Dates: Check your local times using this date/time converter.
Wednesdays @ 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM PT
September 16, 23, 30
October 7, 14, 21, 28
November 4, 11, 18, 25
December 2, 9, 16.
Cost: Recommended course fee is $25
While you are able to join free of charge, as a not for profit we rely on donations and your support is appreciated.
Listening to the World in a New Way
For four seasons, Harmony of Humanity has taken us around the world through music. We have listened to songs of celebration and sorrow, resistance and remembrance, faith and freedom. We have heard ancient traditions carried forward by new generations and contemporary artists finding new ways to give voice to the experiences of their people.
With Series 5, we are widening the lens.
Music will remain at the heart of Harmony of Humanity, but this season we will venture beyond the music to explore more of the cultures from which it comes. We will look at the art people create, the food they prepare and share, the traditions they preserve, and the stories that help communities understand who they are.
Because culture is never expressed in only one way.
A song may carry the same history that appears in a painting or a piece of embroidery. A rhythm may have traveled the same migration route as a favorite dish. A communal meal may tell us as much about hospitality, survival, family, or belonging as a national anthem. Art, music, and food can all become vessels of memory.
And sometimes they become instruments of change.
We begin Series 5 with Where Humanity Finds Its Voice, traveling from the extraordinary polyphonic singing traditions of Georgia and Estonia to the communal power of Sacred Harp singing, the music of Ireland, and the songs that accompanied South Africa's struggle against apartheid. These are not simply performances. They are examples of what happens when people sing together—when the individual voice becomes part of something larger.
From there, we turn to a new generation.
In Youth Voices Rising: Youth, Protest, and the New Global Sound of Resistance, we will hear young artists from Chile, Peru, Iran, Indigenous North America, South Africa, Palestine, and elsewhere using music to confront injustice, reclaim language and identity, protect the Earth, and imagine a different future.
Later programs will invite us to experience the world through the extraordinary voices of women; through instrumental music that communicates without a single word; and through the human voice itself, stripped of instruments altogether.
Throughout the season, we will stop along the way to look more closely. What art was being created in these places? What might have been served around the family table? What histories shaped these sounds? What traditions survived conquest, migration, oppression, or exile? And what new forms are emerging as cultures meet and change?
We are not attempting to become experts in any of these cultures. Instead, we are practicing something at the heart of compassion: curiosity.
What happens when we encounter another culture not as tourists looking at something unfamiliar, but as human beings asking, What matters to you? What do you celebrate? What do you remember? What do you create? What do you eat together? What makes you sing?
Perhaps somewhere along the way we discover that the differences among us make the world infinitely more interesting—and that beneath those differences are remarkably familiar human longings: to belong, to remember, to celebrate, to grieve, to resist, to love, and to hope.
Harmony of Humanity — Series 5 is an invitation to listen, look, taste, wonder, and travel together.
Come curious.
The world has much to share with us.
