I was working on recording a Father’s Day offering for my dad so I pounded away at the keyboard all morning trying to get the nuances of the old-fashioned gospel hymn just right. It must be relentlessly taxing on my roommate in such situations, I thought. After all, she is much younger than I, and an educated and trained musician in her own right.
Somewhat wryly I smiled, “Old church music! If they only knew; sounds like ragtime straight out of a barroom, doesn’t it?”
“It’s perfect,” she said, surprising me with her reply. I had forgotten she is an anthropologist. “It was upbeat, stylish, action-packed, bouncy, full of energy – just what every generation wants from their music.”
True music is ageless and knows no genre. It is us – the linear generations- that place restrictions and prejudices; we who say, “that’s folk, that’s classical, that’s religious, I don’t do old stuff.” Ridiculous! Music always and forever will be an outcropping of the soul. It may be a mathematical formula or a stream of consciousness; an opera or a rap; but first and foremost it is spiritual – an outward expression of what is within.
Meanwhile, I continue to chip away at a larger project: Mom’s memorial service. We want to do it right. It was she from whom we got the music. It needs to be upbeat, stylish, full of energy. And of course, it will be very mid-century Christian. I debated aloud about assigning my younger son a part. All my children are musicians but the youngest is the one who parleys in the hardened vocabulary and angst of his generation on punk stages and in dusky bars four nights a week. Would he stoop to old-fashioned gospel? Sadly, I was projecting the embarrassment and rebellion of my own young adult years on him.
“Phil is not like that,” she said. He is not a snob. He loves Music. “Music is music with him.” Music is an outward expression of what is within. There is an ocean of love in that young man – whether pain or joy.
How fortunate we are – every one of us in this family – to have music as the go to pressure valve – the way to express what is really inside – to say what can’t be put in words.
What do you need to say through music today? What do you need to hear?