Are You a Chosen One?

Music has great power and potential power in the Green and Sustainability Movements: go ahead hum a few of your favorites....

Not everyone GETS music. Almost everybody likes some form of music or another. But just as I don’t GET football —yes, I can sit and watch a game with friends, mostly follow it, cheer and and be engaged a little, but it does not have the power to MOVE me, and I don’t much care about the stats or the finer points— I have often been struck by the difference between people who GET the power of music to transform and those who simply think of music as kind of a wallpaper for life. I don’t think it is merely a lack of education, but more to do with exposure, genetics, the brain and interpretation, and the sensory system.

Exposure
I have very early memories of the power of music in my life. My mother did all of her housework while singing. Some were popular songs, some were from her high school choir repertoire, some from years of church hymn and choir singing. She knew that vacuuming, peeling potatoes, weeding the garden, stirring the soup, washing dishes, hanging out clothes were all best done when accompanied by music, preferably from within. I also remember sitting on my dad’s knee as he sang You Are My Sunshine and feeling the vibrations of his tones in his chest. Parked in pew #3 on the left side of the aisle and lined up with my four siblings in the Immanuel Lutheran Church every Sunday morning, there was great power in being surrounded by voices singing How Great Thou Art and Holy, Holy, Holy. In third grade I joined our neighborhood 4-H Club and noticed that we sang a few songs at EVERY CLUB MEETING! The following year I got to the Central School where we had Mrs. Precious, the veteran music teacher who at sixty-plus taught music with her whole, spry little body. She reinforced the tenants of 4-H and Sunday School singing: it doesn’t have to be perfect or even pretty, but had better be enthusiastic and most often FUN.


Choosing to Listen
By middle school (well, they used to call it Junior High) I learned to save my money from ironing for Mom, pulling mustard in the oat field and other specialty work, so I could buy carefully chosen LP albums. I listened for hours, over and over in a dark room to Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman. Ten years later I would do the same with Peter Tschesnokoff’s Salvation is Created, the music I still consider the greatest piece of choral music ever written. Getting to sing this as part of the soprano section of Iowa State Singers in a concert with the touring Moscow Symphony Orchestra in my junior year of college was and still is a peak experience of my life. While writing this, I listened again to St.Olaf choir’s recording and yet, again got goose bumps several times in its three and one half minute duration of nearly four- octave-span from rumbling bass section to soaring soprano line that shoots to heaven.


Creating
I have a sprinkling of fans and friends who really GET what I am doing. (Thank Goodness I am married to one of them. : >) They write via paper or email and quote some obscure line in one of my songs, telling me how it inspired some ah-ha moment in their life. I feel immense gratitude because when I boil down all the reasons I write, perform and record music, the most basic answer is “to touch people” in a way that only music can.

I know that my music in not really my creation—though I will defend my copyrights to the grave—but some creative force of the Universe that flows through me when I am primed and remember to turn the spigot on. As with all composers and songwriters, my job is to put it all together in a way that only I can, given my unique combination of life history, geography, experience and eccentricities. Give fifty professional songwriters the same song title to write and I guarantee that they will compose fifty very different (some pretty darn good, some not) songs.

Musician Conversation
The years I lived in Nashville, surrounded by the best of the best songwriters, pickers, sound engineers, (who are mostly all fine musicians in their own right, which makes them better engineers at the board), I was immersed in an environment of great musicality everywhere—well, maybe except for most of Top 40 radio. I would hear stunning songs by great writers and singers whose names you would not recognize because there are just so MANY good music makers. Not all can be anointed by radio or internet or Amazon. Some days on breaks in the studio the assembled players would have diagnostic discussions on something like a chord progression, its prior history in country, classical, and Ukrainian folk music, followed by several bad puns, and a story, from when one of them was playing on the road with Some Once Famous Artist. Then back to work coming up with a stunningly brilliant intro on the spot to the recording session. Musician brains are a marvel, and they don’t work like any other. Yes, I understand that there are parallel universes to this in the Jazz, Classical, Opera,
Cabaret, Music Theatre world.

(These days there is plenty to bring down any music creator’s dreams. What with people making CD copies of whatever they like and passing them to friends, internet piracy and illegal downloads, producing a sustaining income stream from music is getting harder and harder, except for the likes of Beyonce, Bono, and Black Eyed Peas. Now with programs like Garage Band, musicians who could never have dreamed of recording a CD can do so in their spare time, duplicate it and declare themselves both an artist and a record company. Some of the resulting recordings are great. Some are awful. But who am I to judge? Music is such a personal thing.)

In my work booking my shows for Helping Heal the Planet One Song at a Time—which can be called concerts, showcases, school assemblies or Music and Conversation,—I sometimes have to explain why music is so important. Can’t do it. People either GET the power of music in any movement or venture or they don’t. No amount of explaining how the affective domain of the brain works in influencing cognition and action, no reminder that they know their ABC’s because they learned them by singing them, (and probably still sing them occasionally when looking up something in the dictionary or phone book). Imagine the Civil Rights movement without the power of We Shall Overcome, Christianity without Amazing Grace, elementary school without Yankee Doodle. I can’t, but some can.

So, if you happen to be one who is moved, tortured, lifted up, or inspired by melody, harmony, lyric, rhythm, or a really sweet string arrangement, count your blessings. You are one of the chosen ones. Not only do you have ears, a sense of timing and pitch, but the molecules, enzymes and synapses in your brain are arranged in a way that coalesce the components of sound into the majestic tones of the Universe, the first of which vibrated with the Big Blossom over fourteen billion years ago. You are blessed. God is Great. And She loves music.



Get yourself a little inspiration now!

To hear and purchase Earth Mama® (Joyce Rouse) songs about the Big Blossom
and the New Story of the Universe:
Listen to (I Come From a) Fireball at:
Earth Mama — Eco Music Therapy For Our Planet
http://www.earthmama.org/hearundertherainbow.php


or a gentler telling, Mystery
http://www.earthmama.org/heargrassroots.php


Earth Mama’s latest music can be found at
http://www.earthmama.org/hearpayattention.php

Or at www.iTunes.com/earthmama

Do you REALLY listen to music? Care to share examples of what moves you?
Please comment below