LISTEN to the music...

So today I am pondering the joy and meaning of music-making after reading this poem by Hannah Fries entitled: Let the Last Thing be Song.

i.
Memory is safest in someone with amnesia.
Behind locked doors
glow the unmarred pieces—
musical notes humming
in a jumble, only
waiting to be
arranged.

ii.
What is left in one
who does not remember?
Love and music.

Not a name but the fullness.
Not the sequence of events
but order of rhythm and pitch,

a piece of time in which to exist.

iii.
A tone traveling through space has no referent,
and yet we infer, and yet it
finds its way between our cells
and shakes us.

Aren’t we all still quivering
like tuning forks
with the shock of being,
the shock of being seen?

iv.
When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.
Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe,
with its loosening warp
and weft, still
unspool its symphony?

Sing to me — please —
and I will sing for you as all unravels,
as time continues past the final beat
of the stutter inside your chest.

Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,
with the black hole’s
fathomless B-flat.

I have had the privilege of creating music with a variety of excellent artists. Over the years I have been blessed to find the most wonderful artistic companions wherever we go. In Saginaw it started small with a folk quartet we called the Saginaw Rounders, we went through a few small band iterations in Cleveland, then began a youth band as part of our ministry in Tucson only to see it morph into what I considered the "liturgical Grateful Dead" as about 10 seasoned performers joined the fun, and now our music-making continues with 2 or 3 discrete ensembles including the All of Us trio, the All of Us big band, and from time to time sitting in with Andy Kelly's Jazz Ambassadors. 

Each ensemble has its own niche: the trio is a straight ahead rock'n'soul bar band, the larger ensemble is built upon close 3 and 4 part harmonies with an emphasis on eclectic songs of solidarity (we play mostly to raise funds for peace and eco-justice groups), and the Ambassadors sometimes play New Orleans jazz and at other times Irish drinking music. What I've discerned is that each group shares a few commonalities:

+ First, if it ain't fun or aesthetically moving, we don't do it. Our music is NOT about ego: it's about joy. We rehearse hard, we have high standards, and then we let it rip and expect everyone to hang their egos up at the door. We can be spontaneous: last week someone at the bar suggested "Mustang Sally" so we tore it up at Methuselah while playing more acoustic Wailin' Jennys songs at Edwards Church in Northampton. 

+ Second, each band is committed to building community. In our polarized and mean-spirited culture of privilege and privation, we do NOT want to add to the misery. In fact, we trust that singing and dancing together can help us nourish a sense of shared commitment. We are not overtly political, more Grateful Dead/Allman Brothers groove than earnest folkies with the qualification being we work at building a safe and joyful space. Like the community of Taize used to say: we don't offer answers, just one living alternative carnival to the current culture of competition.

+ Third, we love to find ways of including the wider audience in the groove. I love group singing - so we make sure that it happens - and I love wild ass dancing - so we encourage that, too. Its easier most days to shake your booty in a bar than at church but like the song "Hell Yeah" insists, our faith communities could learn some important lessons in compassion and acceptance from some watering holes - so we do our best to be genre-benders pushing the limits.

+ Fourth, whether its rock'n'soul or hymns: it is ALL sacred to us. There is NO division between the human and the holy: we're ALL in this together. And that includes all of creation, nature, and its flora and fauna as well. 

Maria Popova added this to the mix that warrants review, too noting that Beethoven's Ode to Joy had "become the official Hymn of Europe — a bridge of harmony across human divides. I remember wondering as I sang whether music is something we make or something we are made of." Her extended reflection reminds us that:

That is what Pythagoras, too, wondered when he

laid the foundation of Western music by discovering the mathematics of harmony. Its beauty so staggered him that he thought the entire universe must be governed by it. He called it music of the spheres — the idea that every celestial body produces in its movement a unique hum determined by its orbit...The word orbit did not exist in his day. It was Kepler who coined it two millennia later, and it was Kepler who resurrected Pythagoras’s music of the spheres in The Harmony of the World — the 1619 book in which he formulated his third and final law of planetary motion, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. For Kepler, this notion of celestial music was not mere metaphor, not just a symbolic organizing principle for the cosmic order — he believed in it literally, believed that the universe is singing, reverberating with music inaudible to human ears but as real as gravity. He died ridiculed for this belief. Half a millennium after his death, our radio telescopes — those immense prosthetic ears built by centuries of science — detected a low-frequency hum pervading the universe, the product of supermassive black holes colliding in the early universe: Each merging pair sounds a different low note, and all the notes are sounding together into this great cosmic hum. We have heard the universe singing.

I don't recall who said it but my recollection is that whomever it was clearly believed - like myself - that we were NOT made to spend our days battered by anxiety and manipulated by media. We were born to sing. To make love. To share compassion and creativity and that means turning off the news and reconnecting with humanity. When asked what was the first sign of human culture, anthropologist Margaret Meade replied that the first sign of civilization was a broken but healed femur. "A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. Be civilized, be safe, be cautious.. be in care. We are at our best when we serve others."

And so we sing - and rock - and groove and harmonize and dance - and share it as boldly as possible: it's where I draw sustenance for the journey and hope for another day.