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Moving Music: Bringing Joy into Work and Life with Bennett Konesni
In this enlivening conversation, Megan sits down with Bennett Konesni—a musician and garlic farmer based in Maine. He directs Bagaduce Music, a music library, performance and educational center, runs The Worksong Project, and tours internationally performing and teaching musical labor, the songs and tunes of Maine, and his original compositions. Together they explore the joyful space where work and play meet. Bennett shares how his younger years aboard Maine’s schooners awakened him to the power of music as a unifying, energizing force—one that transforms physical labor, community gatherings, and even staff meetings into experiences of coherence, creativity, and vitality. As he says, “There’s a space in between work and play… and the music is just a direct path into that space.”
They reflect on the interplay of essential elements such as rhythm, structure, and playfulness as pathways to belonging. Bennett describes how rhythm itself becomes an entryway: “If you have a body, you have a rhythmic element… we are rhythmic beings.” They explore the subtle communication that emerges in group song—beyond what words can hold. “Music gets people through the divisions that words create,” he says. He also explains how bringing a sense of playfulness into the workplace offers a powerful lens for leaders seeking to bring more ease, connection, and coherence into meetings, strategy, and collaboration.
Bennett shares his evolving vision, Moving Music, and his desire to pass on this ages-old practice through workshops, books, rowing and farming projects, and everyday acts of shared song. “It’s our birthright,” he reminds us. “Music is there for us—whether we’re rowing, planting garlic, or cleaning the kitchen.”
An uplifting exploration of what becomes possible when we let music move our work—and our lives—inviting us into what Bennett calls “the Way… the place where you’re getting something done and having a great time doing it.”
Bennett Konesni is a musician and garlic farmer based in Maine. He directs Bagaduce Music, runs The Worksong Project, and tours internationally performing and teaching musical labor, the songs and tunes of Maine, and his original compositions.
Links:
Bagaduce Music
Music and Garlic: bennettkonesni.com
Library of Congress: Homegrown Series - Bennett Konesni Profile Concert
Washington Post: Sea shanties are having a moment
NY Times: City Slickers Take to the Crops, With Song
NPR: Mainers Are Working To Give Historical Sea Chanties New Life
TEDxFruitvale: Transforming Work into Joy
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
TRANSCRIPT:
Moving Music: Bringing Joy into Work and Life with Bennett Konesni
Megan: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Spirit of Leadership Podcast. Listen in as we talk with emerging as well as seasoned leaders, change makers, and visionaries, and hear their stories—how they have overcome challenges, how they cultivate inspired vision as stewards and mentors shining their light to uplift and empower others, reconnecting us through a sense of belonging to the natural world and to the interweaving circles of just and vital communities.
Hey Bennett.
Bennett: Hi Megan.
Megan: It's so great to have you on the Spirit of Leadership Podcast.
Bennett: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Megan: So I'm gonna let you introduce yourself because you have so many things that you engage in and you are passionate about, and so I'd like you to just jump right in and introduce yourself to our listeners.
Bennett: Okay. My name's Bennett Konesni. I grew up in Maine and have been either in Maine or the East End of Long Island, Shelter Island, New York, for most of my adult life, working on farms, starting farms, making music happen—whether it's for contra dancing or singing while working or writing my own songs.
And I guess if you could boil down a lot of my work, it's getting people to do stuff and have some fun while they're doing it. I think maybe the key idea that unites my work is that there's a space in between work and play—or what we think of as work and play—and I'm looking for any way or every way, basically the musical way, of getting people to occupy that space.
Mostly it's the music that gets us there, but then I think there's also a mindset thing that works for me and helps work for other people. The music is just a direct path into that space.
Megan: And how did you come to this?
Bennett: It started on schooners on the coast of Maine. These are tall ships that take out tourists these days, but it was a big part of Maine's culture in Penobscot Bay and along the coast of Maine—bringing food and timber and granite and ice all over the world.
And to raise the sails and bring up the anchor, music became a thing that was a big part of how people operated the boats. It was actually all along the East Coast and even down in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a major part of how boats moved and how teams worked together for hundreds of years in American maritime trades.
But Maine really kept it going. When I was a teenager in the 1990s, I worked as a deckhand aboard these boats, and we sang while bringing up the anchor and putting up the sails—historic vessels using historic songs and techniques to put up thousands of pounds of canvas and bring up thousands of pounds of old-fashioned anchor every day.
I didn't really realize it, but that was the foundation of what's become a life’s work of singing while jogging or singing while planting garlic or singing while rowing, singing while tipping spruce boughs to make wreaths—all kinds of community work projects that music helps facilitate.
And that's, I would say, at the core of my work and what I'm up to. And then all of the other projects—more organizational leadership type stuff—starting Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, executive director of Bagaduce Music (one of the world's largest music lending libraries) in Blue Hill, Maine, and Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island.
Those have been two major community projects, but I try to exhibit leadership through the same principle that we have while we're hauling up the anchor, which is that there's a space in between work and play. We can find that edge where you're really getting something done and you're having a great time doing it.
And I would say even if you're in a meeting, a staff meeting or a strategy session, that concept is really powerful. I try to get people there. I'm just always trying to find that spot. And when I'm not in that spot, I'm not very happy. So I'm always trying to get back to that feeling that I get.
If we're singing and rowing, I have more energy when we finish. We could row for an hour and a half hard and sing the whole time, and I have more energy when we get back to the dock. Or we could plant 5,000 heads of garlic in a morning and I'll have more energy at the end than I did when I started, which isn't how we normally think of those sorts of activities.
So if I've ended a staff meeting and I have more energy than we had when we started, I know that I found that spot.
Megan: Yes. And it's interesting that you began with this as a teenager—you came to this with your own openness to it.
Bennett: Yeah.
Megan: And to experience. I think as teenagers we're looking for that sense of community and finding that with other people. But it's interesting that something that's very hard to do, like the weight of the sails and the anchor, actually energizes you. Do you think it's also the communion with the other people so you don't have to be using words to communicate what needs to happen?
Bennett: Absolutely.
Megan: There’s some other kind of communication.
Bennett: Yeah, you nailed it. The division between work and play is a false dichotomy, I think. And we use words because they help us communicate— we live in a world where words are used all the time and they help us understand what's going on. And they have a fundamental flaw, which is that every word takes the full variety and diversity and complexity of any concept and starts to build walls around it so that you can say, “This is the difference between red and green.” You build walls around the concepts.
But when it comes to things like work and play, in the effort to simplify communication about these ideas, we create a division that doesn't fully capture the nuance of what's going on. And so when we're singing—especially if we're doing wordless songs—we neatly sidestep that issue with words. And even if we are singing with words, they often take a back seat to the type of communication which is happening, which is around rhythm, which is around melody and harmony—around other musical concepts that seem to have… they probably have different pitfalls to communication around perceived skill.
People think, “I can't sing. I can't carry a tune in a bucket,” people will say—which is about a technical ability to deliver a melody, which does get in the way of communication. But ultimately the division that happens around words is really a big one to get over, and music gets people through it in a really nice way.
Megan: One of the wonderful things about you, and being with you when you're leading songs—I haven't actually rowed a boat with you doing the songs—but some of the ones that I've done with you and witnessed, that energy that you generate… Everyone belongs. It's a place of belonging.
Bennett: Right!
Megan: And so it doesn't matter what anybody's skill level is—everyone feels this togetherness.
Bennett: Yeah.
Megan: And it generates that happiness.
Bennett: Yeah.
Megan: And so I'm curious about those aspects—like the rhythm. The rhythm must be really important when you're doing the work.
Bennett: Yeah. Yeah. The rhythm is so key because if you have a body, you have a rhythmic element. Your heart is beating. The way you move your arms—your kinesthetics—define a sense of rhythm as you're moving through space. So we're familiar with rhythm intimately. And that's one place people can just drop into very easily, even if they think they can't sing a melody or find harmonies.
We are rhythmic beings. And so that's one easy entrance into this state between work and play.
You said something really interesting—that when I'm making music happen in a group, people feel included or they feel like they're a part of it. They can very easily be a part of it. And that's very intentional by me.
Last night we played a contra dance in Amagansett—me and Shepsi and Molly—and I noticed that phenomenon happening. People just felt included, like they could be a part of a musical kinesthetic experience even if they'd never contra danced before or been in a community dance.
And that's because I think of technical skill being lower on the hierarchy than the feeling of inclusiveness. A lot of people invert that relationship—they put technical skill at the top of a hierarchy, and at the bottom there’s a sense of play and inclusiveness. That's a pitfall that a lot of musicians and musical settings fall into—that it’s the technical musical delivery that’s the most important, and then the feeling you're getting by making the music is secondary.
And I think it works really well when it’s flipped on its head and we think about how included you feel, and then the technical stuff comes along. And I've noticed that—at Bagaduce Music in Blue Hill—we have dozens of classes. This year we've had 800 different class meetings of all sorts of things: guitar class, Northern New England Ensemble, a community chorus, a children's chorus.
Over and over, I keep thinking about this idea: If you start by helping people feel like they're a part of something, then the technical stuff comes right along.
So that inclusiveness I think is really… that's what I was looking for last night, much more than anybody's particular ability to dance or engage me on a technical level. And that’s maybe one of my secrets to leadership: we all have in us something to contribute and belong at the table—belong in whatever setting we're in, whether it's on a boat or in a staff meeting.
If we start there, then people bring their best—whatever that is. And things unfold in a positive way. People start to feel the euphoria that comes from the play-feeling—the feeling where we're working and we're playing. It's familiar to me because I get to do this all the time, but last night at dancing, they were working—they were moving physically. People were sweating, their brains were working as they were learning the dances. But there was this euphoric, tangible joy in the room. Some people call it a flow state. And I'm just trying to get people there.
The hardest thing is in the mind—settings, where it’s really about ideas and language.
Megan: Like when you're heading a meeting.
Bennett: You're heading a meeting, yeah.
Megan: So do you start with that sense in yourself—because it's important to you to create that in the meeting? Do you access that within yourself in order to bring it to the space?
Bennett: On a good day. On a good day, I'm there, and I'll start a meeting with something fun. Recently we had a staff meeting where I said, “Okay, we'll go around and take 15 seconds each—just a personal update. How are you feeling? But describe yourself as a weather forecast.”
And somebody said, “Cloudy with a chance of sleet.” Somebody else said, “I'm a sunny day in October.” That kind of thing. So to have just a fun engagement with what could ordinarily just be, “Oh, I'm fine,” but instead you turn it into something a little more playful and imaginative, creative. That kicks it off in a really nice way.
And I can pull that off—I have the sort of presence or ability to help groups in that way—when I've had enough sleep and some healthy food and am well hydrated and gotten some oxygen in my lungs recently. I'm always trying to get to that place.
Speaking of words—I've been trying to come up with a word for the space in between work and play. It’s really a Venn diagram overlap. I tried “plark”—play and work. That word doesn't feel quite right. But if you take “work” and “play” and you take out the “ork” and the “pla,” you get “way.”
Megan: Oh, that's awesome.
Bennett: It's just the way to do it. The way.
Megan: Yeah. There you go.
Bennett: So I'm always trying to find that Way.
Megan: You obviously have this connection and this desire to be in that state of play. Has that been with you your whole life? Do you remember? Obviously as children we play.
Bennett: We used to clean the house on Saturday mornings as a family, and Mom or Dad would put a CD on and we'd put on some Cajun music—Rockin’ Sydney. It was this one great Cajun or Zydeco album that we listened to. And we had a bunch of fun upbeat music that we would listen to while we cleaned the house. I was seven or eight years old, and that was already a thing—to combine music and work and have fun while you're doing the thing that you have to do.
Megan: Right there. That is just so fascinating.
Bennett: Yeah.
Megan: Because it got into you.
Bennett: Yeah. Got into me.
Megan: And you were doing it as a family—what you're talking about, putting on the music. And when you're young and that comes into your being, then it's established. You don't have to get back to it later on in life. So when you're saying the word “play,” you're lighting up.
Bennett: Yeah.
Megan: And so it's the word. Maybe in your adult life, in your job, you have to justify it—that it's getting work done.
Bennett: It's work. Yeah.
That's an interesting point. I've pondered this question: is it just play that I want to do? Is that really what I want to do? And I will say that I've found that music-making—when there isn't some sort of work happening—to be less satisfying for me on a fundamental level. There's something really beautiful about play that actually is also accomplishing some project or goal or something's happening.
That work can even be the physical—like stacking firewood or making contra dancers move around a room; that's one step away from a sort of pure functional work. And then I think about doing kirtan with Shepsi and Molly and doing these Hindu devotional chants, which are helping people do spiritual work. All of that I find gives me the same feeling.
So in a way I'm playing, but there's still something happening. Sometimes play is just for play’s sake, and I guess that has its own satisfaction. I can just report that there is something really sublime when they meet in the middle—when there's some meeting in the middle. It's also totally underexplored in our Western culture, I would say.
Megan: So right there you have a desire—a mission—to bring this into people's experience. Because you know what it feels like and how completely different it is. When you think about people’s relationship to work, they just assume that it's going to make them tired. And you're talking about being energized.
In a meeting, where you're not necessarily singing, the work could be the strategy and the strategizing—which again is a communion. You're in that space where there's a field of everyone being aware of each other and working together.
Bennett: Yeah. There's a creativity that's born—a playful creativity—that can come in if you're doing a strategy session. It can be quite sublime actually, but it takes that willingness to be playful and be creative in that setting.
Megan: So that's a very unique aspect of your sense of leadership and being a leader. Can you give a sense of what you would coach someone in—being able to bring that in? Say someone isn’t necessarily a musician. But they could participate in your groups and bring that to their leadership.
Bennett: Yeah. There's a couple things that I would say if someone wants to learn from me and the way I'm approaching leadership. One is: confidence is really important. Because when people sense your hesitancy or lack of confidence, they start to turn off. Or maybe they're skeptical and the project starts to crumble.
It's very easy to be skeptical—certainly singing while stacking wood isn't normal in our culture these days anymore. Singing in the woods was a much more common thing 150 years ago. But even just bringing a sense of play into an office setting—not common. Not very common.
So you have to really believe it and know it inside—just know that it works—and start to look around and see the workplaces where play is a part of that group setting. They're around. If you start to look around, you'll see some businesses really have a sort of playful sense about them. Silicon Valley has had a lot of play worked into their offices over the last decade or so. Pixar is a great example—their whole workplace for making those amazing films is an incredibly playful, creative space. They design it into their space.
But how do you get confident? I see my confidence being built partly by understanding and appreciating and realizing that the theoretical will work. It's a theoretical concept that has total validity across cultures all around the world throughout time. There are work songs—people have found a way to make music help the work happen.
So there's the theoretical understanding, and then also the practical skills. And this might be the best thing to take away: I memorize the songs that I'm gonna sing. I brush up on the techniques and tools that are gonna help people who are feeling less confident or have never seen this before or thought of it before, so that they can easily get into that space between work and play.
So there are structural elements like rhyme schemes—I have a whole series of rhyme schemes that I use across different songs. There are melodies and forms—call-and-response forms that I've sat down and memorized and internalized that give me the confidence to know I can go out into a garlic patch and have three hours of songs ready to go. And that kind of confidence—those skills—then engender confidence in myself, which then gives other people permission to jump on board.
If you're just thinking about how to facilitate meetings, that could look like practicing icebreakers—like having icebreakers at the ready, having jokes at the ready, literally making a list of jokes that you tell and brushing up on it before the meeting and having one or two ready to go.
There's a really great book called The Change Handbook.
And it has hundreds of different group projects or systems for getting group feedback and making change—having a handful of different ways to facilitate group process, for instance.
Megan: Yes. Excellent—group process, yes.
Bennett: Any leader should have those fun, compelling, different, useful ways of getting people to work together at the ready. And that takes work ahead of time. The seven Ps—we can't get away from the seven Ps of success: Prior Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
If you're preparing for a board retreat or preparing to harvest several hundred pounds of balsam tips—both require a little bit of preparation. That gives you the confidence that then allows people to come in.
We cast almost five acres of field with winter rye at Sylvester Manor in 2007. We had 120 people in the field spreading the rye. And I had prepared the songs that I thought would work, and I wrote them down on a little note card and put them in my front pocket. So I was ready that in the next moment, after the first song, I could just refer to the card. And that way I didn't have to rely on remembering in the flow of things—I could just glance at the card and then boom—into the next one, which was a song that I had prepared and was ready for the moment.
Megan: That's really interesting because we think of play as being spontaneous, right? So that preparing the ground—literally and metaphorically—so that you’re creating that space so that people can just ride in it.
And I just want to say, my experience of being a dancer while you were playing last night—I was not aware consciously of your music. I could just ride it. I wasn't thinking, “Oh, now I'm hearing you playing, and I'm trying to follow it.” It was all of a piece.
[00:25:00]
Bennett: Yes. And the structure… there's something about structure and rules and discipline that enables creativity. It's often overlooked, but I think the most creative people often have a discipline they're inside of—a daily discipline. “I'm going to make one drawing a day,” or in my case, it could be “I'm going to write one verse a day,” or even “I'm going to play with one rhyme scheme a day.”
With work songs, for me, it's often about the structures of the songs themselves, which deliver you to a moment. If you have an AABB rhyme scheme, sometimes if I have the flexibility—and I often do—to switch it around, I might make it ABAB, because that gives you double the amount of time to think of your next rhyme.
Megan: Just to give a clue to people—because when you're singing in the field, sometimes people are then chiming in and coming up with their own verse, with the rhyme. So they have to, like you said, have the time for that to come to them.
Bennett: That's right. Yeah. And even me—I try to give myself a break by, if I'm writing the song, giving myself the time to improvise the lyric. I often think of the way that I do work songs as a tradition of spontaneous invention, where we have a form and we might sing three or four traditional verses to an old sea shanty and then start improvising new verses using the same form.
So again, this play between structure and innovation or spontaneity—it really doesn't work so well if you go out without any structure whatsoever. People love a little structure.
Same with the contra dancing. We get big crowds to come contra-dance. It's just a different way to experience movement and music. But I can say that a lot of people feel really comforted having a little bit of form. “We're gonna do-si-do here, you're gonna cross the set there, we're gonna balance and swing at the top of the B section.” It's a comforting structure that then allows people to improvise as they're dancing—“I'm gonna move my body a little bit differently here,” “I'm gonna do a little twirl there,” “I'm gonna have a flourish here.” And amazing things happen that way when there's just a little bit of structure.
Megan: And also, just as when you're dancing and the music is cuing you to the next section, because you know intuitively—you’re not thinking about it—you’re feeling, “Oh, we're shifting into this next part, and that means we're moving into this next…” So that we're doing it all in communion at the same time.
Bennett: Yeah, absolutely.
Megan: So I would like to just segue here and have you talk about this—because we were talking about this when you were last visiting—that you have this desire to be able to pass on all of this that you've been gathering through the years, through your experience. I'd like you to talk about that and bring a little bit of this play to: what’s your vision for that?
Bennett: I've been researching work songs as a practice and art form since the early 2000s. I started using them in the mid-90s but didn't put my academic frame on it until I was in college in 2002, more or less—2001, 2002.
And then I started looking around and realized, wow, all over the world for most of human history, people have used songs or music to help get the work done. So that led to going to different countries and working with different people. And I think we're really missing out—our culture is really missing out—by forgetting how to do this. Whether it's singing while doing the dishes or sweeping the floor, or even having a workplace chorus that meets after lunch.
One way or another, I would feel really bad if I died without sharing that vision—that people can do this. It's a natural human thing. It's our birthright, actually. No matter what culture your grandparents were a part of or where you're living now or what you're doing, you have the tool. It's right here. You've got a voice—most of us have a voice. Most of us—all of us—have some sort of rhythmic component. And all of us have work. Even if we're out of work technically, there's still work to be done—cleaning the kitchen, for instance. Or even dealing with trauma and the miseries that life presents.
And the music is there for us. Music is there for us.
So how to share that? What I've been doing for the last couple of decades has been leading workshops mostly, and helping people on different farms and different contexts sing while getting something done, or helping rowers—sailors—sing while getting things done.
Atlantic Challenge USA is one organization that does seamanship training in Maine. We go out in 10-oared rowboats and sing while rowing, particularly with teens and twenty-somethings, helping them connect with a sense of place but also learn this transformative tool that takes the attitude we have about work—which is one of suffering, wanting to avoid the suffering of work—and transforms it into something closer to play.
So I want to help the world. I want to keep going on with the workshops, but then I also need to find other ways to help—books, podcasts, lessons, things online that people can learn from. I think that's what I'll have to do. Talks—I’ve done some talks. I did a TED Talk over a decade ago. But there's more.
Even just getting into more communities and helping them jog and sing—there are jogging groups all over the world. There are 10Ks. I should start entering some of these 5Ks and just singing—getting groups of people to sing and jog. That's my hope. Use any method possible, really.
Megan: Excellent. Looking forward to seeing how you evolve this. And I encourage everyone listening to follow Bennett—his journey in this passion to bring this playfulness to our sense of getting things done.
Bennett: Yes. I've been calling it “The Work Song Project” for years, but I'm thinking of shifting into calling it “Moving Music,” because then it really can include contra-dancing and other sorts of forms of music that get you moving. And also it's moving in terms of—it moves you to a different place. It could be spiritually. It could be physically.
Megan: Emotionally.
Bennett: Psychologically. Yes—emotionally, yeah.
Megan: We look forward to following you and being a part of everything that you create. And so I'm going to put in the show notes all the ways that we can get in touch with you, Bennett. And thank you so much for filling us in more deeply on your process. I'm grateful to you.
Bennett: Glad to be here. And if anybody wants to reach out, you can email me [email protected] or [email protected]—and that’s the name of the music library. I'm happy to talk with anyone and come to your community, do some fun projects, or just talk on the phone.
Or I have a “dial-a-work-song” system where if you're picking cherries in a cherry tree and you need a song, you can text me—207-FLUX-OXEN is the Google number—and I'll see a message and I'll call back and leave a song on your voicemail.
Megan: Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome, Bennett.
Bennett: So yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me, Megan.
Megan: Thanks so much.
[00:34:00]
View all episodes
By Megan Chaskey
5
3333 ratings
In this enlivening conversation, Megan sits down with Bennett Konesni—a musician and garlic farmer based in Maine. He directs Bagaduce Music, a music library, performance and educational center, runs The Worksong Project, and tours internationally performing and teaching musical labor, the songs and tunes of Maine, and his original compositions. Together they explore the joyful space where work and play meet. Bennett shares how his younger years aboard Maine’s schooners awakened him to the power of music as a unifying, energizing force—one that transforms physical labor, community gatherings, and even staff meetings into experiences of coherence, creativity, and vitality. As he says, “There’s a space in between work and play… and the music is just a direct path into that space.”
They reflect on the interplay of essential elements such as rhythm, structure, and playfulness as pathways to belonging. Bennett describes how rhythm itself becomes an entryway: “If you have a body, you have a rhythmic element… we are rhythmic beings.” They explore the subtle communication that emerges in group song—beyond what words can hold. “Music gets people through the divisions that words create,” he says. He also explains how bringing a sense of playfulness into the workplace offers a powerful lens for leaders seeking to bring more ease, connection, and coherence into meetings, strategy, and collaboration.
Bennett shares his evolving vision, Moving Music, and his desire to pass on this ages-old practice through workshops, books, rowing and farming projects, and everyday acts of shared song. “It’s our birthright,” he reminds us. “Music is there for us—whether we’re rowing, planting garlic, or cleaning the kitchen.”
An uplifting exploration of what becomes possible when we let music move our work—and our lives—inviting us into what Bennett calls “the Way… the place where you’re getting something done and having a great time doing it.”
Bennett Konesni is a musician and garlic farmer based in Maine. He directs Bagaduce Music, runs The Worksong Project, and tours internationally performing and teaching musical labor, the songs and tunes of Maine, and his original compositions.
Links:
Bagaduce Music
Music and Garlic: bennettkonesni.com
Library of Congress: Homegrown Series - Bennett Konesni Profile Concert
Washington Post: Sea shanties are having a moment
NY Times: City Slickers Take to the Crops, With Song
NPR: Mainers Are Working To Give Historical Sea Chanties New Life
TEDxFruitvale: Transforming Work into Joy
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
TRANSCRIPT:
Moving Music: Bringing Joy into Work and Life with Bennett Konesni
Megan: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Spirit of Leadership Podcast. Listen in as we talk with emerging as well as seasoned leaders, change makers, and visionaries, and hear their stories—how they have overcome challenges, how they cultivate inspired vision as stewards and mentors shining their light to uplift and empower others, reconnecting us through a sense of belonging to the natural world and to the interweaving circles of just and vital communities.
Hey Bennett.
Bennett: Hi Megan.
Megan: It's so great to have you on the Spirit of Leadership Podcast.
Bennett: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Megan: So I'm gonna let you introduce yourself because you have so many things that you engage in and you are passionate about, and so I'd like you to just jump right in and introduce yourself to our listeners.
Bennett: Okay. My name's Bennett Konesni. I grew up in Maine and have been either in Maine or the East End of Long Island, Shelter Island, New York, for most of my adult life, working on farms, starting farms, making music happen—whether it's for contra dancing or singing while working or writing my own songs.
And I guess if you could boil down a lot of my work, it's getting people to do stuff and have some fun while they're doing it. I think maybe the key idea that unites my work is that there's a space in between work and play—or what we think of as work and play—and I'm looking for any way or every way, basically the musical way, of getting people to occupy that space.
Mostly it's the music that gets us there, but then I think there's also a mindset thing that works for me and helps work for other people. The music is just a direct path into that space.
Megan: And how did you come to this?
Bennett: It started on schooners on the coast of Maine. These are tall ships that take out tourists these days, but it was a big part of Maine's culture in Penobscot Bay and along the coast of Maine—bringing food and timber and granite and ice all over the world.
And to raise the sails and bring up the anchor, music became a thing that was a big part of how people operated the boats. It was actually all along the East Coast and even down in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a major part of how boats moved and how teams worked together for hundreds of years in American maritime trades.
But Maine really kept it going. When I was a teenager in the 1990s, I worked as a deckhand aboard these boats, and we sang while bringing up the anchor and putting up the sails—historic vessels using historic songs and techniques to put up thousands of pounds of canvas and bring up thousands of pounds of old-fashioned anchor every day.
I didn't really realize it, but that was the foundation of what's become a life’s work of singing while jogging or singing while planting garlic or singing while rowing, singing while tipping spruce boughs to make wreaths—all kinds of community work projects that music helps facilitate.
And that's, I would say, at the core of my work and what I'm up to. And then all of the other projects—more organizational leadership type stuff—starting Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, executive director of Bagaduce Music (one of the world's largest music lending libraries) in Blue Hill, Maine, and Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island.
Those have been two major community projects, but I try to exhibit leadership through the same principle that we have while we're hauling up the anchor, which is that there's a space in between work and play. We can find that edge where you're really getting something done and you're having a great time doing it.
And I would say even if you're in a meeting, a staff meeting or a strategy session, that concept is really powerful. I try to get people there. I'm just always trying to find that spot. And when I'm not in that spot, I'm not very happy. So I'm always trying to get back to that feeling that I get.
If we're singing and rowing, I have more energy when we finish. We could row for an hour and a half hard and sing the whole time, and I have more energy when we get back to the dock. Or we could plant 5,000 heads of garlic in a morning and I'll have more energy at the end than I did when I started, which isn't how we normally think of those sorts of activities.
So if I've ended a staff meeting and I have more energy than we had when we started, I know that I found that spot.
Megan: Yes. And it's interesting that you began with this as a teenager—you came to this with your own openness to it.
Bennett: Yeah.
Megan: And to experience. I think as teenagers we're looking for that sense of community and finding that with other people. But it's interesting that something that's very hard to do, like the weight of the sails and the anchor, actually energizes you. Do you think it's also the communion with the other people so you don't have to be using words to communicate what needs to happen?
Bennett: Absolutely.
Megan: There’s some other kind of communication.
Bennett: Yeah, you nailed it. The division between work and play is a false dichotomy, I think. And we use words because they help us communicate— we live in a world where words are used all the time and they help us understand what's going on. And they have a fundamental flaw, which is that every word takes the full variety and diversity and complexity of any concept and starts to build walls around it so that you can say, “This is the difference between red and green.” You build walls around the concepts.
But when it comes to things like work and play, in the effort to simplify communication about these ideas, we create a division that doesn't fully capture the nuance of what's going on. And so when we're singing—especially if we're doing wordless songs—we neatly sidestep that issue with words. And even if we are singing with words, they often take a back seat to the type of communication which is happening, which is around rhythm, which is around melody and harmony—around other musical concepts that seem to have… they probably have different pitfalls to communication around perceived skill.
People think, “I can't sing. I can't carry a tune in a bucket,” people will say—which is about a technical ability to deliver a melody, which does get in the way of communication. But ultimately the division that happens around words is really a big one to get over, and music gets people through it in a really nice way.
Megan: One of the wonderful things about you, and being with you when you're leading songs—I haven't actually rowed a boat with you doing the songs—but some of the ones that I've done with you and witnessed, that energy that you generate… Everyone belongs. It's a place of belonging.
Bennett: Right!
Megan: And so it doesn't matter what anybody's skill level is—everyone feels this togetherness.
Bennett: Yeah.
Megan: And it generates that happiness.
Bennett: Yeah.
Megan: And so I'm curious about those aspects—like the rhythm. The rhythm must be really important when you're doing the work.
Bennett: Yeah. Yeah. The rhythm is so key because if you have a body, you have a rhythmic element. Your heart is beating. The way you move your arms—your kinesthetics—define a sense of rhythm as you're moving through space. So we're familiar with rhythm intimately. And that's one place people can just drop into very easily, even if they think they can't sing a melody or find harmonies.
We are rhythmic beings. And so that's one easy entrance into this state between work and play.
You said something really interesting—that when I'm making music happen in a group, people feel included or they feel like they're a part of it. They can very easily be a part of it. And that's very intentional by me.
Last night we played a contra dance in Amagansett—me and Shepsi and Molly—and I noticed that phenomenon happening. People just felt included, like they could be a part of a musical kinesthetic experience even if they'd never contra danced before or been in a community dance.
And that's because I think of technical skill being lower on the hierarchy than the feeling of inclusiveness. A lot of people invert that relationship—they put technical skill at the top of a hierarchy, and at the bottom there’s a sense of play and inclusiveness. That's a pitfall that a lot of musicians and musical settings fall into—that it’s the technical musical delivery that’s the most important, and then the feeling you're getting by making the music is secondary.
And I think it works really well when it’s flipped on its head and we think about how included you feel, and then the technical stuff comes along. And I've noticed that—at Bagaduce Music in Blue Hill—we have dozens of classes. This year we've had 800 different class meetings of all sorts of things: guitar class, Northern New England Ensemble, a community chorus, a children's chorus.
Over and over, I keep thinking about this idea: If you start by helping people feel like they're a part of something, then the technical stuff comes right along.
So that inclusiveness I think is really… that's what I was looking for last night, much more than anybody's particular ability to dance or engage me on a technical level. And that’s maybe one of my secrets to leadership: we all have in us something to contribute and belong at the table—belong in whatever setting we're in, whether it's on a boat or in a staff meeting.
If we start there, then people bring their best—whatever that is. And things unfold in a positive way. People start to feel the euphoria that comes from the play-feeling—the feeling where we're working and we're playing. It's familiar to me because I get to do this all the time, but last night at dancing, they were working—they were moving physically. People were sweating, their brains were working as they were learning the dances. But there was this euphoric, tangible joy in the room. Some people call it a flow state. And I'm just trying to get people there.
The hardest thing is in the mind—settings, where it’s really about ideas and language.
Megan: Like when you're heading a meeting.
Bennett: You're heading a meeting, yeah.
Megan: So do you start with that sense in yourself—because it's important to you to create that in the meeting? Do you access that within yourself in order to bring it to the space?
Bennett: On a good day. On a good day, I'm there, and I'll start a meeting with something fun. Recently we had a staff meeting where I said, “Okay, we'll go around and take 15 seconds each—just a personal update. How are you feeling? But describe yourself as a weather forecast.”
And somebody said, “Cloudy with a chance of sleet.” Somebody else said, “I'm a sunny day in October.” That kind of thing. So to have just a fun engagement with what could ordinarily just be, “Oh, I'm fine,” but instead you turn it into something a little more playful and imaginative, creative. That kicks it off in a really nice way.
And I can pull that off—I have the sort of presence or ability to help groups in that way—when I've had enough sleep and some healthy food and am well hydrated and gotten some oxygen in my lungs recently. I'm always trying to get to that place.
Speaking of words—I've been trying to come up with a word for the space in between work and play. It’s really a Venn diagram overlap. I tried “plark”—play and work. That word doesn't feel quite right. But if you take “work” and “play” and you take out the “ork” and the “pla,” you get “way.”
Megan: Oh, that's awesome.
Bennett: It's just the way to do it. The way.
Megan: Yeah. There you go.
Bennett: So I'm always trying to find that Way.
Megan: You obviously have this connection and this desire to be in that state of play. Has that been with you your whole life? Do you remember? Obviously as children we play.
Bennett: We used to clean the house on Saturday mornings as a family, and Mom or Dad would put a CD on and we'd put on some Cajun music—Rockin’ Sydney. It was this one great Cajun or Zydeco album that we listened to. And we had a bunch of fun upbeat music that we would listen to while we cleaned the house. I was seven or eight years old, and that was already a thing—to combine music and work and have fun while you're doing the thing that you have to do.
Megan: Right there. That is just so fascinating.
Bennett: Yeah.
Megan: Because it got into you.
Bennett: Yeah. Got into me.
Megan: And you were doing it as a family—what you're talking about, putting on the music. And when you're young and that comes into your being, then it's established. You don't have to get back to it later on in life. So when you're saying the word “play,” you're lighting up.
Bennett: Yeah.
Megan: And so it's the word. Maybe in your adult life, in your job, you have to justify it—that it's getting work done.
Bennett: It's work. Yeah.
That's an interesting point. I've pondered this question: is it just play that I want to do? Is that really what I want to do? And I will say that I've found that music-making—when there isn't some sort of work happening—to be less satisfying for me on a fundamental level. There's something really beautiful about play that actually is also accomplishing some project or goal or something's happening.
That work can even be the physical—like stacking firewood or making contra dancers move around a room; that's one step away from a sort of pure functional work. And then I think about doing kirtan with Shepsi and Molly and doing these Hindu devotional chants, which are helping people do spiritual work. All of that I find gives me the same feeling.
So in a way I'm playing, but there's still something happening. Sometimes play is just for play’s sake, and I guess that has its own satisfaction. I can just report that there is something really sublime when they meet in the middle—when there's some meeting in the middle. It's also totally underexplored in our Western culture, I would say.
Megan: So right there you have a desire—a mission—to bring this into people's experience. Because you know what it feels like and how completely different it is. When you think about people’s relationship to work, they just assume that it's going to make them tired. And you're talking about being energized.
In a meeting, where you're not necessarily singing, the work could be the strategy and the strategizing—which again is a communion. You're in that space where there's a field of everyone being aware of each other and working together.
Bennett: Yeah. There's a creativity that's born—a playful creativity—that can come in if you're doing a strategy session. It can be quite sublime actually, but it takes that willingness to be playful and be creative in that setting.
Megan: So that's a very unique aspect of your sense of leadership and being a leader. Can you give a sense of what you would coach someone in—being able to bring that in? Say someone isn’t necessarily a musician. But they could participate in your groups and bring that to their leadership.
Bennett: Yeah. There's a couple things that I would say if someone wants to learn from me and the way I'm approaching leadership. One is: confidence is really important. Because when people sense your hesitancy or lack of confidence, they start to turn off. Or maybe they're skeptical and the project starts to crumble.
It's very easy to be skeptical—certainly singing while stacking wood isn't normal in our culture these days anymore. Singing in the woods was a much more common thing 150 years ago. But even just bringing a sense of play into an office setting—not common. Not very common.
So you have to really believe it and know it inside—just know that it works—and start to look around and see the workplaces where play is a part of that group setting. They're around. If you start to look around, you'll see some businesses really have a sort of playful sense about them. Silicon Valley has had a lot of play worked into their offices over the last decade or so. Pixar is a great example—their whole workplace for making those amazing films is an incredibly playful, creative space. They design it into their space.
But how do you get confident? I see my confidence being built partly by understanding and appreciating and realizing that the theoretical will work. It's a theoretical concept that has total validity across cultures all around the world throughout time. There are work songs—people have found a way to make music help the work happen.
So there's the theoretical understanding, and then also the practical skills. And this might be the best thing to take away: I memorize the songs that I'm gonna sing. I brush up on the techniques and tools that are gonna help people who are feeling less confident or have never seen this before or thought of it before, so that they can easily get into that space between work and play.
So there are structural elements like rhyme schemes—I have a whole series of rhyme schemes that I use across different songs. There are melodies and forms—call-and-response forms that I've sat down and memorized and internalized that give me the confidence to know I can go out into a garlic patch and have three hours of songs ready to go. And that kind of confidence—those skills—then engender confidence in myself, which then gives other people permission to jump on board.
If you're just thinking about how to facilitate meetings, that could look like practicing icebreakers—like having icebreakers at the ready, having jokes at the ready, literally making a list of jokes that you tell and brushing up on it before the meeting and having one or two ready to go.
There's a really great book called The Change Handbook.
And it has hundreds of different group projects or systems for getting group feedback and making change—having a handful of different ways to facilitate group process, for instance.
Megan: Yes. Excellent—group process, yes.
Bennett: Any leader should have those fun, compelling, different, useful ways of getting people to work together at the ready. And that takes work ahead of time. The seven Ps—we can't get away from the seven Ps of success: Prior Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
If you're preparing for a board retreat or preparing to harvest several hundred pounds of balsam tips—both require a little bit of preparation. That gives you the confidence that then allows people to come in.
We cast almost five acres of field with winter rye at Sylvester Manor in 2007. We had 120 people in the field spreading the rye. And I had prepared the songs that I thought would work, and I wrote them down on a little note card and put them in my front pocket. So I was ready that in the next moment, after the first song, I could just refer to the card. And that way I didn't have to rely on remembering in the flow of things—I could just glance at the card and then boom—into the next one, which was a song that I had prepared and was ready for the moment.
Megan: That's really interesting because we think of play as being spontaneous, right? So that preparing the ground—literally and metaphorically—so that you’re creating that space so that people can just ride in it.
And I just want to say, my experience of being a dancer while you were playing last night—I was not aware consciously of your music. I could just ride it. I wasn't thinking, “Oh, now I'm hearing you playing, and I'm trying to follow it.” It was all of a piece.
[00:25:00]
Bennett: Yes. And the structure… there's something about structure and rules and discipline that enables creativity. It's often overlooked, but I think the most creative people often have a discipline they're inside of—a daily discipline. “I'm going to make one drawing a day,” or in my case, it could be “I'm going to write one verse a day,” or even “I'm going to play with one rhyme scheme a day.”
With work songs, for me, it's often about the structures of the songs themselves, which deliver you to a moment. If you have an AABB rhyme scheme, sometimes if I have the flexibility—and I often do—to switch it around, I might make it ABAB, because that gives you double the amount of time to think of your next rhyme.
Megan: Just to give a clue to people—because when you're singing in the field, sometimes people are then chiming in and coming up with their own verse, with the rhyme. So they have to, like you said, have the time for that to come to them.
Bennett: That's right. Yeah. And even me—I try to give myself a break by, if I'm writing the song, giving myself the time to improvise the lyric. I often think of the way that I do work songs as a tradition of spontaneous invention, where we have a form and we might sing three or four traditional verses to an old sea shanty and then start improvising new verses using the same form.
So again, this play between structure and innovation or spontaneity—it really doesn't work so well if you go out without any structure whatsoever. People love a little structure.
Same with the contra dancing. We get big crowds to come contra-dance. It's just a different way to experience movement and music. But I can say that a lot of people feel really comforted having a little bit of form. “We're gonna do-si-do here, you're gonna cross the set there, we're gonna balance and swing at the top of the B section.” It's a comforting structure that then allows people to improvise as they're dancing—“I'm gonna move my body a little bit differently here,” “I'm gonna do a little twirl there,” “I'm gonna have a flourish here.” And amazing things happen that way when there's just a little bit of structure.
Megan: And also, just as when you're dancing and the music is cuing you to the next section, because you know intuitively—you’re not thinking about it—you’re feeling, “Oh, we're shifting into this next part, and that means we're moving into this next…” So that we're doing it all in communion at the same time.
Bennett: Yeah, absolutely.
Megan: So I would like to just segue here and have you talk about this—because we were talking about this when you were last visiting—that you have this desire to be able to pass on all of this that you've been gathering through the years, through your experience. I'd like you to talk about that and bring a little bit of this play to: what’s your vision for that?
Bennett: I've been researching work songs as a practice and art form since the early 2000s. I started using them in the mid-90s but didn't put my academic frame on it until I was in college in 2002, more or less—2001, 2002.
And then I started looking around and realized, wow, all over the world for most of human history, people have used songs or music to help get the work done. So that led to going to different countries and working with different people. And I think we're really missing out—our culture is really missing out—by forgetting how to do this. Whether it's singing while doing the dishes or sweeping the floor, or even having a workplace chorus that meets after lunch.
One way or another, I would feel really bad if I died without sharing that vision—that people can do this. It's a natural human thing. It's our birthright, actually. No matter what culture your grandparents were a part of or where you're living now or what you're doing, you have the tool. It's right here. You've got a voice—most of us have a voice. Most of us—all of us—have some sort of rhythmic component. And all of us have work. Even if we're out of work technically, there's still work to be done—cleaning the kitchen, for instance. Or even dealing with trauma and the miseries that life presents.
And the music is there for us. Music is there for us.
So how to share that? What I've been doing for the last couple of decades has been leading workshops mostly, and helping people on different farms and different contexts sing while getting something done, or helping rowers—sailors—sing while getting things done.
Atlantic Challenge USA is one organization that does seamanship training in Maine. We go out in 10-oared rowboats and sing while rowing, particularly with teens and twenty-somethings, helping them connect with a sense of place but also learn this transformative tool that takes the attitude we have about work—which is one of suffering, wanting to avoid the suffering of work—and transforms it into something closer to play.
So I want to help the world. I want to keep going on with the workshops, but then I also need to find other ways to help—books, podcasts, lessons, things online that people can learn from. I think that's what I'll have to do. Talks—I’ve done some talks. I did a TED Talk over a decade ago. But there's more.
Even just getting into more communities and helping them jog and sing—there are jogging groups all over the world. There are 10Ks. I should start entering some of these 5Ks and just singing—getting groups of people to sing and jog. That's my hope. Use any method possible, really.
Megan: Excellent. Looking forward to seeing how you evolve this. And I encourage everyone listening to follow Bennett—his journey in this passion to bring this playfulness to our sense of getting things done.
Bennett: Yes. I've been calling it “The Work Song Project” for years, but I'm thinking of shifting into calling it “Moving Music,” because then it really can include contra-dancing and other sorts of forms of music that get you moving. And also it's moving in terms of—it moves you to a different place. It could be spiritually. It could be physically.
Megan: Emotionally.
Bennett: Psychologically. Yes—emotionally, yeah.
Megan: We look forward to following you and being a part of everything that you create. And so I'm going to put in the show notes all the ways that we can get in touch with you, Bennett. And thank you so much for filling us in more deeply on your process. I'm grateful to you.
Bennett: Glad to be here. And if anybody wants to reach out, you can email me [email protected] or [email protected]—and that’s the name of the music library. I'm happy to talk with anyone and come to your community, do some fun projects, or just talk on the phone.
Or I have a “dial-a-work-song” system where if you're picking cherries in a cherry tree and you need a song, you can text me—207-FLUX-OXEN is the Google number—and I'll see a message and I'll call back and leave a song on your voicemail.
Megan: Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome, Bennett.
Bennett: So yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me, Megan.
Megan: Thanks so much.
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