This commentary is by Joseph Gainza, who lives in Marshfield.
I can’t say that Larry Gordon and I were friends. We were friendly, certainly, but we never went for walks together, shared meals or our stories.
On one level, our relationship was transactional. I would attend concerts he organized, pay my entrance fee and, in return, would receive an evening of magic in the form of community-generated music.
Such evenings had a familiar rhythm: about 30 minutes before the start of the performance, people began drifting into the church sanctuary, temporarily transformed into a concert hall. In subdued voices we greeted one another — some we had not seen since the last concert Larry
organized. Without a scorecard it was hard to tell performers from audience; we were all from the community. Catching up with friends in the short time remaining before the concert became an art form in itself.
As the performance time approached, a certain quiet excited energy began to stir in the room; people seating themselves, waving to new arrivals, reading through the program with the always informative history of the music we were about to experience. If there were musicians, we could watch as they tuned their instruments, played a few notes, shuffled music sheets or, more recently, set up their foot-operated iPad-like electronic devices from which they would read the music.
Eventually, and usually only a little late, from the back of the hall the singers would process to the altar, now a stage, and place themselves according to the range of their voice — soprano, alto, bass, tenor, and so on. Their faces, closely surveyed by us in the audience, registered nervousness, joy, expectation, shyness, pride.
They had every right to feel pride. For weeks on end they had rehearsed every note we were about to hear. They had struggled through what sometimes were difficult compositions. and had, under Larry’s gentle eye and encouraging guidance, mastered them.
Smiles were exchanged between us and the singers — the evening would soon succeed in blurring those distinctions. Here we were, come together to give and receive — a reciprocal
relationship that buoyed us all in the power of community. We had moved from transaction to gift.
Finally, the one person most responsible for bringing us together, Larry Gordon, would walk down the center aisle to take his place as conductor. The audience most often would rise and welcome him with delighted applause.
With a simple bow and no fanfare, Larry would turn to his singers, raise his hands for a brief moment and with elegant gesture cause the music to explode into the transformed space.
This was the magic Larry inspired time and again — in Montpelier, throughout Vermont, around our nation and the world.
Larry died from a bicycle accident on Nov. 9. And around the world, people came together to sing him to his final resting place. We gathered to express appreciation and gratitude, to relive the many, many times Larry reminded us of our common humanity and our ability to give, receive and share in the beauty humanity can create.
Years ago, when we still held spaghetti dinners in the community center above the Plainfield Food Co-op, Larry talked about his decision to do his community organizing through music. He explained that music has the power to transcend divisions to lift our spirits and our vision to
levels where we can experience our essential equality and unity as a people.
And Larry, good to his word, did just that. Using the skills he picked up as a community organizer with SDS and later Urban Planning Aid, he founded the Word of Mouth Chorus, Village Harmony, Northern Harmony and the Onion River Chorus.
With both Village Harmony and Northern Harmony, Larry organized tours of teens to perform all over Europe and South Africa. He arranged for teens from some of these countries to come to the U.S., where they toured with one or the other group.
In an interview he did for the Vermont Historical Society in 2015, he described these efforts as “creating new institutions that help empower people and support people,” and “building bridges across cultures.” He related how Americans performing in such places as Bulgaria, Macedonia,
Georgia and South Africa, and singing songs native to those nations, younger people were encouraged to value their traditional cultures, much to the delight of older generations. Tributes to him have poured in from all over the world, where people continue singing him to his final home.
Larry thus became an excellent and effective peacemaker — between generations, cultures, nations, and within our own communities. He brought us together, performers and audience alike, to marvel at how wonderful it can be to celebrate our time, our place and the world.
