To Music

This post is by way of a pause to honor one of the great formative forces in my life – Music.  My first memory is of darkness, and of singing.  I was a 3 year old in the orphanage where I lived for 4 years after my father died, and it was after lights out in the nursery. We broken hearted toddlers were singing the only song we all knew, “Jesus Loves Me”, to comfort ourselves in our new loneliness.  Singing was our expression of hope, and while that first memory was just a flash, music has stayed with me ever since.

I once considered studying to be a professional musician, but knowing the puniness of my talent, chose instead to keep singing not just as an occupation, but as a way of life.  I attend concerts, play CDs, learn its techniques and history, and I sing.  I sing in choruses and choirs, sing getting up in the morning, sing nonsense songs to my grandkids.  I even find myself communicating with my unconscious through music; when I suddenly start humming a tune, I have learned to pay attention, for my subconscious mind may be telling me something.  My voice is baritone, so of the great musical artists of our times, I particularly honored and appreciated Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; to me, he was the greatest singer of the 20^th century.  So I mourn his death last week, and thank him for all the beauty he brought to an often ugly world.  This post partly is my response to his passing.

Music is an expression of our hope, our anger, our joy, our love, our sadness and a thousand other emotions. It is often truer and better at expressing who we are than are our words.  Like a picture, it is often worth far more than a thousand speeches. My favorite poetic metaphor is from John Donne's final poem, written on his death bed, where he describes himself as "entering that great room, where with Thy saints, I shall be made Thy music."  Brahms worked years on his German Requiem as an expression of his grief for his mother, and it says things words alone never could.  Some people think music may be not just A way of life, but The way of life, and a universal language.  Anthropologists note the role of work chants in fostering the group cooperation that characterizes humanity, and report how primitive peoples never previously exposed to western music love Mozart for his rhythm (who could blame them?).  In The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien suggested that creation began as a song of the Creator, and so, interestingly enough, does the mythos of the Aborigines.  That bemuses me when I learn that some variations of String Theory in cosmological physics describe matter, energy, and everything we know as the universe arising from the harmonic overtones of the infinitesimal strings.  Without a Song, we possibly wouldn’t be here.

If so, we have ourselves created ugliness as well as beauty out of the basic stuff of the universe.  Somewhere, perhaps, a Cosmic Choir Master is glowering.  It’s up to us to learn our harmonies, and to practice together until we get it right.