Singing across America's divides - Incite at Columbia University

In a nation increasingly divided by political, social, economic, and religious divides, what can be done to bridge the divides through sharing moments of humanity and commonality?

Domestic Harmony, led by Don Quixote Award recipients Brian Carey and Bailea Rehberg, attempts to answer this question by bringing together people who inhabit the same geographical community—but experience different socio-political realities—through song.

Launching their pilot expedition in the summer of 2024, Carey and Rehberg traveled along Route 11 from the Canadian border, through Appalachia, and into New Orleans in a mobile recording studio for their month-long experiment. Along the way, the pair set up along street corners and in public squares and invited people to contemplate the state of the union and what they envisioned to be the solutions to the nation’s disunity. Consistently, during their interviews, participants discussed the need for discussion and listening across cultural divides in order to ameliorate the disunity in the nation. Then, these interviews would conclude with a rendition of a song that the participants felt resonated with the themes of the interview.  

Future expeditions will follow the same general template: travel along the length of one of the old federal routes in a kind of self-guided tour of different cross-sections of the country. Following their travels, Carey and Rehberg endeavor to create a series of radio essays of their interviews and performances with the people they have met. However, the pair conceive of this project as going beyond the radio essays. As Carey described, the project is “not quite an academic oral history project, nor is it strictly journalism, and neither is it somewhere in between the two. It’s more a kind of social work.” 

For Carey and Rehberg, the trip was transformative as they watched how strangers, who may otherwise be ideologically opposed, were able to cultivate a moment of humanity and, indeed, harmony. For Carey, this was the underlying and longtime goal of the project:

"The end is rather simply to be there with people: to talk, to listen, and to sing—that is, to have a human encounter and to create a record of it to share.  And if, by our humble and sincere efforts, we can connect two individuals who otherwise might have learned—based on some fiction or another—to hate one another into a bond of even temporary friendship and deliver to them a monument of that connection that they can keep for themselves (or even share with pride with their loved ones), we will consider our efforts to have been successful."