Mary Cohen and Arnold Grice believe in the power of music to heal, to bind disparate people together and to embody compassion and humanity.
An associate professor of music education at the University of Iowa, Cohen in 2009 founded the Oakdale Prison Community Choir in Coralville, and in 2010, a songwriting workshop at the prison there.
Grice, a 49-year-old Moline native who now lives in Davenport. originally had a 35-year sentence, and served over 14 years at three Iowa prisons, including Oakdale. The two of them will describe their experiences in a talk Saturday, April 1, 2023 at 10 a.m., as part of a new lecture series at the Deanery School of Music, 1103 Main Street, Davenport.
Their talk (admission is “pay what you can”) is called “Songwriting and Music-Making in Prisons to Create Caring Communities Inside and Outside of Prisons.”
“In the middle of my madness, I was blessed and fortunate to meet Dr. Mary L. Cohen. To say that she was a ray of sunshine in a dark place would be an understatement,” Grice wrote for the Deanery website. “Mary as well as many other volunteers from the University of Iowa not only rejuvenated my soul but also showed me how to tap into other talents that were lying dormant.”
“With the help of Oakdale community choir, I began to pick up my love for songwriting,” he said.
“Mary, she saved our life, you know,” Grice said this week of Oakdale prisoners, who took part in the community choir with residents of the surrounding community. “For anybody that wanted to make a change, she was one of those volunteers that came in and gave us like a second chance, and believed in it.”
“She helped us start writing poems, writing songs and recording it, man,” Grice said. “It was a blessing to meet her.”
He helped write six songs for the choir at Oakdale.
“It was sort of like God hadn’t gave up on me,” Grice recalled. “When you’re in prison and you get a charge and sometimes people count you out. But then again, something like that happened, the news was there. We were in the newspaper and it was like, wow. You got a second chance to show what you can do.”
The choir program showed that everyone deserves second chances.
“It put us back, you know what I mean? Where we needed to be,” Grice said. “We had like 40 people coming in from Iowa City, North Liberty and they coming inside the prison and they letting us sit in this room and practice with them. Now, here we are in but these are human beings like from society, women.
“And so they put their trust in you that you’re gonna act like a man,” he said. “When somebody give you a chance like that, you have to show up and show and prove, you know what I mean? And just let them know that I do deserve that second shot.”
He was the first recipient of a Deanery music scholarship, which allowed Grice to buy computer equipment and produce his own music. Cohen introduced him to former Deanery executive director Rishi Wagle, who is tutoring Grice and helping him become more technology savvy. (Wagle also studies at Iowa with Cohen, where he’s pursuing his master’s in music education.)
Grice hopes to go to college to get a degree in music recording. He currently works cutting hair and he started a podcast called “The Bare Truth.”
Promoting collaboration and well-being
Cohen researches music-making and well-being, songwriting, and collaborative communities. She has been a member of the advisory board for the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights for over 10 years.
Her research centers around how music education can be a tool for abolishing the prison industrial complex. In the prison songwriting workshop, the participants have written over 150 songs, and the Oakdale Choir has performed over 75 of these songs, many available on the choir website HERE.
She designed and hosted a “Learning Exchange,” a new model for co-participation (singing, moving, and discussions based on a select theme) with all involved in November 2018 with the Soweto Gospel Choir, Maggie Wheeler, and Sara Thomsen.
She is collaborating on an international initiative about the role of music in prison, peacebuilding, and abolitionist principles. Her research and writing culminated in a book (with Stuart Paul Duncan) titled Music-Making in U.S. Prisons: Listening to Incarcerated Voices, released last fall.
This is the first book-length academic history and survey of current practices of music-making in U.S. prisons.
“Our work has shown us the harmful effects of punitive systems within the prison industrial complex and has confirmed and clarified our premise: that music-making in prisons can help transform a revenge-based culture of self-perpetuating pain and violence to a care-based culture of mindful rehabilitation building an awareness of our common humanity,” Cohen said.
Cohen will also do a reading and book signing at Prairie Lights in Iowa City on April 11 at 7 p.m.
The book looks at the role music-making can play in achieving goals of accountability and healing that challenge the widespread assumption that prisons and punishment keep societies safe.
Cohen and her co-author, Stuart P. Duncan argue that music-making creates opportunities to humanize the complexity of crime, sustain meaningful relationships between incarcerated individuals and their families, and builds social awareness of the prison industrial complex.
Recognizing common humanity
Oakdale is a medium-security prison in Coralville, just outside Iowa City.
Music making in prisons recognizes the humanity of those incarcerated and gives people an outlet for expression and socialization, Cohen said this week.
“Perhaps the most important in the United States is to broaden the general public’s awareness of our common humanity,” she said.
“Sometimes people think, how should someone be punished rather than what harm has been committed and how could we heal the harms?” Cohen asked. “So the broader goals with music-making in prisons are to abolish the prison-industrial complex, bring awareness to our common humanity, help the general public realize that people in prison are remarkable. We need ways of healing the harm that survivors of crime were going through and that forgiveness and mercy are actual vital ways of how we should be interacting with one another.”
What’s powerful about songwriting in prisons is that “it’s an opportunity for someone to take an idea created in their own heart and mind,” Cohen said, noting songs are written alone or with others.
“That experience of taking a song someone wrote and then having a whole group of people learn it, it’s just very powerful to embody something as a group, a communal body creating from someone’s idea in their heart and mind and then when we perform it, having an entire audience experience it,” she said. “So it’s a really beautiful process.”
Cohen stopped the program at Oakdale in early 2020 partly due to the pandemic, and partly due to a new warden that took over that year. The previous warden was very supportive of the choir, and the new one has not responded to her request to continue, she said.
In December 2018, Iowa PBS aired a special segment featuring the Oakdale choir, as part of its “Greetings From Iowa” series. See the video HERE.
For anyone (in prison or not), Cohen said singing has many benefits – including enhancing well-being, social skills, emotional well-being, fostering a positive environment, self-expression, communication, development of positive relationships, rehabilitation and reintegration, reducing self-harm and improving self-esteem and confidence.
Cohen co-hosts a monthly Zoom call with people across the globe that do work with music in prisons. “So we have people from all over the U.S. and all over, and we switch times every month,” she said.
“It’s just taken different variations since the pandemic,” she said this week. “I’ve collaboratively written two different articles with choir members that are in prison. And then I’ve done some collaborative songwriting with formerly incarcerated choir members.”
“On its own, prison is profoundly isolating and drives counter-social behavior. Integrating music, specifically, offers a tangible experience of the value of resonance over dissonance,” says a January 2023 review of Cohen’s book in Little Village magazine. “Music-making is a communal act that drives pro-social behavior.
“Music-Making in U.S. Prisons lays out this and other arguments with clarity,” the review says, closing with: “It’s a fascinating look at how we assign value to art and to humanity.”
To learn more about the Oakdale choir, click HERE.