Karen Mihalyi & Alison Mullan-Stout Connecting music to peace

Lorna Oppedisano

When she was in her mid-20s, Karen Mihalyi read the book “What Color Is Your Parachute? Your Guide to a Lifetime of Meaningful Work and Career Success.” It gave her three answers.

“One was be an activist. One was do healing work — counseling. And the other was do music — do the choir. Lo and behold, here I am, many years later, and that’s how I’ve arranged my life,” Karen said.

Now, after decades of leading the Syracuse Community Choir as founder and executive director, Karen is restructuring the organization with the help of Alison Mullan-Stout, assistant to the director.

Karen discovered her love of singing at a young age, when she organized a singing group that performed around the small town where she grew up. She followed that path through her childhood, singing in choirs and musicals at school.

“I was going to study music at Syracuse University, but then the Vietnam War happened,” she said.

Karen decided to put all her efforts into stopping the war. When students went on strike against the war, she dropped out of college to devote her time and energy to peace work. After spending a year in Europe, she returned and cofounded the Women’s Information Center and worked on antiwar projects. Around that

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time, she met and learned from singer/activist Holly Near, who Karen credits as the first person she heard talk about the importance of cultural work and the power that music and art have in that space.

Karen’s next big step in organizing others into song was during the inaugural year for Woman Harvest, a weekend of workshops, singing and safe space for conversation created by the Women’s Information Center.

She put out a call for interest and had about 100 women singing. Thinking back, she admitted it was daunting, since she had never arranged music or directed a choir before. It ended up being an amazing experience, she said.

“To stand in front of these 100 beautiful women, singing — singing is the most amazing thing — but then to put together something that was in harmony and to raise my arms and everyone would sing, it was thrilling,” Karen said. “People talk about directing, but if you’re really there and you’re looking at everybody, it’s so beautiful and so vulnerable.”

She was hooked. They continued to gather the large women’s choir at Women Harvest each year and even had smaller performances

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during the year, including a trip to sing at a women’s march in Washington, D.C.

“That was an amazing thing. A lot of different kinds of women joined in,” Karen said. “We were singing and witnessing and soothing and giving courage to the women who were being arrested.”

In the early 1980s, Karen’s peacemaking work took her to Nicaragua with three other women, an experience that eventually inspired the creation of the Syracuse Community Choir.

“That was my first taste of what it’s like to live in a country that’s fighting a war, but also the incredible poverty much of the world lives in. But what people were doing in this revolution to create a different society was really amazing,” Karen said. “One of the biggest takeaways I got from that trip was that art belongs to the people.”

Karen was driven to found an organization open to anyone and not impeded by money or perceived talent. With that, the Syracuse Community Choir began in 1985.

“We believed that everyone could sing, that everyone had a right to participate in creating beauty and art, and that we would do whatever was necessary to look at the barriers that kept people from participating,” Karen remembered. “What we tried to do and we’ve

tried to do since then is create the kind of world that we want, right in the choir.”

Since its founding, the choir has grown to include a separate children’s choir and teen choir and hold two main concerts each year — a winter solstice performance and summer solstice performance — along with other performances at local performing venues, rallies and schools.

In 2016, Alison saw a flyer for the choir’s performance and decided to attend.

“I was just blown away. There were puppets coming down the aisles and there was humming in the dark,” she said. “There’s a real message to the music. I’ve always loved music and loved singing with people.” Just as Karen had been hooked that first year of the Women’s Harvest choir, Alison, too, was hooked. Initially helping in a volunteer capacity with several projects, Alison’s role in the Syracuse Community Choir grew until she joined the staff. Along with a small number of paid staff, there are many volunteer opportunities in the organization.

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“It’s a way for people to be involved and to have a role,” Alison said. “As I started to get more involved, it really gave me a deeper sense of community.”

When the pandemic hit, it impacted the choir drastically. In-person rehearsals and performances halted. The team, led by Karen and Alison, set up virtual programming for Wednesday evenings, when they would typically hold rehearsals. Along with singing, they also held social justice programming. When it could be done safely, they did sing-outs to visit and sing with members who had limited or no access to technology.

These past couple years have given the team an opportunity to evaluate what they want the organization to look like and what goals they want to achieve moving forward.

“The pandemic means that we have to reorganize everything,” Karen said. “It’s been daunting really to figure out how.”

As Karen begins to transition to a smaller role, they know no one can take her place, Alison said. She explained they are thinking about what a less hierarchical structure might look like and applying for grant funding for additional staffing.

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Their commitment to accessibility and diversity in the choir remains a top priority, Karen said.

“We have these goals that are connected to worldwide movements — worldwide desires to live with equity, to figure out, ‘How do we create a world where every voice matters?’” Karen said. “That’s our theme statement: we believe that everyone can sing and every voice matters.” SWM

For more information on the Syracuse Community Choir, including upcoming performances, visit syracusecommunitychoir.org.

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