October 26, 2007
Music
The Archbishop of Canterbury came to the Big Easy to visit with The Episcopal Church’s bishops and wonder what they were of a mind to do about their dilemma that had been handed them. It is a pity that it took sex to get him over here, but it is fine that he came to New Orleans where he could have, if he would have, maybe he did have heard some jazz and find out what Satchmo meant when he said, “Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.”
Jazzers talk about a band being “in the pocket” when a tune they’re playing has a tempo that really swings, something close to what Armstrong said about jazz’s source, its vitality, its endurance. As I’ve said here before and probably will again, there’s a model in this distinctly American take on music that we churchers might do well to emulate.
Music is not only a melody and a tempo, but also a system of harmonies called chords and chord changes, but it is more. Jazz is a good illustration of that “more.” The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz, when asked What is music? put it this way. Music is little dots, some black, some white, he said. Anybody can play it rather like a stenographer might turn shorthand into words on a typewriter. But, he said, this is not music. Music is what’s behind the dots, where the heart reaches inside and reveals what is there and then plays. That is music.
We’ve a liturgy, a scripture, a tradition, that anyone can “play” and many do, much like a stenographer might type. We sometimes may call that rendering worship or even service.
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