Who wrote "The Book of Love?"

The Echoes of Peace Choir, directed by Sara Thomsen, will present its fall concert “The Book of Love” at 7pm, Saturday, November 10, at Sacred Heart Music Center, 201 West Fourth Street in Duluth. Admission is a $15-20 suggested donation at the door. Proceeds from the concert will benefit Together for Youth, LGBTQ support group.

The concert, featuring love songs and songs about love, is a celebration and affirmation of the right to love—and if you choose, to marry—the one you love. The concert follows on the heels of the MN Marriage Amendment (on the Nov 6 ballot). Echoes of Peace is one of over 100 Minnesota arts organizations that have joined Minnesota Citizens for the Arts to voice opposition to the marriage amendment.

In addition to the 70+ member Echoes of Peace Choir, director Sara Thomsen and her partner, Paula Pedersen, will be featured singers at the performance. “As a singer, I am often asked to sing at weddings,” says Thomsen. “The irony of singing songs to honor something to which I am not legally entitled—in Minnesota—is not lost on me. I wanted to respond to what is truly a hurtful amendment by singing love songs and songs about love that are a blast to sing, and to do so with my ‘unlawfully’ wedded partner (though we are legally married in Iowa!), in community with others, and in clear affirmation, recognition and honoring of all loving and committed relationships. Including my own.”

Other special guests for the performance include Twin Cities based vocal artist Sarah M. Greer and pianist Ryan Frane, UMD Jazz Studies Director. Songs include Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” The Monotone’s “Book of Love”, Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” and many more.

Concert proceeds will benefit Together for Youth which has served hundreds of LGBTQ and allied youth in the greater Duluth area for over 17 years. A social and support group, LSS (Lutheran Social Services) Together For Youth has met weekly throughout this time at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in the Central Hillside neighborhood. Other services Together for Youth offers include one-on-one support, advocacy, educational outreach and maintenance of an LGBTQ Youth Resource Directory. A focus of the group is exploration of queer history with intention to foster engagement with our region’s LGBTQ elders.

The Echoes of Peace Choir is a non-audition community choir motivated by its mission to inspire awareness, action and reflection among choir and audience members on critical social issues, using music and the arts to build and bridge informed, engaged and caring communities.

You Are My Other Me

[The following is the summary of how "You Are My Other Me" became the theme for our 10th Anniversary Concert, which was held April 22, 2012 at Sacred Heart Music Center, Duluth. Proceeds for the concert went to Grant-Nettleton Community Collaborative.]

You are my other me. 

If I harm you, I harm myself. If I respect you, I respect myself.

The Mayan concept of “In Lak Esh”

In January 2012, as this 10th anniversary choir season began, a news report from Tucson, Arizona caught my attention. The Mexican American Studies Program had been deemed “illegal,” and must be discontinued by February 1. If they did not comply, the school district would face loss of funding. And so it was. Books were taken off shelves, boxed up, put away in storage under lock & key.

I scanned through the list of “banned books” and discovered I had one on my own shelves: Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire, Brazilian educator. I put the other titles on my wish list: Critical Race Theory, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures, edited by Elizabeth Martinez, Message to Aztlán, by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales, Chicano! The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement, by F Arturo Rosales, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, by Rodolfo Acuña, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, by Bill Bigelow.

I dug a little deeper to find out what sorts of things this program, deemed illegal, was teaching. I should be working on learning the tenor and bass part to that one song, and the soprano and alto part to that other song so I could teach it at choir practice. But books, boxed up and taken away?

My mind flashed on a trip to Berlin years ago. I was walking across the city’s large public square Bebelplatz, with fellow musician and travel mate Hans. We stumbled across a large clear glass plate set into the cobbles beneath our feet. Startled, we bent down and peered through the glass to find a room with nothing in it but a bunch of white empty bookshelves. “They must have taken down the display,” I remember thinking. I hoped the museum and gallery we were about to visit was more up to date.

Then we saw the following words of Heinrich Heine engraved on a tiny plaque: “Das war ein vorspiel nur wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen” (“Where they burn books, they ultimately burn people”). Flipping through our travel book, we discovered we were standing on the site of the infamous Nazi book burnings. 20,000 books up in flames. I looked again at the empty shelves. I don’t remember what else I saw that day. But I remember the books. That I didn’t see.

I really should figure out what’s the best key to do that one song in, so it’s not too low for the basses this time, and I have to remember to get copies of the lyrics for that other tune. But I couldn’t focus on the music. I needed to know: What are they teaching in this Mexican American Studies Program? I stumbled upon these words by María Federico Brummer, a Tucson high school teacher:

“Our opponents claim we teach hatred of “Whites.” There’s no truth to that. Our students see the anti-Mexican sentiment in Arizona, but we teach that we are all human beings and race is a social construct used to divide us. We teach the Mayan philosophy of “In lak ech,” which means “You are my other me.” We ask students to look into each other’s eyes. What you see is your reflection. We teach that human beings should not just respect, but love one another.” *

Tonight we dedicate this evening of song to the Mayan philosophy of “In lak ech.” Everybody’s story is important. If I don’t learn about your story, I don’t fully know my own story, because “you are my other me.” We are linked, one to another, interconnected, inter-woven. We really should get to know ourselves better. Eat, drink, sing, tell stories. Loosen up a little, and get to know your other me.

Sara Thomsen
Artistically Distracted, Echoes of Peace Choir


* NEA(National Education Association) Journal, January 2011