Music Everywhere

I realized as I sat down to write this morning that I had two subject sloshing around in my head--as opposed to mornings when my head feels empty of anything to share. I also realized that because I pair writing and photos that I haven't written about other passions, music being an important one.

Recently I have been blessed to hear live music that has been creative and inspiring. It has included the Met's live HD performance of Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride in a Boulder theater, a concert by a local chamber music orchestra, and several of the weekly free concerts by Colorado University's College of Music faculty. There have been evenings when I thought I was too tired to drive to CU for a concert. Then I would remember that I would be tranported from my daily activities to another realm, one of beauty in which I could wrap myself.

The talented violinist, the Chinese pianist, the baratone singing Odgen Nash's poetry all took me with them as they used their talents. However, I was most stirred and inspired by faculty composer, Daniel's Kellogg's program. I also recently heard a CD rendering of a composition by Joseph Landers, a Montevallo University (in Alabama) professor, whom I knew as a young boy. These young men create music that's new, sometimes edgy, both vibrant and shimmering.
How blessed we are to have their creativity in our midst.

Music in my early childhood was primarily that of hymns and children's Sunday School songs. Deep and Wide, Climb, Climb Up Sunshine Mountain, and Jesus Loves Me are examples. We looked forward to the birds' return each spring, to their songs. Mother's favorites, the blue birds, came to the kitchen window, where Mother whistled their tunes back to them.

I learned to tune out screams and cries, even sniffling. I didn't know that in shutting out sounds of pain and grief, that I would lose ability to discriminate close tones and replicate notes of music. That in ignoring sounds that were bad to me, I wouldn't have the acute ability to hear beautiful sounds. This is another rung in the "it takes darkness to perceive light, despair to enjoy hope--all of those truths that are not what we want to believe. As I've been willing to remember the harshest sounds of my childhood, I've recovered some of that fine discrimination, but with age, not all of it.

The sounds of crickets and frogs were evening music, sometimes a chorus in the night. The rooster's crow rose above the birds singing in the pear tree by my bedroom window and signaled that it was time to get up.

Water's music was and is today one of the most soothing or energizing sounds--as long as it is not rushing to overflow its banks in the spring thaw. As a child I begged to go with Dad to his farm, the other place, for several reasons. One was to trudge to the spring and listen to the sound of the water as it bubbled from wherever its source and flowed over the rocks and into the little creek bed, down through the trees that held vines strong enough to hold Billy and me as we swung, pretending to be Tarzan and Jane of the jungle. The spring and creek's music was quiet in the winter, robust in the spring, leisurely in the summer--until with August's heat it dried to a trickle.

I look forward to spring's thaw and hikes along side rushing creeks, their roar sometimes so loud that talking must cease until we come to a quieter place. In the meantime, I will enjoy live music as it's presented around Boulder and fits my budget, and I will play more of my CDs at home and in the car. There is music for every mood and any occasion. And I will enjoy the music of laughter, especially that of grandson, Sam. I am blessed with the sound of music.