The Music of Life by Rev. Zenshin Florence Caplow

The seeds of this reflection lie in a second hand shop somewhere in San Francisco, years ago. I happened to see this broadside (show) and was captivated by it. It is from a poem by Tennyson. A friend saw me exclaiming over it, and bought and framed it for me as a gift. It has been in every house I’ve lived in the quarter century since.

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn’d it in his glowing hands;

Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;

Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass’d in music out of sight.

Why was I so taken with this quote? I think because it expresses something that seems absolutely intuitively on the mark to me, that life itself is like a song or a piece of music, something that, like music, only happens in time, that rises from silence and goes back in silence, or as Mary Oliver writes in her great poem, When Death Comes,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence.

Or the words of the hymn we sung earlier, one of my favorites: my life flows on in endless song.

The process theologians say that we are verbs, not nouns, and that the whole world is made up not of things, but of processes, of an unfolding. Just like music. Music doesn’t exist without time – it is only because the sound waves resonate through time that we have music. It is not a coincidence that musicians talk about keeping time.

Music has become so ubiquitous in our culture. It is everywhere, in elevators, in department stores, in our earbuds, in music scores. We are literally deluged with music. How much is it just the sound score of our life, background, taken for granted? But how often do we really stop, really listen?

Some people do. We call these people musicians. This is why I asked Paul to offer a reflection this morning too.

I grew up among musicians. My grandmother was a concert pianist. My mother was a piano student at University of Colorado, my father’s sister was an extraordinary pianist and singer. Concert grand pianos were in all their living rooms, even my aunt’s apartment in New York. My aunt Doe, in her late 90s, with memory loss, would sit at her piano and play whole sonatas by memory. One of the last photos I’ve seen of her, at 98, was at her piano.

To them, music was not background. It was foreground. My mother could never understand why someone would have music on in the background while doing chores or eating dinner. Music was, to her, like life-blood, emotionally intense and absorbing, something that could carry a person away. Only now, years later, do I begin to glimpse what she experienced.

Although my mother loved many forms of classical music, her greatest passion was reserved for opera. She went to her first opera, in downtown Chicago, when she was 12 years old. Supposedly without her parents, though I find that hard to believe. She would quite literally experience ecstasy when she heard arias that really moved her.

For a few years around the time I was born she lived near New York and had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera, which was, to her, what St. Peter’s in Rome might be for a devout Catholic.

After we moved to Indiana, she had season tickets to the opera at Indiana University, and I went with her. We went to many of the great opera houses in Europe too, although she didn’t have a lot of money so we were usually in the standing room section of the opera house. Often someone would take pity on the small child trying to stand through a three hour opera and let me sit with them.

Every Saturday afternoon as I was growing up she would religiously listen to the Metropolitan Live on the radio, and later she was a regular at the movie theater at the mall in Terre Haute, where the Metropolitan was shown live on the screen.

I didn’t understand this passion. In fact, these were in the days before opera had titles, so I only had the barest notion of what was happening on stage. Although I appreciate music, I wasn’t trained to the level others in my family were.

But in her memory, two weeks ago when I was in New York for just three nights after a friends ordination at All Souls NYC, I bought a ticket to the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, for Verdi’s Rigoletto, one of the most brutal and tragic of all operas, (which is saying a lot). Verdi was my mother’s favorite composer.  Many Verdi operas have death scenes, the soprano singing beautifully as she slowly dies, often the last nights sung lying down, the last whisper heard even to the back of the hall, and my mother would be weeping soundlessly as she listened.

Being my mother’s daughter, I was seated way, way up near the ceiling, but oddly there was an empty seat next to me. I felt like she was there, in some way. And I tried to hear the music as she did, as life blood, as power, as beauty.

It helped that earlier that same day I had had my own intensely personal encounter with music, totally unexpectedly.

I had always wanted to see the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Episcopal cathedral in New York, built in 1892 and one of the largest church buildings in the world. On that day I traveled up to Morningside Heights, near Columbia University, to see the cathedral. I began wandering across the vast open floor of the nave. From a distance I heard the faint sound of a choir. Up near the high altar, to one side was an unfinished part of the cathedral. I went through a small door and into a room with high pillars, empty except for a circle of small speakers on stands.

A sign explained.  

This was a sound installation by Janet Cardiff, a Canadian artist who creates art mostly with sound. The title was the 40 part motet.

One of the greatest pieces of choral music from the Renaissance, or maybe in the history of music, is a motet for 40 voices by the English composer Thomas Tallis, called “Spem in Alium” and composed in 1570. It is extraordinarily difficult, sung by eight choirs of five voices each, with each  person having a unique part, and is meant to be heard with the choir surrounding the audience.

Janet Cardiff went to a performance of “Spem in Alium” by the Tallis singers, and placed a recording microphone in front of each singer. So in the recording from that microphone you hear mostly the singers own voice but also the rest of the motet, But as the singer themselves heard it from where they stood.  There were 40 speakers in groups of 8 in the room.  Only from the middle of the room could you hear the whole piece. Janet Cardiff explained why she did this: I wanted to be able to experience this music in a more intimate and physical way, to hear it from the viewpoint of the singer, to be able to climb inside the music, connecting with the separate voices.

And then the music started and I walked up to the speaker nearest me, and without any warning, I was weeping.

I think trying to write about a musical experience is very difficult, so I want you to hear a little bit of what I heard (play music)

The piece is 14 minutes long, and I listened to it all the way through, moving slowly from speaker to speaker, sometimes sitting in the middle of the room, weeping and weeping. I can’t say why I was crying. How to explain why music can enter the center of your heart like a sword? Only that it felt like the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, listening to this music, created 450 years ago, resonating in that great stone room like the ocean inside a seashell.

Music is healing. I think that time in the cathedral was healing for me, as I continue to mourn my mother’s death. I think the tears had been waiting for a moment like that, and how fitting that it was music that brought them finally flowing. Maybe that has happened to you too.

My neighbor here is a writer and a novelist. When she was younger she also sang in choirs, but career and family took her away from singing. Then she began to sing again, a few years ago, and she fell in love with singing jazz improvisation as part of an ensemble. She has been working on a manuscript about coming back to singing at a time when she felt despair about the world. What she found was that singing brings her deep into the present moment, with no room for worrying or thinking about anything else. And it brings her joy.

The other day we sat down over tea and she told me what it was like when there was a sense of connection and flow in the improvisation. She said, I have this sense that I’m shaping time, I’m sculpting time. It’s both fascinating and scary for me. And she described making music with her band , communicating and being together, like a conversation with each other, a different conversation than you can have in language.

I felt like she was showing me a little of what brings people to music, from the inside. And it made me think, again, about the Tennyson quote, about our individual life like a chord of music played by love, with love.

Earlier this year, my mother’s life, as all lives do, trembling passed in music out of sight. And yet those chords still reverberate in this world, still reverberate in me and those who loved her. It’s as if we are also the harpist, and the vibrations we make – the gardens we cultivate, the trees we plant, the animals we care for, the people we touch – go on and on, even as our particulars tend back toward the silence from whence we came.