If the two guiding mandates of our spiritual lives are TO KNOW AND TO BE KNOWN, I think we can all do more to remember that we are born into song …  I think we can do more to let song enrich our lives

 The Poet, Wendell Berry made an observation crucial to this idea:  “All creatures … dance … To music so humble and vast  that no ear hears it except in fragments.”  (from The Larger Circle)

Many of us feel that ART enriches our lives, and we could do well to remember that, as the founding philosophers of aesthetics believed,

music is the art form to which all other art aspires

 (Walter Pater 1873). Pater’s line in “The School of Giorgione,” one of the essays in The Renaissance.  Giorgione was a 16 C. Venetian musician/artist whose canvases have a “symphonic” quality)

From soothing the troubled heart to rousing the warrior, from joy to grief, romance to despair, music is one of the most powerful and yet least understood aspects of our nature.

MUSIC accompanies our arrivals and departures.   SONG calls us forth … the crooning glissando of a mother to her newborn is a universal language … the first song most of us hear  (motherese)

And

RHYTHMS within and around us resonates with the earth as we depart … the fading heartbeat, the death chant of the tired warrior, the dirge that helps us grieve

At the beginning … at the end … all through our lives, the rhythms and music within us resonates with all that is around us  ….  Even with the music of our universe when it is given to us to sense it  …

About this metaphor of RESONANCE:

Most of know intuitively what it means to be in tune with another person or one’s environment.  Resonance is when the activity of one thing, say a string or a person, can energize or activate another thing with which it shares the same frequencies.  With which it is “on the same wave-length.”

Speaking of resonance; I’m writing this in a rain storm and, as usual, really enjoy it because I feel like ideas come together more easily.  The resonance we usually speak of–the metaphor of an action (like a piano string) at one site evoking a harmonic reaction at another site–is harmonic resonance.  Perhaps the rain effect is an example of stochastic resonance— I need to master this idea, it may help. Look at A&O notes on RESONANCE

In fact, one could argue that it is the capacity to resonate that enables all our understanding of the world

Theme and variation are said to be the essence of art:

and we are each variations on a theme we are part of. 

EACH of us here today  … each of us that have ever existed … each of us that will ever exist, are a unique variation … on that theme that can only be sensed … it can only be heard  in our hearts

In fact, one could say that it is the variation that makes us human and the search for the unifying theme that makes us holy.

The SONGLINES that Bruce Chatwin referred to in the opening reading, is even today believed to be a labyrinth of pathways known to  the shamans of the Australian Aboriginal people.   They are called SONGLINES because when the creator first walked about during the DREAMTIME, he sang a song.

The creator’s song  identified and made real, every feature of the landscape, every creature the creator encountered or imagined.

The Aboriginal SONGLINES covered a continent and crossed many cultural boundaries, the territories of various tribes.  Some of the harshest – least hospitable — landscape in the world

But it is said that one who knows the song could travel safely … from refuge to refuge … from  waterhole to hidden life-sustaining root.

One who knew the song  would endure, … even naked in the wilderness

SONG ALSO HELPS US  move more surely amongst the inhospitable facts of the world – if we become aware, we find paths in the world that can help us accommodate as they resonate with the harmony within . . . 

It must be a GREAT MOMENT when  circumstances suddenly evoke a sense of the song  … like an idea on the tip of your tongue, you can just barely hear it … even a few seconds of experience can be inspiring … a cause of  “enthusiasm”  (en-theos – a stirring  of the greater spirit within you)  it must be a great moment …  a glimpse of even greater moments beyond … a pointing in a direction that feels so true.  

And ANYTHING might provide the note that perfects the harmony for that instant:  Walt Whitman once said, ALL TRUTHS DWELL IN ALL THINGS.   It’s like that …  it can be what may seem to others frivolous … The brief crystallization of  a great harmony would  include the voices  of 30,000 generations of ancestors, of thousands of personal experiences conscious and non-conscious, and of all we imagine … ALL WE hope for … for ourselves … for our children … for the community in which our children will prosper …  we CAN resonate with the future.

 There is something going on here … these musical moments touch something … recruit something within  us … RESONATE

This  stirring … this momentary  alignment of sound and spirit …  recalls what Joseph Campbell called  “the crystalline purity of the bed or ground of ones own and yet the worlds true being. “

 “ Like perfectly transparent crystal, [the song is there], and yet as though not there.”  And all creation both hears it and participates.  (deep apologies to Joseph Campbell 1968: 66)

 Whether creating or appreciating music, it is a bridge between the senses and the spirit.  It is, as Beethoven put it, “the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life,”

 “There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music.” said William P. Merril

“All deep things are song,” said Thomas Carlyle,

“It seems somehow the very central essence of us,

as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!”

A FEW MORE GREAT MOMENTS:

The great composer, Mendelssohn once played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the piano for Wolfgang von Goethe – a scientist but also the author of Faust.  When the performance concluded, Goethe  exclaimed,  “It is stupendous, absolutely mad.  It makes me almost fear that the house will collapse. And supposing the whole of mankind played it at once” .  Goethes commet to Mendelssohn after he played Beethovens Fifth Symphony on the piano for him  related by Maynard Solomon in Late Beethoven Music, Thought, Imagination UC Press, cited in Lewis Lockwoods review in NYRB July 17 2003 pp 27-29).    (remember the Beatles?)

Peter Shaffer, author of Amadeus. in an Homage to Mozart, The New York Times Magazine, 2 September, 1984. pp. 22-38)  identified moments of great spiritual power for him … he was fairly precise:

• the setting of the words “Tutti contenti” at the end of “The Marriage of Figaro;” or the
• harmonization of the Priest’s response “Starkt mit Geduld sie in Gefahr” in “The Magic Flute[i]” or
• the bar in “Cosi Fan Tutte” at the reprise of the tenor’s tune “Un’aura Amorosa,” wherein a single note in the accompaniment descends a semitone, from F sharp to F natural.)

A great moment in music was related to me by a friend:   Howard Pollio had an Indian Hindu expert on spiritual consciousness visiting his class.  His poor English language skills allowed him to focus on only one point:  he sung the one-word prayer: OM, and beckoned the class to join him.  They began hesitatingly, significantly distracted by dissonances and the inability of some of them to hit the note they were aiming at: BUT with urging , OVER A FEW MINUTES, each individual, whatever their natural pitch or ability, was able to find their place in the harmony …  at THAT INSTANT, the wave of pleasure that swept across the class at that moment was almost tangible.

Most everyone (I expect) can identify music that gives them the chills

And songwriters know how to pitch to our needs:  at least they know what to try:  that major chords are cheerful and confident and that minor chords are melancholy and mysterious.   They know that sevenths are funky and soulful but that a major seventh will seem serene and romantic while a minor seventh would evoke a mellow moodiness.  They know the spookiness of a diminished chord and the delightful tension of a suspended fourth.

They can open these doors with more-or-less skill, but it is we who have to step through them

BUT there is sometimes more to this than our individual resonance or will … an emotional thrill is nowhere  near  the “States of ecstasy and rapture may lie in wait for us if we give ourselves totally to music ;  

a  common scene “during the 1950s,” the neurologist and popular author Oliver Sacks reminds us, “was to see entire audiences swooning in response to Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley—seized by an emotional and perhaps erotic excitement so intense as to induce fainting.” (in Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia).

This reminds me once again That I am a biologist and I am restless until I can reconcile an experience with the functions of the organism:

… I can’t forget that music activates more specific parts of the brain than any other sense, or that that song is on the other side of the brain from language … or that the wounded brain can recruit song to express itself when words fail …  I can’t forget that the songs and dances in many species are the keys to recruiting reproductive partners    

Then there are dysfunctions: the epileptic seizures which can, in a few rare people, be triggered by very specific musical stimuli … say, a specific song by Bing Crosby .  

OR the extraordinary juxtaposition of gifts and losses in a disorder in which great social skills and musicality –often perfect pitch–  are accompanied by a cognitive  ineptitude with the inanimate world (Williams Syndrome)

But these scientific facts are not what is occupying me here: 

Recalling Wendell Berry’s comment I mentioned earlier:  “All creatures … dance …

To music so humble and vast  that no ear hears it except in fragments.”

It is an item of Unitarian faith that we each participate in a great unity … that each of us is, like all works of art, a variation on a theme … that our songs are fragments of a great harmony …  that is, if we get to sing them.

I  share – many of us might share—the fear expressed by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore,  –the  fear that “I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.”   Am  I one of that mass of humanity, as Thoreau described,  living a life of “quiet desperation”  who will  “go to their graves with the song still in them.”  

So we keep on singing, in our ways, and seeking harmony where we can … tasting the vast diversity of song as we move forward …

One way we sometimes get a sense of this is right here … in our sanctuary … And the ever-present chance that our song will merge with that of the larger group such that we even lose our self-consciousness … You’ve heard people like that singing out confidently as they seek the right note to harmonize

I take this opportunity to apologize

Sometimes   a song penetrates one’s mind in a way that tantalizes … we may even hate it but cannot get it out of our heads …

And the incredible diversity … some people are transported by rap … or by Hymns,  or blues,  or lieder, or opera,  … lullabies, childly tunes …

(Since grand-daughter Katie, came along …. “the itsy bitsy spider” has taken up residence in a corner of my brain)

Sometimes Music is a refuge, like Maya Angelou, “ I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” (Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name)  Or the dimly remembered songs … that are, as playwright Ben Hecht once said, “Little houses in which our hearts once lived.  (Ben Hecht’s comment quoted by John Lahrsin The New Yorker July 12&19 2004, p104)

CHANGE

Every Spring I conduct a seminar entitled “ART & ORGANISM”,  and amongst the critical elements of art with which I seek resonances in biology, is, predictably, the idea of THEME AND VARIATION … we ask what is FIXED and what is FLEXIBLE in our lives.  

As we change, as the world around us changes, we cope and hopefully prosper.  The fixed and the flexible … when we get it right, the root and the fruit (as Jesse Jackson would say) are in accord

BUT WHILE MUCH about music is reminiscence, stabilizing, comforting … MUSIC CAN ALSO ENERGIZE US in ways that enable CHANGE  …  especially important when CHANGE is needed and yet we resist it or go into denial.  …   We are unified by the  experience of change …  but we often  fear we will be sucked into what Marshall Berman called “a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.”  … some people call that “LIFE”  but to live it we must be part of that universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’” (Berman 1982)

YET WE ENDURE