Why Choral Music Shouldn’t Be Easy

On Art, Effort, and Community

We are living in a moment that prizes ease above almost everything else. We automate, outsource, hit the drive-through, and look for faster, cheaper ways to produce something that looks like the real thing. Artificial intelligence can now generate text, images, even music in seconds. Efficiency has quietly become a cultural virtue. It’s worth pausing to ask what gets lost when ease becomes the goal, especially for things that once depended on time, patience, and people paying attention to one another.

Large-scale music refuses this logic. You cannot automate a choir or an orchestra into existence, and you cannot shortcut the hours of rehearsal, the listening, the disagreement, the missed entrances, or the slow process of learning how to breathe and count together. The only way this kind of music comes alive is through sustained work, done collectively over time. It is slow by design, unmistakably human, and impossible to fake.

Read the full article in the Press-Citizen →

Thank you, Alex Koppel, CSIC Conductor, for these observations and the nudge toward building habits to ensure community choral music remains strong in Iowa City in 2026 and beyond.