Music Meanings

This is a blog about music, and what it can mean to us. Since this is an entirely subjective topic, the opinions expressed are meant to only be personal expressions. To the extent that they stimulate other, different personal expressions, the blog will have served its purpose.

Like most musicians, I function in a lot of musical ways. I serve as a Minister of Music to the Vestavia Hills Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In that role I conduct adult, youth and children's choirs. I also work as a conductor in other settings. I serve as an Associate Conductor to Midamerica Productions, where I used to work full-time in their New York office. In my current role I travel around the country to conduct rehearsals with choirs just prior to their trips to New York to perform in the Carnegie Hall Concert Series. I also conduct concerts in that series from time to time. And I conduct the Birmingham Chamber Chorus, an ecumenical group of singers who perform in and around Birmingham under the sponsorship of the Vestavia Hills Baptist Church.

Most musicians I know have a similarly long list of jobs they pursue, and I am grateful for the opportunity to serve these groups in these ways.

The arts in general, and music in particular, are so important to our lives that we work for more than an income. We are passionate about our work, and hope to give our very best to our efforts. It is easy to document the fact that the arts reflect the highest accomplishments of human beings in every generation. There is so much about life that is of the highest importance, but that cannot be fully expressed through prosaic words alone. For that reason our world's civilizations have always had poets, composers, singers, players, dancers, actors, painters, sculptors; in every human place there have been those who gave their peers the greatest ability to leave their best behind for future generations while speaking with clarity and inspiration to their own.

Frequently, the greatest artistic efforts have come in times of societal or personal travail. Unmatched is the beauty of the African-American spiritual, inconceivable is the depth of emotion inherent in the stories of the performances of masterpieces like the Verdi "Requiem" by the imprisoned Jews in the Terezin Concentration Camp. And in our time, viewers around the world sat breathless as the New York Philharmonic played "Ahrirang" before the audience in North Korea, seen in an unprecedented, uninterrupted telecast on CNN. For ninety minutes the "Axis of Evil" was supplanted by the "Ties that Bind."

It is for this reason, I think, that Biblical descriptions of final judgment call for a musical act, the sounding of a trumpet, as the beginning of the end. Israel's great flawed king was a singer and poet, and the disciples left the upper room and went to their fate singing a hymn. Creativity lives for those times when words fail, whether lamenting "Absalom, my son," or looking evil in the eye while shouting/singing "Dies irae, dies illa..."

Artistic expression gives us the avenue we seek when we are bereft of the ability to fully express ourselves. While in graduate school at Florida State University, and for the years afterward until his death, I had the unmerited and singular privilege of being a friend, accompanist and sometimes apprentice to Robert Shaw. I remember so often the things he said in his unique way, reflecting his unique perception of the world. He frequently referred to the arts as "the flesh become word." He appropriated the metaphysical metaphor that begins the Gospel of John and reversed it to mean that the arts are our opportunity to do something that will last beyond our earthly lives. I think it's a way of realizing that we as creatures are at our best when we imitate our Creator by being creative.

I once worked in a church in rural south Alabama, where a well-meaning church member insisted that I would be pleased to have her son, visiting from another part of south Alabama, as a guest soloist. So I agreed to meet him and hear him sing. I asked him (using poor church musician vernacular) "what he sang," meaning what voice part he sang, tenor or baritone or bass. He answered, "I mostly sing songs that's got a meaning to 'em." While the comment was both funny and exasperating at the time, it has remained in my mind, and served as a goal for many years of church music since then. I like to think that all our music has "a meaning" or two, and that we wisely utilize our opportunity to create the context through which great art speaks to and for our generation.