About Music

Over the weekend I was thinking about music.

Music has always been a huge part of my life.  Still is.  For a short time in my undergraduate years I was a music major, but I couldn't sustain it because it was way too competitive for me.  Most of those other music majoring students had been reared on classical music and had studied formally for most of their childhoods.

I simply loved music.  My music background was in the Southern Baptist church and the old time gospel songs my parents sang as we traveled by car from one Army post to the next.  I learned to read music by attending a shaped note training in a country Assembly of God church in rural, southern Alabama. (Isn't that a clincher?  Southern Alabama.  What a double dose!)

I wonder how music is experienced in your life.  It seems to be pretty important to us culturally.

I don't think most people walking around with earphones are listening to talking.  What's a movie or a television program without a musical soundtrack.  I mean, really, how would you even know what to feel when watching a movie without the music?

I often listen to music over an Internet radio station when I'm in my office at work.  I listen to CDs when I'm in my truck.  People pay big bucks to go to concerts to hear live music.  People sing in choirs and bands and staged musicals.

Many of us sing along with whatever music we're listening to.  Sometimes, maybe, we just sing on our own because we simply want to or we need to or we just can't help it.

Now that's the piece I've been coming to here.

Think about music for moment.  Just let your mind go where it wants to when it contemplates music.



Now think about music without any reference in your thinking to performance.



Have you ever seen a child, sitting by herself and playing and making up a song as she sits there or as she dances around or walks?  When was the last time you did that?  Have you ever done that?

Like me, you probably know someone who says they can't sing.  What does this mean, they can't sing?  If you take the time and care to inquire about what this person means, it probably includes things about how they think they sound or what they've been told about how they sound.  Perhaps they would say they can't carry a tune.  You know, stuff like that.  We've all heard it.  Maybe some of us have been the ones to say it.

Well all of that implies that we have a notion of how singing is supposed to be, how it is supposed to sound, and that whatever we are doing is not the way it's supposed to be done.  Says who?

Before music was co-opted by the culture of which we are a part, I suspect it played a different role in people's lives.  What was music before it became something primarily either performed or listened to?  What was music like when there was more spontaneity in it as an expression?