his experience of being on Mount Athos. And he was a monk on only mountain for a little over a decade. And he he explained, you know, how do you get people who come from different different cultures different countries speak different languages to suddenly live in an immersive way together and have that kind of cohesion that you really need in order to survive that environment. And he said there were three aspects of life there and that was the common worship. That was what everything was founded on and then out of that flow the common work. And then from that and not the least of the three was the common feast. And so we took that formula and Bishop Alexis said his experience was that that was present at every level of his life his monastic life. And we took that formula and we thought okay, could we do this over a limited period of time in a pedagogical way, but also a way that feels complete in a remote location. And so partly because of the extraordinary sort of resources of that community st. Michael’s St. Michael the Archangel in Teokyan Church in Louisville and partly because of the assembly of people instructors and students that came together there the almost 200 people that you know were part of the the weekends program. First yeah, really. It surprised almost all of us with both its intensity and its efficacy really. So so the good news is that yeah, we can practice this we can get better at this which is really encouraging, you know. Yeah, I mean we we do a number of things under the artifact brand we as a team go and do do church music workshops in various parishes. We’ve also started to publish we created a song book of 12 essential folks songs that we think are good for kind of a home gathering for a party or songs you can sing with your with your friends or your kids and we’re going to do more with that. We’re probably going to make a recording to promote that I think you know people like to learn from from recordings and that’s really for those of us who really can’t read music when I saw that you would put up a recording. Okay, I feel like I can actually engage with this now because yeah, first I saw the prints. I was like, okay, this is not for me my friend. Well, that’s the thing about a song. I mean songs not on the score. Song is not the is not the notes on the page. That’s that’s that’s an entry point into the song, but there’s a lot of other ways to go in and by far the more the more common way to learn a song. For all of human history was was by ear. So so yeah, so we’re going to help we’re going to try work on that. We’re going to do consulting work where we go into a community. We speak with them. We work with them and we talk about some things they can do and we’ll even put on put on some kind of an event or help to coach them in that. But we also want to there there there to be some really like some magnet events where a lot of people can come from from all over and that’s what we started. You know, the level and the plan is to do it again in 2021. Where we can bring a lot of people together we and at that event we well you should talk about the kind of the rhythm of the day. I think that’s a good way to Yeah. Yeah, that common that common worship common work common feast thing, you know that can happen over a long on multiple scales. So the we structured it so that every day began with worship and we we sang in in you know small chunks the a kathis glories God for all things, which is kind of an exceptional piece, especially for what’s going on right now. And you know remarkable that it was composed by someone who was it was you know, In a prison camp. Yeah, it really is a very it’s very powerful for the modern. It’s a master piece, I think. Totally. Yeah, and it’s actually I actually believe it’s in a three act structure that mirrors the the cathartic journey of the here. I actually contend that the book about the kathis is a is a monum. I write it up Benedict. Send it to me. I will publish it on our on our symbolic blog there. Yeah, so tell us tell us. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, we started with that in the morning and part of the community is what’s remarkable about it to a certain extent also is this architecture. So they have some really amazing spaces that do what spaces are supposed to do. They tell you what you are supposed to do in them. You are and where you belong and and who God is and who your neighbor is like. I’ve heard you say that before Jonathan. Like we it’s like this the most significant art in a sort of sleeper way because we don’t know what to do if we’re in a space that’s telling us to do one thing. But you know, we’re supposed to do a different thing. So that community has a couple more hours now. So so we were in a beautiful space that really showed us that what we were supposed to do was, you know, be be still and praying and that’s how we started our day and then the rest of the work hours. We went to eat. We went to breakfast and then we did a group a group singing a group. All right, so we did the morning the morning singing and that had yeah, it was awesome partly because what our goal. I mean, I advise this on myself. Well, I’ve heard only good things about that event. I’ve heard just amazing people just really excited about it and myself feeling very lonely and and sad that I didn’t go. You invited me, but I just had something else. I don’t remember what it was. It’s okay. It’s okay. We have we for our own like, you know, sense of peace and insanity. We need to do these things too. So don’t worry. Don’t worry. No, but but the the morning thing was interesting because one of the one of the weird things is that if you want to have a celebration where something is some corporate activity happens that celebration can’t be a new thing. There has to be some memory that that that celebration is founded on. That’s the kind of like, oh we do this. So we had to teach the people there that these were songs they sang so that when it came time for the party, they could be like, oh, we should sing our songs. But it took several days of right of imparting that and holding their hands through that process for them to then think, okay, these are our songs and then that’s singing of them at the party, which was the final kind of, you know, capstone experience. Not not remotely the high point. It was just another of the many high points kind of it felt natural and that was that was kind of an interesting process pedagogical process for us because because just like you said, you wouldn’t know how to do a thing. That you didn’t do if you don’t do a thing, then how do you start doing a thing? And that’s a barrier that I think so many people come up against when they try to make they want to make their lives more beautiful. But that analogous memory thing like, oh, it’s got to be like another thing. I’ve done it. My grandparents knew how to do this, but I don’t know how to do and none of my friends do and none of my family does. So what do we do? So in a sense, it has to be taught again or taught a new I don’t know about again. It has to be taught a new. We have to have things for us and for our time. And it seems like the way you’re doing it in the sense that you’re building up and you’re actually creating the experience of of learning and then rejoicing in the thing you’ve learned. It seems like a nice little microcosm of of how it can work on a bigger scale, you know, because like I said, because it’s lost, we can’t it’s harder for us to access the bigger scale one. So building these small scale ones, you know, can can let’s say layer up and hopefully create bigger ones. I think it’s a great 100 percent. Yeah, it was super, super exciting to see it work so well. It worked better than we actually thought it was going to work. Which is so then after the morning sing, we would all disperse to the various disciplines that we were working. And so there was there was training for for for conductors. There was a there was there was a program for singers. There was a program for writers and storytellers. And that’s about as far as we were able to go with this first one. But we’d like to do more. And then we would come back to get together at some point in the day to actually have the choir rehearsals. And we were preparing for a concert and then for for for a service on Sunday morning for the Feast of the Meeting of the Lord. And the concert was actually a narrative program where Nick Kuchar. He worked together with with with the other writers in the workshop to prepare a narrative of the life of St. Simeon, more or less made up based on some of the things we have from older documents. And then and then we interspersed it with music song by fire, which was made up of a bunch of different people. The big choir was actually about 70 people. And then there was a smaller chamber group, which is about 30. And then there were 13 pros who were kind of the core. And then each of them sang a different thing. And the whole thing had a narrative and a dramatic arc. And you’re talking to Jonathan Peugeot. What Nicky, Nicky Nicholas noticed was that there was a symbolic. There was symbolic structure of the hero’s journey in the sequence of Vespers. Okay. And so the actual service of Vespers could be melded with the story that he wrote about St. Simeon and how the sequence of himnography in it actually followed the arc of his life. And that was an exceptional experience because our feeling was like, okay, we’re going to do a thing. It’s Vespers. There’s all these words, but we wanted to try and reawaken. Yeah, that word is that’s a fun word right now. To re-enchant Vespers. And we had to find the symbolic language in the service in order to really do that and bring it into a narrative. And it was really powerful. It was really amazing. It began with a procession where people were holding candles and siftinging. And there was incense and the whole church was dark. And then we processed up to the front. And we lit everybody’s candles and the narrator begins and then all the lights come on when the choir began to sing Rachmaninov. And it was pretty awesome. I mean, it’s pretty epic. So we did that. And then on the next day we had the liturgy and the whole choir sang for the liturgy and the student conductors who they also helped to conduct in the liturgy. And then at the end of it all, we had the big feast and we worked all through the day to prepare the base to go and forage for reedery. We brought in we were ironing the tablecloth and putting out the candles and setting the plates. It’s all under the expert instruction of our convidiality instructor Amanda Jacobs, who is a designer, interior decorator and designer. And who like that task analysis thing. Well, you know, these fancy things, this china I have in my cabinet, that’s not for me to use. I wouldn’t even know how to use it. So part of her job and everybody participated in this partly because what we’re trying to tell people is that this is this is this is for you. Yeah, I know. This is amazing. I love your approach. It’s such a great idea to have people prepare the feast that the themselves, you know, and like iron the tablecloths, put out the, you know, put out the decorate the table, do all that so that it feels like this is our feast. This is not something to go into a hotel lobby like a hotel greeting room and we just sit at the table and that’s it. It’s like this is exactly. Yeah. You have to have all three elements. You have to have the common worship so we all can get to get to get together and in some ways, what is our ideal? What do we believe in? Or what are we aiming at? And then then we all work together and we all sweat and you know, so we know we do the work and we do the work under the guidance of experts though, because there’s nothing so disappointing as work that feels like futility. You don’t know what you’re doing and you know it doesn’t work. It has to be the right work. But also bonds that you create when you work together are very strong. You know, people when we work together, we meet people in a much deeper way than if we’re just having a chat. So we work together, we know somebody has to hold the platter while the other person puts up the candles that we hung from the ceiling and you get your hands dirty and you know, like there’s a lot of bonds that you form as a community when you do it, when you do tasks to get together. We really, you know, we’re a specific and clear way. And then we do all that and then we all go back and we get and we put our nice party clothes on and we come back together and the room is lit with candles and there’s a band playing and there’s champagne and everybody’s just like, you know, just like just the kind of the reaction when people walk into the room was just the kind of gasp. This is so beautiful. And it’s like, but they made it. I made it. It’s our beautiful thing. So it’s like, it’s like I didn’t realize that I deserved to be treated like this or to treat myself like that’s a powerful thing. And then so we all sit down, do we know? So we pray, people give toasts, people told stories, people read poems. We sang saptams. We actually did country dancing. They did Arabic folk dancing. It was pretty spectacular. And so we were there for like four hours and you just had a sense of like, like you didn’t know how much time had passed. You didn’t want the party to end. Time, time passed differently. Yeah. But it would have been, it wouldn’t have had that transcendent value if we hadn’t all been working towards an ideal that we shared, that we articulated together. And that, you know, we all agreed upon sort of implicitly and then shared. And that’s the context that a church comes from. I mean, that’s what creates a church. And so we see leftover in society. We see the churches with the foundations underneath them eroding out from them. So what we’re trying to say to people is that, okay, so maybe you don’t live in a village anymore. But those things that people did in that were expressions of how their interaction on a sort of micro level were important, we can still do that. We have to modify our technique and we have to have conversations with experts and with artists and with culture creators and with, you know, thinkers about how we modify it because each new age the technique changes because the tools change and the context change. But there are these sort of fundamental needs that we need to address. And that working together will come up with a way more, you know, authentic expression than if just we let some elite class do this for us. What do they know about us? Well, how can they actually meet our peculiar needs? You know, Hollywood can’t produce all the stories. We have to tell some of our own stories. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then, like I always say, the stories that Hollywood, they tell us the stories. They’re not our stories. We don’t participate in them. We don’t feel like they are that they connect to us in the way that my story, you know, or hearing the story of a friend, you know, all of these stories are stories that you engage with that you that you can pray for the other person that you have this real interaction. It’s a it’s a real interlocking of stories, you know, and there’s nothing wrong with entertainment versions or the, you know, I love stories. I get told on Netflix. I mean, exactly. We need to not replace one with the other. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Great. But because like you need like it’s like in this whole debate now about like, how do we do because a lot of us couldn’t go to church for Easter. And, you know, we had the option to sit and watch a live stream of church. But in my mind, it’s like it’s like church, you know, like even being in church, it’s already in some sense, it’s a virtual reality because because the whole the whole like all the liturgical stuff we do is all. These encoded symbols and these and these stylized representations of things which are all in sense to create this this this idea of the kingdom of God. And so that’s already in my mind. It’s already VR, you know, and and and when it’s really well done, it’s really powerful when it’s not well done. It’s not as great. But but but like about it’s like I couldn’t wrap my mind around then watching a virtual version of that. It’s it was too far removed to me from reality. And so so we were so our idea was to to to actually to create an order that revolves around a meal and and and prayers at the meal around. We kind of made a ritual of putting on the clothes that you would have for Easter. We visualize decorating the table. And and the bringing out of the food and certain prayers to go with certain parts of the meal and then to make basically that’s what we can do on our own. We can make the Easter meal a bigger and more meaningful experience. And so that’s what we did. We actually created an order of that together with Bishop Alexis and one of the priests monks at St. And when we put and then we and then we and then we and then we made that available to to to people everywhere. And it actually got approved by the by the by the substitute. You say bishops actually they actually were totally shut. Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah. Like angry and and they were they got used in Australia and in South Africa and in Germany and in the UK. And and all over Canada. So this is the sense of like we we can because already was like, let’s see like what would worship at Easter look like if it grew out of our own experience. Yeah, so so that’s what was so it really I think it worked. We did that because I feel like it’s really important that we not just do church because that’s what we because that’s what we do. And it’s like like the worship of the church is a wonderful and beautiful thing, but it didn’t just come from nowhere. It didn’t just it didn’t just get dropped out of the sky. Even if some people believe that it really didn’t you know, it’s it involves out of culture. It involves out of people of people really being together and having relationships and then trying to find God and to know God and to love God. That’s where worship evolves from. You know, but but if we don’t take part in that if we don’t have a sense of of that evolution, if we don’t have a sense of where it fits into the into the rest of our lives. I really worry it becomes just something that’s totally imaginary. Something is totally totally artificial. Or at least just totally detached totally detached the rest of our lives. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So our sense is so I mean we have to kind of reconnect those things. Well, I think it’s a I’m really excited to see we’re going to this. I really I all the things I’ve seen have been beautiful. I think that the that you’ve thought out the method and also to kind of take people by the hand and just kind of guide them through. And so and I think it’s a it’s really a testimony to your to your own family to your own community that you have the strength at this time and kind of the resources to bring this together. And so I want to encourage everybody to to go I’ll be posting the links in the description artifact. You’ll see also the downloads that they have and the different resources that that they’re putting together. Hopefully when all of this chaos of of virus goes away, there’ll also be events and I will definitely be going at at the next event because I’m really excited. Awesome. By this project. Well, you could be well, it’s I mean it needs you. We need you. Well, thank you because I feel like I need exactly what you’re doing. So I just I it’s just it’s also really exciting for for me to see because we kind of started having small collaborations through Orthodox Art Journal and you know, different people work on different things and it’s just exciting to see us like with Nicholas Cotar and yourselves and myself and Andrew and all these different people that we’re on the same track. We all have our different little version of it. We all have our different vision, but we kind of understand the problem in similar ways. And so it’s great to feel like we’re even if we’re not together physically that we’re we’re a team in a certain way that we’re kind of working in the same in the same direction. So it’s that’s exciting. Exactly. Well, I think that’s I think at least my my I’m optimistic that that’s a sign that it’s from it’s something from God that that that we’re all being coordinated that we’re all being coordinated in some ways. Like in ways that we can’t see or even understand but it’s like, oh wow, we’re all doing the same thing. How did that how did that come about? You know, I think that’s pretty neat and hop on the same train. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, all right guys, so I am gonna we’re gonna keep an eye on all of this and hopefully in in a year or whatever we can have another discussion and track how everything has been going. So I’m looking forward to that as well. Awesome. Look forward to it. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for coming and talking with us. I know. Thanks for talking to me. I really liked it. Thanks.