Joy in Battle

When I joined a choir recently, I was such a musical idiot that I had to ask which of the four notes at the beginning of a bar the alto is supposed to sing. Ah, said the music director, widening and then swiftly narrowing her eyes, that would be the bottom note in the treble clef.

Later, when she started tossing around the word “descant,” I was baffled again until a fellow alto revealed that it is when, during the song’s final verse, a few of the sopranos lift their voices away from the rest of the others, up high, in counterpoint to the melody. I was still trying to imagine what that would sound like when the descant started and my own throat closed in awe. Those soaring, searing voices gave new meaning to the notes the rest of us had been singing. They took the song to a new plane, a place of far greater beauty. A place past hope and into the powerful arena of certainty.

In our paralytic international discourse over the high-carbon world we have made, a...