Make a joyful noise!

When my wife and I lived in Katowice, Poland some 10 or more years ago, we lived in an apartment block.  Across the road from where we lived there was a huge city park - Park Kościuszki.  This park was crisscrossed by paved paths and contained open lawns, flower beds, wooded areas, a children's playground and sledding hill, an old wooden church and a Soviet soldiers' cemetery.  Various music concerts were held in this park throughout the spring and summer.

One warm and sunny day as I was walking through this park, I began to hear a distant thumping sound.  This sound had a regular rhythm: THUMP . . . THUMP . . . THUMP, THUMP, THUMP . . .

The sound got closer and louder and I realized it was a bass drum.  And then I saw a column of people dressed in gray military style uniforms marching through the park.  They were carrying musical instruments and there were a few female majorettes.  They marched to an open area of grass and then formed up into ranks.  As I looked over their uniforms I discovered they were from the Ukraine. 

After their band leader barked out some instructions, the band began to play.  As they played they maneuvered into ever changing formations, with the majorettes strutting in front and waving their batons and the band leader giving an occasional blast on his whistle.   A small crowd of onlookers soon gathered to watch.

Ukrainian military marching band

I stood watching and listening enthralled.  They were very precise in their maneuvering; obviously professionally trained.

I can't say how long their performance lasted, maybe 15 or 20 minutes.  After they finished, they reformed their column and marched away, with the bass drummer beating out, THUMP . . . THUMP . . . THUMP, THUMP, THUMP . . . 

The crowd of onlookers dispersed.  I walked home marveling at what I had just witnessed. 

Later that same day I happened to look at the city newspaper and read about an international marching band competition taking place that weekend in Katowice.  The news article mentioned that various of the bands taking part in the competition would be appearing throughout the city to give mini-performances as a lead up to the competition.

Music is a very powerful thing.  I guess that's something most everyone knows, but I wonder how deeply we actually think about it.  We've seen the old black and white film from the 1950s of radio station owners or DJs pronouncing that they refused to play rock-n-roll, 'the devil's music,' then breaking a vinyl record over the corner of a table.  They took the power of music seriously, though we chuckle over their dramatics today.

Plato was very concerned about the power of music, too.  In his work The Laws (Book III), Plato's character, the Athenian, comments on the decline of Athenian democracy:

And then, as time went on, the poets themselves introduced the reign of vulgar and lawless innovation . . .

And by composing such licentious works, and adding to them words as licentious, they have inspired the multitude with lawlessness and boldness . . .

In music there first arose the universal conceit of omniscience and general lawlessness;-freedom came following afterwards, and men, fancying that they knew
what they did not know, had no longer any fear, and the absence of fear begets shamelessness . . .

And then the attempt to escape the control and exhortation of father, mother, elders, and when near the end, the control of the laws also; and at the very end there is the contempt of oaths and pledges, and no regard at all for the Gods-herein they exhibit and imitate the old so called Titanic nature, and come to the same point as the Titans when they rebelled against God, leading a life of endless evils.

(My thanks to BadEagle.com - http://www.badeagle.com/2009/07/12/plato-bad-music-destroys-democracy/)

 

Lucifer: Pride by Gustave Doré

 

Plato's words are worth reflecting on in regards to much of the popular music nowadays and the shocking decline of our culture.  Allen Bloom in his book The Closing of the American Mind likens teenagers' addiction to rock music to drug addiction.  Is he exaggerating?  Try taking a teen's music away and see.

Now, I am one who loves and is deeply moved by music.  As a child I soaked up the music I heard at home and church - lots of John Denver, The Carpenters, and old gospels ('I'll Fly Away,' 'How Great Thou Art,' 'That Old Rugged Cross,' etc.).  As a teenager I went through a succession of rock and pop passions.  I pretended not to like the classical music we listened to in music classes at school.  As I got older I acquired tastes in jazz, Irish and other folk music, country, blues and lots more classical music. 

Simple Minds in their heyday, circa 1983



I understand the profound power of music.  Music can lift you up or bring you down.  I'm not going to argue that music can cause a teenager to kill himself, but I don't think it's a coincidence that so often a young person who's taken his or her own life spent a lot of time listening to some rather dark music.  I'm sure the troubled individual sought out the darker music as it reflected the state of his or her soul, rather than the music being the cause of the darkness.  However, someone who lives in the dark doesn't need more darkness, but more light.

As with individuals, the same can be said for entire societies: less vulgarity and darkness, more beauty and light.  Make a joyful noise!

Johann Sebastian Bach - dig the wig!