This Everflowing River of Music

Here are a couple of excerpts from the Introduction to The Spirituality of Music, just to give you some sense of the flavour of the book, and why I wanted to write it. Of course, it's the photos (and they're not mine) that really make it sing.

This Everflowing River of Music

Music accompanies us throughout our lives, from our very first moments to our very last, bringing meaning and heightened emotional awareness to so many of the important occasions and experiences that mark our journey on this earth.

We are conceived in the pulsing rhythms of the sex act, and our life in the womb is nurtured by the comforting throb of our mother’s beating heart.

Each year, we mark our birthday with a simple song that renews our sense of personhood and identity within a community of friends and family.

We dance at weddings, to celebrate a friend’s or a relative’s commitment to enter a new life in holy and sacred partnership with his or her beloved.

We worship the God of our understanding by singing hymns at church, temple, or synagogue.

And when our time comes to leave this world, we hope that friends and family will come together to sing us out of it, to celebrate our lives and to wish us godspeed.

But even then, the rhythm and the music will play on.

* * *

Everything has a Rhythm

So we carry music with us – and it carries us – through our most significant moments as well as through the most mundane activities of our daily lives. We awake to the latest pop or country songs on the clock radio. We sing in the shower. We play CDs in the car during our daily commute, and sport MP3 players while doing aerobics at the gym, or while out running or walking.

We even whistle while we work, whether it be digging a ditch, preparing a report, folding laundry, making dinner, or weeding the garden. As an incidental character in John Sayles’ film Honeydripper puts it, “Everything in life got a rhythm – even pickin’ cotton.”

And of course, we use music to help us access our emotional lives, or more precisely, to help us connect our intellect, our so-called rational mind, with our emotions, our bodies, our souls; and to share feelings with one another.

A father’s lullaby in the dark of night can send us drifting into “Slumberland,” secure in the faith that we are loved, cared for, and protected. I remember my own father lying beside me like a gentle giant in my child’s single bed, as I snuggled deeper under the covers, bathed, scrubbed, brushed, combed, and poised on the edge of sleep. His smooth, comforting tenor voice would spin tales for me of cattle drives and of life in the bush, as he gently crooned work songs from his New Brunswick childhood – songs such as the lumber-camp lament “Peter Emberly”; or the cowboy ballads of Wilf Carter, “Streets of Laredo” and “Strawberry Roan.”

My mother shared songs from her Welsh childhood. She would hold me close and sing humorous tunes in a strange, wild language that told me we drew part of our family heritage from a more ancient culture than the popular one I knew through commercial radio. Her songs ran the gamut from Church of Wales hymns such as “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” to humourous ditties such as “Sospan Fach” (Little Saucepan) and “Hen Fenyw Fach Cydweli” (The Little Old Lady from Kidwelly).

I also remember my mother and father holding one another tight, drifting across the kitchen floor in a tender, shuffling dance that spoke volumes to my closely watching brother and I about their devotion to one another. They would gaze deeply into each other’s eyes, and sing together the romantic pop songs of their Second-World-War youth – songs of hope from amid war and separation: “There’ll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover” or “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”

I will always cherish those moments in the kitchen, when music offered me a glimpse into another aspect of my parents’ strong and mutual love – and another lesson about the joys of love.

* * *

The Human Beat

So begins our journey in music, and so begins the musical journey of this book. Someone once said that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture – it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” It’s such a great quote that (as Allan P. Scott documents extensively on his webpage) it has been variously attributed to as diverse a cast of characters as Elvis Costello, Martin Mull, Clara Schumann, Igor Stravinsky, David Byrne, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thelonious Monk, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson, Steve Martin, William S. Burroughs, Charles Mingus, Nick Lowe, Miles Davis, George Carlin and/or John Cage. Take your pick.

Regardless of who said it first, it’s a great statement because it gets to the heart of the matter: music is meant to be experienced directly. Music deals with meanings and emotions that often can’t be put into words.

Aaron Copland, one of my favourite American composers, expressed itanother way, as reported on the website, quotesandpoem.com: “The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.’” The same source also tells us that Copland said: “If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.”

Nevertheless, when we’re not experiencing music – and even while we are – we continue to talk about it. And I’m going to continue to try to write about it. Because it’s important. And because, in case it’s not obvious already, I love music. I love to listen to it, to watch people play it. I love to dance to it, meditate to it, and particularly I love to play it myself – and especially to play it with other people.

“Everybody has a heart,” Juan Opitz told me. “To follow your heart – literally – just put your hand on your heart and repeat it with your other hand with a drum or a stick. That’s you. That’s your rhythm. Your rhythm is not in your face, your body, your physical appearance. The colour of your skin can be totally different than mine. Your heart is the same. It’s only one beat, and that’s the human beat – and if you want to go farther, the universal beat.”

Welcome to the universal beat of music.