MUSIC? It makes the world go ‘round

Don't you love the sound of a song being played? Take folks here with stories to make sense of it all. When I hear music like that, I think of springtime. I feel springtime that one of my favorite things besides flowers blooming at springtime is the sound of the metal lark, or as we have here in our backyard in Colorado, Red Wing Blackboots. There's something about spring and music that go together, and there's one thing I like better than hearing a song played, and that's when I know the player. I know the player of the song here on the background. His name is Van, one of my dearest friends, and I'd like you to meet him. Now this recording was made remotely a few weeks back just after Easter, so we'll have some reference to that, and you may sense it in the way it sounds a bit, but let's get on with it. Here we are. I'm sitting with a dear friend named Van, hello Van, hello, and I want to talk to you about music in general and music specific as it relates to you, and then particularly how it is expressed this past weekend in this time called Resurrection Sunday. A couple of years back, a couple of books by a neuro musicologist by the name of Daniel Levitton. The first one was called This Is Your Brain on Music, and the second one was called The World in Six Songs, and I had never read anything from a neurological framework with regard to music and the human frame, if you will. But it was just fascinating how he suggested, and this is a total distillation, how he suggested the music is at the heart of us, and I put heart in quotes. It's at the center of who we are, our brain, so forth. So you're a musician. Talk to me, give me some of your thoughts about music and our human experience, and you know, we can start anywhere, brain, physiology, gifting, culture, whatever, just jump in. Let's have a conversation. Music is everywhere in our culture. I don't think that's just American culture, but I think as I travel the world, it's everywhere. There's music in every nook and cranny, all different styles. I think it's interesting in my perception growing up that the people that we sort of lauded in high school, which is that microcosm of our culture, the people that were cool were the jocks and the people who were super smart and stuff like that. But as those people grew older, some of them went into the NBA or the NFL, they're on the sidelines with their headphones on, and they're listening to the musicians. And those are the people that in our culture have been, even the movie stars are listening to the musicians. That somehow music is at the apex of our culture, that we all have our own. We all like what we like, and it moves us. It's emotional. It reminds us of a time and a place. You can listen to a song and be transported to the very place and almost smell what it smelled like at that moment in your history. Your brain is crazy good at taking music and storing it. So I've said in the past that sport, agriculture and music will take you anywhere in the world, any culture, any country. But of those three, only a certain number are into sport. There's a certain percentage that deal with agriculture, although we all eat. So that would be a great leveler. But nothing reaches around the world, or maybe into the universe, like music. And you've touched on that, talked to me a little more. I think going back to the high school thing, I think the students that were in the band, which I was one of those people, I think it was probably my eighth grade year, in between my eighth grade and ninth grade year, I was pretty young because I skipped fifth grade. In that summer time, I started getting interested in music. My brother would play his guitar and he would practice for hours in his room and I would just sit there and he let me, was great of him, watching, then when he would leave and go off and do some, I would pick up his guitar and play it. So I figured out at some point my brain works in such a way where I can put things underneath my fingers. And so I just started playing, ended up in my brother's band. They had a little sort of rock pop band with the covers and stuff like that. And I was a keyboard player off of a sudden and they didn't like me before, but I could play the piano now and they didn't have one of those and so I became the kid that did that. I was cool enough. But it was just funny for me to be all through high school, being sort of on the outskirts, being a musician. I never wanted to be that nerdy kid, you know, but our culture now, as I said, has shifted those little band nerds have become icons in the world because I think music changes us. It captures our emotion, it captures our seasons of life and it's a soundtrack. Everyone of us has a soundtrack of our lives and there are songs that provide their world. And a playlist. Our own playlist, our own mixtape, as it were, that's old school, you know, old mixtape of our lives. Well, so I've already said you're a musician. What instruments can you play? You don't have to rate them as to which you play best or whatever, but what instruments beside your voice, because you sing, which is an instrument. What do you... We started playing saxophone in the fourth grade. Okay. And it was very heavy to carry school, but I did okay with that all the way through high school, played it off and on, but then started picking up the piano and the guitar. I played the drums at age five in our church. I'm not sure how good it was, but that pretty much tells you there was nobody else to play the drums. Well, and if the people sang loud, it's all right. It didn't matter. They were just letting people try it, which was good about our church. They put in anybody up there. So I played the drums, bass, piano, mostly piano. That became my love because of one thing, and that was harmony. The chordal structures in the harmonies captured my attention and my heart. That guitar sort of does that for me, but bass, I love the low and I wish I could have the best place per in the world, because they're so important. But it's the choral structures of the piano that make me come alive, so. Why is the bass player so important? In my opinion, the bass player provides everything of the groove. The drummer doesn't set the groove. The bass player does. So you're talking about bands, you know, and we play the music I like. It's the bass player that carries the tempo and the groove. And the drummer, super important, but the bass player, that's everything. Here she tees it up. They are the backbone of the band. When did you know that you had a gift for music? It's one thing to appreciate. You know, a lot of us have tried the piano, you know, in the seventh grade, my parents gave me lessons. And at the end of the year, the teacher said to my folks, you know, I think you probably want to save your money. I can still play the first two measures of the American patrol march, but nobody sings that. I don't even know if it has lyrics. Anyway, when did you know that you had a gift? I think people start saying stuff to you and you're young, especially if you can do certain things. So I think I started hearing that. My whole life, though, I've sort of downplayed the fact that I have talent because I've always been painfully aware of the people that I know that are unbelievable at the instrument. So they're better. Always. There's a thousand guys out there better. So I just always kind of downplayed the fact that I was talented in the sense or had a gift because it was so minuscule in compared to the things that I love to listen to. And still to this day, I'm 54 years old, and there's still people that I just can't believe they do what they do on the instrument. Like, cool. There's a new kid on the block named Jacob Collier, who is just a musical genius. A young prodigy that when he was like 15 years old, Taylor Ixty, that plays with just masterful capacity. So there's just, God gives gifts to people musically. And I think I got a little bit of that. And I'm grateful for it because it's given me life, and I think it's blessed other people along the way. Any gift musically or otherwise, you and I would at least agree comes from the creator, comes from God, because you were chatting with me the other day about Eric Clapton. Yeah. Talked in it. And he's not a pianist. He's a guitarist, right? Talked to me about Eric Clapton. Well, people have just talked about the idea of music, you know, being Christian and noncreek. I grew up in a family that followed Jesus, and so they kind of made delineations. I never really saw that. I just thought, either you're talented, you got a gift or you're don't, and it all comes from God. And if you're listening to Eric Clapton play in his style in genre, he's unbelievable in what he accomplished is. Certain style, he's just gifted. He knows when to play and what to play. The way he places his vowel sounds and his singing, his guitar playing. He's not the best guitar player in the world, but he is unbelievable in his gift and talent. And there's just thousands of people like that. And I don't think it's determined by you being a religious person or not. It's determined that God just gave you a gift. And to me, all of that is beautiful. If you can listen to true talent and ability, it's godly, you know. You know, I have on my phone several recordings of Andrea Biccelli. I have a couple of albums of Allison Kraus. I heard Allison Kraus at the National Prayer Breakfast sing that old song called Abide with me. And she was accompanied by a guitarist and a mandolin player. And on the last verse, they stopped and she sang it acapella. And her voice is such a unique instrument if I can do that, that when she held that last note for several seconds, I describe it like the fog that happens when you breathe out on a Chicago morning when it's four below zero. And your breath that you can see just hangs in the air. It was like silver, you know. I don't have the words to describe it. Or listening to Andrea Biccelli sing almost anything, but he had another event saying amazing grace. You know, I mean, if you've not heard that man sing that. I think when you get those moments like that, I think you're tasting heaven. Your heaven's going to be like, you're tasting something of God in those moments. We were in Broadway and it took our kids to see a revival of the color purple. A young British gal named Cynthia Arevo was playing the lead role. And I've never seen this happen before in my entire history, my son and my daughter were sitting next with us and they're in their late teens and early 20s at the time. And I didn't know if they would like it, Eric and I were concerned, they're going to like it or not or whatever. That Cynthia Arevo was so unbelievable. There was moments, not at the end, in the middle of a song that people stood to their feet to applaud because of just the pure beauty and intensity, tonal quality, passion. It just brought you to your feet. And my son and daughter included, and I remember at the end of the first act, Sam looked over at us and said, I think that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. There's something powerful and I think that it's God. I think that's who he is. I think that sheer beauty is God. Speaking about God, I think it's C.S. Lewis in his trilogy or in his story of Narnie. He has this, the Christ figure is Aslan the Lion. And if I'm not mistaken, Aslan sings the earth and the galaxies into being. And there's something about that connection, that insight that the C.S. Lewis gives us or thought that he gives us, that's powerful. So, scripture and music is connected in a lot of ways. Technically, I think there are probably 185 songs, it could take all the songs and then some others, the scholars think or some, in scripture, but between narrative and music, it's a chunk of what we call the Bible. And I suppose if you put the narrative to music, you get country music, I don't know. There's some thought that the Torah, first five books of scripture, were sung. I mean because certainly they were memorized by those folks in that day. Talk to me a bit about scripture and music. Well, I think that even though the Hebrew culture, as we know it today, has its foundation in celebrations and songs, but I think it predates even Abraham. I think that God set that in place and I think that God set music as a part of their celebrations. Because he set up all the festivals, if you read the Old Testament and the Exodus, he told them, this is what I want you to celebrate. And he set them up in seasonal reflective times, seasons of celebrations, season that reflected good times and hard times, remembering hard times. So I think that the whole idea of music in the scripture, it's everywhere in there. Songs are everywhere and they usually reflect the heart of the singer. And it usually reflects some connection between the singer and that which is God. Singing provides this direct contact in a way that prayers may also, but singing may be prayers put to song. These would show that a baby in the womb can recognize a mother's voice. I think it's four months in. And if that voice is connected to a melody, that's a gift in and of itself. And lullabies are the things that put babies to sleep off in time. I don't know how much is the music, how much is the mother's tone, whatever it is. Let me just back up a moment and ask this question. So what degree is music a lens through which you see the world? And it totally my friends tease me that if I go into a restaurant or anywhere I always notice what song it is, that's plain. Because I'm a tune to it, I'm a tune to chordal harmonies and structures within music. And I think it has shaped me. I am moved by sound, orchestration, all of that. So I think that I look through what I do. I see my life the way I lead, the organization that I lead, I see it as orchestrating. I see it as pieces of the puzzle coming together, every part having a place. So I think my shaping, certainly my college degree in music and orchestration and arranging all those things affect. But it's like these are mental means to do things, the way I would do it musically, I tend to apply those principles to life and to with people. How do we create harmony in this moment of time with people doing their parts? So I do that and I haven't noticed this until recently, that it is so much a part of who I am, I think in terms of arrangement and flow and process and people going from one step to the next. And that's all about transition and music. And I think that I don't know how to make my brains think any other way. Are you good at math? You know, I was not good at math, here's a quick story, I skipped the fifth grade. And in our school, the fifth grade was the foundational math. So I have a mind for math, but I was stunted a bit because I missed that whole year of math. So I got into high school and I could do algebra and geometry, but then I kept having these glitches with division and multiplication, which I would have learned in fifth grade. That's those big timestables here. And so I struggled a little bit with that growing up, but I think mathematically. The reason I ask is of course math and music are very connected, aren't they? Absent in terms of whatever it is. There's rhythm, all of that as a part. What is it about singing together that inspires and generates life in people? I used to think that because I grew up in a church environment, the singing there was this sort of like it was just because you were in a church and that was God's spirit. And I think it is. Right. Something powerful about sitting around a campfire is singing, hang down your head, Tom Dooley or whatever. I mean, there's something about that song, that song dates you. Yeah, it does. Kingston truth. That it does something to you to participate with others in singing. And even if it's because it can be fun, why is karaoke such a big idea in Japan? There's something about doing something that's out beyond yourself that's significant. So I think that kind of shared experience is way better than going to see a movie together. You have the same shared experience, but you don't participate. And so I think that singing has power and it bonds us together, I think. Well, and again, scientists would say that when you sing together, oxytocin, that trust hormone, right, is released in your brain, it's all connected. I suppose dopamine with pleasure and all that stuff is all part of it. And that hormone is the same hormone that a nursing mother has with her child. What's interesting is I have some family friends who went to a Bono concert some years ago. And they came back and these were older people. These weren't like, you know, 22-year-olds, because Bono's older, you know. But he said, at the peak of that concert, it was, and again, he came from a religious upbringing. He said it was like a worship experience. They weren't singing some song about God. They were singing whatever Bono sings, but he said there was something about that that just sort of welded everybody together. I think part of our worship in a church situation for those that called religion part of their life, that that environment, part of what makes it powerful is when we do it together. And as unto the deity and the Godhead, that shared experience is life-giving to us. We're meant for that somehow. We're designed to do it together. That's why harmony is in the universe, overtones, everything is out there. It's in the ethers. And so the world-tone quality is in this world today. The rain that's, we hear a little bit, pitter-patter of it right now outside. There's tonal quality in that, you know. And you could orchestrate to that, because there's music and creation, you know. So even if I were to start singing right now, you'd be inclined to join in, like, if I start singing. Depends on if I know the song or not. Well, you know, this one. This little light of mine. I'm going to let it shine. Let it shine. You're going in the second verse. You're going to lose me. There is something fun about when kids try to sing or do sing. You know, it's all over the map in terms of harmony. Harmony is not necessarily what you get, but you do get innocence. You do get enthusiasm and all of that. We just had a Palm Sunday thing where I live in Colorado and just the idea of children participating is fun. So we like Christmas programs, we like Easter programs, all that. We have just had Easter Sunday Resurrection Day. And the music, historically, of Easter, at least for the Western world. I don't know how it is in other cultures because they have different scales, right? I don't know how the Easter songs sound with binary scales. Just as we wrap up, your connection, your experience of Easter and music, Easter music, and perhaps a couple of your favorite Easter songs, a couple of your favorites, how you see music in Resurrection Day coming together, all of that. Talk to me. Let's wrap this thing up. I think Easter, for me, as a kid growing up, was all about music. We were the ones who set up the music in our local community, get up there at five o'clock in the morning for the sunrise service, and we'd have to set up the sound system, tear it down. We'd always be late to the breakfast because the Baptist had already eaten all the bacon by then. I always hated that. This is a little town in Greenfield, California, yeah, just a little farm community. But Christ the Lord has risen today for some reason, even as a kid, it was an old person song when I was a kid, but it's embedded in my spirit. I think as a kid, you learn theology through song. More people, I think, learn their theology through song than they do through a catacism or an adult teaching them something. And I think kids are very capable of learning theology through song, even at the smallest of age. There's a story in a book I just read called Sing about a female song hymn writer who wanted to write hymns for kids. This is probably the latter part of the 19th century, and she was feeling that they didn't know their theology, so she wanted to write songs for them. Those songs are still in hymns today, but in the 21st century mindset, these songs are too heady. They're too difficult for people to sing here, but they were written for kids 150 years ago, and meaning that kids have the ability to learn. And so I think music is the conduit. Kids grow up knowing the joy of singing a song, and they learn lyrics that turn into reality in their life. And I think Easter is a prime example. Christmas, the carols of Christmas help kids to learn theology. They don't understand it till later, but they learn the information. So for me, Easter has just always been about joy. There's an old song, the second chapter of Acts, back in the 70s used to sing. Yeah. Hear the bells ringing, they're singing. Christ has been born against. There's some reason the melody of that song, it's in the key of C, it just has this joy to it. And I just remember feeling a lot of, this is the day to celebrate. And as an adult, I've heard this phrase from Pope John Paul II that said, we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. And I just think that's what Easter is about, and that's how I grew up, that's why I go to Easter Sunday service and services, and we do music like crazy. I just think it's an expression of resurrection power. You know, one of my favorite quotes from a London pastor back in the 40s who wanted to paraphrase scripture, so guys coming home from Normandy and Singapore and the building of the Burma Road, these broken men and primarily men would have the scriptures in words other than Elizabethan English or King James English. And two things he said, one was paraphrasing scripture was like rewiring an old house without turning off the power or an ancient house without turning off the power. But the second thing he said was hallelujah, that means three chairs for Jesus. And I think the whole exuberance, the whole exuberance of resurrection day is captured in that idea. So Christ the Lord has risen today. How about singing just a phrase or two of that for us as we go out, just give us a little shout. Are you going to join me? Well, yucky. Let's see, you go ahead. Christ the Lord has risen today, hallelujah, sons of men and angels say hallelujah, raise your joys and triumphs high, hallelujah, Christ has opened paradise, hallelujah. Well, we're not, you know, this isn't Carnegie Hall, but it's our Carnegie Hall, Van and by the way, I didn't mention that you are our son-in-law and you live in Eugene, Oregon and you passed our wonderful congregation here and you have giftings that I don't have time to describe, but many years ago now, over three decades ago, we were pillaged to get our daughter, Eric, to be you and Mary. And it's just, it's great to be with you and thanks for your insights on this post Easter week. Thank you. Great. As we sign out, we believe that, we encourage you to believe that. Thank you for listening to this podcast on whatever platform you're wearing it on and if you would like to give it a review or something, the couple of sentences that would be great. What we've been doing here is reviewing, if you will, that spectacular Easter morn when the whole world was upended for a good thing. God bless. Dicful signing off. Catch you later. Bye-bye.