Music!

Reading C.S. Lewis on the problem of animal pain this morning - excellent and serendipitous preparation for teaching a lesson on the very poignant "Little Shepherd" from Debussy's Children's Corner.

Driving to and from school today, listening to the last movement of Beethoven's fifth piano concerto - marvelous imagination and variety expressed with basic scales and triads!

Now I'm watching an episode of The Incredible Hulk. Great soundtrack in this series: sensitive reiteration of a handful of motives in a range of settings, and played beautifully by live musicians. Joe Harnell's "Lonely Man" theme from the closing of the show.

Theory Thoughts

As I gear up for teaching music theory in my new job at Southeastern, I'm thinking about what a lot of music theory consists of, especially in the early stages of learning - recognizing and labeling musical materials. When I was a student, I thought those activities were pretty mundane and not very theoretical.

While I have come to accept that mastering some basic concepts is a normal and necessary way of entering into a discipline, I also believe there might be more profound and exciting implications to the seemingly simple act of naming things.

As described in Genesis, one of the first things Adam had the opportunity to do was to name the animals. There are many things I really like about that passage:

One is that it sounds like God made all those creatures because God was concerned about what things were good for us and what things were not good for us. It wasn't good for us to be alone. My dog and cat really are helpers and partners of sorts to me at times, mostly by accepting me and by being small, cute, energetic, and random creatures around the house.

I also like the freedom that is part of this Genesis scene. It doesn't seem like God commanded Adam to name the animals, nor does it seem that God caused him to call the animals anything in particular. Instead, I think God and Adam shared a wonderfully relaxed and uncomplicated communion. I imagine them sitting down over coffee and looking at God's portfolio of work. In this pre-fall picture, Adam's behavior is presented as really healthy and whole. He naturally sees, processes, and acts in a good way. It reminds me of the really bright children I worked with at Collegiate School in Richmond who were endlessly curious and had lots of innate learning skills. What's more, they applied those skills with joy as it was naturally fun for them to do so! Maybe those are more layers of what "coming as a child" means.

I'm also really struck by God the creator's desire to see what each aspect of the creation meant to Adam. That's exactly how we human artists are about our creations. We want to know the significance of the things we create in the experience of our fellow human beings. It is through their feedback that we know that we are, indeed, serving. Because of this, it seems to me that creativity is linked to relationship.

Now, back to naming.

I would think that naming took analysis and reflection for Adam, and developing words to represent creatures must have involved some creative fun. Organizing is an important aspect of the creative process as we know it. Sorting the animals by name was a way of bringing order to the human understanding of the world God had created. In this way, Adam was getting to partner with God in creating.

I'm intrigued by the fact that it seems like language already existed when Adam named the animals. I have usually assumed that we humans created language from its foundations. But in Genesis, God had already spoken some pretty involved sentences to Adam before Adam was given the opportunity to name the animals. Also, I had been thinking that language arose from a communication need between humans, but it sounds like Adam was the only one of us around when this naming happened. That seems significant to me because, while the language Adam was creating would be for the use of the race, at its inception, the language was just between him and God.

While naming, it seems that Adam realized his need for someone like himself, and when Eve was brought into being, Adam verbally expressed his need and prayed a prayer of thanks through the act of naming her.

Maybe God left the animals unnamed so that we could fully appropriate the created order to our experience through thought and language. Through the language aspect, we expressed the need for community with other people, and language went on to create a shared human culture once there were other humans with whom to share it. All of this seems to have grown out of relationship with God and the Creation.

So as we continue to see and name patterns and organizations in the both the created worlds of living things and physical phenomena such as sound, I think we are following through on God's invitation to name, organize, and create within our own consciousness. And through that exploration of what God has made, we can discover and develop community.

Seaworld Christmas

My in-laws sent us to Seaworld for Christmas. I enjoyed the day and found it to be a surprisingly musical experience.

Not far into the park, I heard a recording of an all male chorus singing chant. Naturally, that intrigued me. When the third phrase arrived, I started hearing the instrumental accompaniment and recognized this "chant." It was "Winter Wonderland!" Those first two lines really do sound like chant when heard in this way.

Then we took a bridge, not to nowhere, but to Shamu Stadium. This long bridge was lots of fun. There was music playing and several choirs of fountains in the lake responded to some of the music. It was a lovely and energetic water ballet. I also heard a bit of Mannheim Steamroller's version of "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming" on that trip across the bridge. I've been playing the arrangement myself, and faster than the recorded performance (which I hadn't heard until yesterday). But my tempo was based on the metronome marking in the piano score.

Seeing the really big and smart animals in the Shamu show was very moving. This was more ballet, only with whales.

Shamu was presented as a member of the same family as all of us humans who share the planet, and this made some sense to me because Shamu seems a bit like some giant great-grandmother that many of us visit from time to time. And she lives in Florida.

Crossing the bridge again, we saw a skywriter writing "Jesus loves you" up above.

Later, we heard a good brass quintet called "The Penguins" play various Christmas carols. We enjoyed their playing, their rapport, and their festive costumes. The tubist also did an excellent and heart-wrenching imitation of a melting Frosty the Snowman.

In the evening, we saw Shamu's Christmas celebration. This was kind of the strangest worship service I've attended. I liked the inter-species aspect of this worship. But it was also really designed as a show.

One thing I found truly worshipful was singing Christmas songs along with the five thousand people who were watching the words on giant screens before the show. The calmness and innocence of song hovering over such a group was special. It did make me feel a bit like we were one big family.

Also worshipful was witnessing the cooperation and communication between people and these beautiful animals. That was poignant, too, because I bet there is much more we could say to each other, if only we knew how - more important things than "spin around," etc. But we saw some of the deeper things being said through the loving attitudes of the trainers with the animals.

The end of the show really was over the top: a very loud gospel choir, leaping flames, and jumping whales.

I had different feelings about the jumping of the whales depending on what music I was hearing when the jumping was going on. The upbeat gospel version was the most invigorating whale jumping.

On the way back across the bridge the last time we heard the end of "Sleigh Ride" as well as the Orlando Symphony playing some the sound track for Arctic Express from a distance.