Mission Peak UU Congregation

M i s s i o n P e a k U n i t a r i a n U n i v e r s a l i s t C o n g r e g a t i o n

FROM MOZART TO MOTOWN, BACH TO BLUES

Reading

The music of the Spheres by Ernesto Cardenal

The music of the spheres.
A harmonious universe -
like a harp.
Its rhythms are the equal,
repeated seasons.
The beating of the heart.
Day/night. The going and
returning of migratory birds.
The cycles of stars and corn.
The mimosa that unfolds by
day and folds up again by night.
Rhythms of moon and tide. One
single rhythm in planets, atoms, sea.
And apples that ripen and fall,
and in the mind of Newton.
Melody, accord, arpeggios
The harp of the universe.
Unity behind apparent
multiplicity.
That is the music.

Sermon

Plato once said "Rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul...giving soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaity and life to everything."

I'd like to engage you all in a little thought experiment: I'm going to ask you to play some music right now, in your head. Think of something you like - anything from Mozart to Motown, Bach to the blues, Beethoven to the Beatles, Shostakovich to Sinatra, Cole to Coltraine. Play half a minute of a favorite piece of music in your head. Pause...

Can you hear it? Clearly, we carry music around with us. It gets deep inside of us, delights us, moves us, stirs both our souls and our bodies, sometimes even irritates us, like that song or commercial jingle you can't get out of your head. Advertisers certainly understand the power of music.

Cultures the world over have known the power of music: the power to motivate, to keep up morale, to inspire, to heal, even the power to create the world. In Greek mythology, the muses, from whom we get the word music, are goddesses who invented the seven-tone musical scale - the scale that was seen as a reflection of the music of the celestial spheres. So, to the ancient Greeks, the very structure of the universe is music, and those who imitate the celestial music by playing a lyre are said to have entered the sacred realm. In Hopi mythology, the world was born when Spider Woman molded two creatures out of earth and sang a creation song over them. In some African mythologies, the world comes into being with the beating of a drum. Ethiopian folklore speaks of the early times when the first humans sang rather than spoke, although humans eventually forgot the melodies and we now have to use ordinary speech. In India, the universe is built upon the primal chant, "OM." All existence, all that happens, depends on that sound.

Music also has the power to heal. In Hindu mythology, the gods gave mortals music to alleviate human suffering. In the Hebrew scriptures, David cures King Saul by playing his harp. In ancient Egypt and Greece, priests and priestesses chanted over the sick. Among Native Americans, shamans sing songs, beat drums and shake rattles to heal the sick. Many of us instinctively turn to music for therapy - to relieve pain, or sometimes to allow ourselves to feel more deeply - to experience grief and pain more fully, as a way to work ourselves through it. We may sing when we're afraid, when we're feeling blue, even when we're angry. Once, when I needed healing, I went to a seminar at Esalen Institute, titled "singing Gestalt." We sang our hearts out - not worrying about sounding good, just to get all those feeling out. It was a very powerful experience.

Throughout the centuries, songs arose from the world's wars, from tragedies, economic depressions, from ghettos and concentration camps, out of poverty and plenitude alike. A Rabbi, Sydney Greenberg has said, "A people that lives, sings; a people that sings, lives." Out of the deep suffering of African Americans under the yoke of slavery, there arose a type of song, a new type of music that in turn gave rise to new, and now familiar, musical forms: jazz and blues, gospel and soul, Motown and Do Wop, and Rock and Roll.

Music is in our bodies, in the beating in our hearts. It is in the rhythm and songs of the natural world. Music is a primary experience, an experience of depth beyond words and concepts; it reaches down deep, dropping a plumb-line into our very being, creating a connecting link between our finite selves and the eternal. Music sacralizes existence. Theologian Gerardus Van Der Leeuw said, "Music creates heaven on earth; [It] is at root a mimicry of heaven." To me, anything by Mozart is the sound of God humming. I can be so transfixed by a Mozart symphony or concerto that I lose myself; I melt into the timeless moment created by the music until there is no me any more, there is just the music. Perhaps many of you have experienced this self-transcendence through music as well. I can also be spiritually moved, deep in my bones, though in a different way, by the soulful, gospel-like song of someone like Aretha Franklin, calling out for a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T! And I can likewise be lifted onto a higher and wider vision of justice and equality than mere words can produce when I sing with a community of like-minded folks, as we do here each Sunday, singing hymns and songs of freedom and yearning, love and celebration. There is something in the music itself, not just in the words, that brings people together, that unites people in a common expression of our humanness.

Some of the most magnificent music ever written or performed is religious music - the Latin masses of many great Western composers, the complex Ragas of sacred Hindu music, the haunting traditional Hebrew melodies, Muslim prayer chants, and the art form known as a hymn, which needs no great orchestra or soloists, but only the human voice and perhaps a single instrument for accompaniment. The hymn is a very democratic form of religious music. We can all participate, young and old, male and female, rich and poor, because we all have this one instrument - the voice. It's no wonder that Martin Luther, who believed in the priesthood of all believers, was such a promoter and master himself of the great art form of the hymn.

Speaking personally, I love singing hymns and songs with a congregation. As a young Catholic, I felt singing-deprived. We didn't sing hymns in the Mass, although now Catholics do sing hymns. In my long-ago Catholic days, the Mass was sometimes chanted, which I preferred, but only the priest did thechanting. It is said that we UUs don't sing hymns very well, because we are always reading ahead to see if we agree with the words, but I believe we as a whole movement are singing better in recent years - and we're also singing more varied types of hymns and songs, such as those in the new teal hymnbook. Even the grey hymnal is a radical departure from the one before it, in terms of the variety of types of hymns and songs.

Whether sung, performed or simply listened to, music is a vehicle of transcendence, a healing balm, a filament that links us all, echoing the rhythms of our bodies and the pulse of the universe. One of the best descriptions I've heard of music is this anonymous one: "Music is what feelings sound like."

I close with the words of the Unitarian activist, writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote these words in 1845, after listening to a strain of music:

While I listened, music was to my soul what the atmosphere is to my body; it was the breath of my inward life. I felt, more deeply than ever, that music is the highest symbol of the infinite and holy...With renewed force I felt what I have often said, that the secret of creation lay in music...Sound led the stars to their places.

Benediction: Three quotes on music

First from Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!

From Michael Torke:

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?

And from the mystic known as Prophet, Kahlil Gibran, a little incantation to music:

O music, In your depths we deposit our hearts and souls.
Thou hast taught us to see with our ears,
And hear with our hearts.