The Music of the Machine

I have, of late, been struggling to keep a certain type of music out of my playlists.

The auto-generated "favorites"  that YouTube Music pitches me can get a little stale, as one overfamiliar song after another is served up.  Sure, they're songs I like, but algorithmic recommendations start feeling a little bit like the musical equivalent of Bread and Jam for Frances.  "Sweet Lord Jesus, this again?" I'll mutter, skipping to the next one.

Usually, new additions are welcome.  Only now, I find myself having to be warier and warier around new music, particularly if it feels a certain way.  More and more new music isn't produced by human beings at all, but is instead the result of a short prompt dumped into Suno or some other AI.  I created a few songs myself, back when it was unusual and felt like a fun thing to try.  But I'd rather not listen to it.

As every ad for Suno reinforces, that creation process requires exactly zero talent, as people who haven't the skill or won't put in the work are encouraged to pretend they've made something.  So when I hear a song that exactly matches a particular vibe, I'm on alert.  Machine music takes advantage of our distraction, engaging parasitically with the musical styles we enjoy and crowding out human voices and talents.

Like, say, my listening preferences when driving on a cool summer evening.   I drive with the windows down and the sunroof open at such times, letting the wind play through my hair.  I want stuff that's utterly relaxing, both mellow and sophisticated.   Give me a tree-lined country road paired with a sultry chanteuse purring over a tightly constructed jazz standard, and I'm as happy as a clam.  

If clams liked driving briskly whilst listening to jazz, that is.  It may or may not be a mollusk preference.

So the other day while driving home from church, I heard a new tune that landed perfectly.  Bubbly and playful, with lyrics that danced between English and Japanese, it was just one hundred and ten percent chill vibe.  "Little Sunny Moments," it was called, and I enjoyed it as it hummed away in the background.  But as it progressed seamlessly from verse to chorus and came to a quick and easily digestible conclusion, I began to wonder.

Is this a real song?  

It felt too tight, the vocalizations too sharply defined and breathless around the edges.  Each "Doo Doo Doo" didn't quite have the shape and form of a human utterance.  I'd not really paid attention to it, so I listened to it a second time, tending to the lyrics, trying to come to a determination as to its provenance.

[garbled] is shining in the light. Everything just feels so right. Tiny waves go up and down. Nothing special, nothing big. Little sunny day.

Doo doo doo. Drifting far away.

Doo doo doo. Come and stay. Seagulls dancing in the blue. I just sit and think of you. Clouds are floating like a dream.

If I laugh a little more,

will this day just last forever? Doo doo doo. Little sunny day. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Drifting far away. Doo doo doo. Come and stay.

The lyrics sort of made sense, but were more a feeling than anything coherent, and the garbling of some words and hyperprecision of others felt less organic and more generated. Odds of it being AI? Now at 90%.

And then came the final verse, sung to precisely the same tune as the rest of the song:

Smooth relaxing jazz Bossa Nova.

Similar mood to Quiet Glow.
Soft breathy female.
Soft Doo Doo Doo

Soft Breath Doo Doo Doo
Soft breathy female.
Smooth.

It. Was. The. Prompt.  O Lord have mercy, how perfect.  From behind the wheel, I cackled with delight.   

Somehow, the prompt used by a human to tell an AI what kind of song to make had been accidentally folded into the lyrics, and...this being a low effort sort of thing...they'd just burped the thing out without even noticing.  

"This," I thought to myself, "should be mandatory."  Meaning, at the end of every AI song, the final lyric must be the prompt.

Just so we know.  So it's clear how much effort was involved, and how little humanity.

There Are Quarrels

How easily do divisions form? We human beings are remarkably talented at ways to separate ourselves into Us and Them, into the Good and the Right and the True and the Bad and the Wrong and the False. This can happen in a moment, for almost any reason under the sun.

Like, for instance, if one happens to be on a cruise, and one’s preferences are for the more subtle enjoyments of a more civilized age. With the exception of the lack of gyroscopic stabilizers, I’d be perfectly content sailing a century ago, as my favored amusements tend to involve sitting out with a view of the water before me, a book in one hand and a cool beverage in the other.

Or perhaps walking on the promenade for a post-prandial constitutional, gazing out at the distant horizon and Thinking Big Thoughts.

Best of all, listening to live music, as Rachel and I did most evenings. We’d settle in to listen to a Ukrainian classical trio, whose music was utterly delightful and gracefully selected.

But right next to the venue where the loveliest of music played, there was a casino, filled with the bingings and clangings of slot machines. Not that they were slot machines, technically, as nobody drops quarters into slots anymore. Instead, the spinning wheels are simulated, and the clattering sounds of coins cascading to jackpot are synthetic noise.

One evening, as the first movement of Ludwig’s Trio in C Sharp Minor began its vigorous dance between piano, violin, and cello, the pauses and intentional silences were filled with the nearby cacophony of mechanisms designed to clinically separate human beings from both time and their money.

I felt my enjoyment of the sublime music I was trying to hear soured by irritation. My internal monologue muttered at those hapless uncultured philistines, oblivious to Truth and Beauty, unappreciative of skill and training and subtle sensibilities.

This, I sniffed, is precisely why Western culture is failing and empty, as the clangour of blind predatory systems and the hoi polloi that know no better drowns out all that’s worthy and wise.

Those listening attentively were Us, and those pressing buttons like conditioned rats in a Skinner Box were Them, and Lord, but did I feel superior and self-righteous.  Which, of course, is a sign that I remain both a fool and a sinner.

Divisions form so quickly, and we are so very good at them.

19 de Janeiro

It's my birthday, and so, well, here's a song composed in honor of the day.  It's part of a vast work composed by Brazilian jazz legend Hermeto Pascoale, Calendario do Som, in which he created a delicious lilting ditty for every day of the entire year.  Why?  So everyone would have a birthday song, of course.

It was delightful to find, particularly given the existential insignificance of turning fifty seven.  Sixty?  That's a Birthday.  Fifty five?  Also a Birthday.  But fifty seven is neither here nor there, neither fish nor fowl.  It's a grey and liminal thing, marking an in-between place, becalmed in the fogged doldrums of deep middle age. 

Not that I mind, not at all.  It's a pleasure to still be drawing breath, to enjoy the blessings of creation around me, the soft quiet of hours spent reading and the good company of friends and family.  

I write this shipboard, in the lap of ease.  For the last hour, I've been out on a veranda overlooking the rolling ocean, reading Zola's Germinal as eight foot swells rock the ship and I give thanks for dramamine.  It's the fourth and final book I brought with me on this trip, and it's more engaging than I'd anticipated.  Immersed in that desperate, carnal tale of the lives of coal miners in the late 19th century, the dissonance between their brutish, desperate labors and my own comfort is as jarring as a Ligeti Requiem ringtone.  

Today may not be any particular thing, but I'd have to be delusional not to appreciate the fifty seven seasons of my own good fortune and happenstance.  These last near-sixty decades have been good ones, with more days filled with song than not.

Take enjoyment of your days, counsels the One Who Assembles, and I shall enjoy this one with gratitude.

Ice Water Baptism

I find myself, lately, wondering about the state of my playlists. Ever since adolescence, I’ve always enjoyed encountering new music, finding my way to a sound, a composer, or an artist that I’ve never encountered. Once, that came through the radio, as I’d twist that tuning knob to WCXR 105.9 or WHFS 102.3 on the FM dial. I reached back into the classic rock of the 1960s and 1970s, and into the world of alternative rock, and encountered the new.

There were mix tapes provided by friends, which soon became CDs, which became playlists. Then the playlists started getting different, curated not by the human beings around me, but by algorithms designed to show me what I already like. This can lead things to feeling a little stale, a little samey samey and ultraprocessed. I hear only what I want to hear, and that makes me feel like a stagnant pond.

In the last six months, there’s been a new shift in the approach to recommendation. Take, for instance, my recent tendency to listen to Parisian jazz. A sultry chanteuse singing wistfully of l’amour jazzie is chill enough to take the edge off of any commute, but…the algorithms being the algorithms…my lists were getting a bit stale. So I went looking for more, and from artists I didn’t know. What I found was dozens of new albums, all filled with voices I’d never heard. Like, say, Eva LaNuit, whose music filled my car on a recent drive. Je n’ai pas change, purred the voice beneath a guttural sax, and I thought, who is this? 

Her versions of old standards felt like slipping into a well worn shoe. Tight and interestingly constructed improvisationally, her sound was exactly what I was looking for, exactly. So I looked her up when I got home, and of course, she doesn’t exist. She’s an AI simulacrum, her voice and her tightly tasteful backup band all constructed from extant music and prompts from a user in Morocco, ones and zeros. She is not the droid I am looking for.

But many people are in this strange new age. The AI “band” Breaking Rust recently had the best selling streaming single in all of country music, with the unsettlingly good single Walk My Walk. An AI “artist” called Solomon Ray has repeatedly topped the Gospel charts, which is remarkable for a singer that literally has no soul. The songs are catchy, the songs work, and once you listen to one, the machine just keeps serving them up, over and over again. The cup of AI slop runneth over, and I want nothing more than to wash it all from my mind. It is a new thing, and there’s plenty of it.

There come times when societies fall into decadence, when they forget their purpose and what makes them good, and culture begins to rot. How, if one lives in such a time, do you restore your sense of self and sanity? How do you commit to reclaiming what was lost?

In first century Judah, you did that by being baptized. Baptism finds its spiritual foundation in the mikvah, an ancient Jewish practice of self-purification and cleansing. That practice literally washed away impurities of the flesh, allowing a person to return to connection with community. By the time of Jesus, baptism had become a way to renew one’s commitment to God’s covenant of faithfulness and justice, as the Temple in Jerusalem became more and more woven up with the greed and moral rot of the Herodian dynasty. Herod the Great and his incestuous brood were interested only in their own gain, and that corruption trickled down to the priesthood and the temple, an edifice wrapped in gold and ego.

Out in the desert wilderness, John the Baptist wasn’t just there because he liked the feel of camel hair and the satisfying crunch of protein rich locust chitin. He was there to share a message to a people who knew they had lost their way, who sensed that all around them had yielded to the siren song of greed and power, and who felt the loss of their identity as a covenant people.

And so the ritual of baptism became a way to recommit yourself to the faith of your people, symbolically representing the washing away of sin through the washing of the body.

In Christianity, that ancient sacred tradition was continued. It became the symbolic entry into the Way that Jesus taught, a sign that we have turned away from the way of life defined by mammon, domination, and brokenness, and instead turned ourselves in joy to the good news and the new life it proclaims.

New life, however, doesn’t mean the things we tend to think it means. It doesn’t mean more of the things that our society teaches us to view as success. It is explicitly and intentionally not that. There is nothing more dangerous to our souls than hearing only what you expect to hear. If we are walking the Way of Jesus, it means day after day recalling the purpose established in our baptism.

So what to do, when the songs around us are no longer truly human, and when the mediating structures that connect us no longer do so?

I wonder that, in my listening to the music that fills my hours. It’s not that AI-generated music is bad in the abstract. It is not, not any more, not like the amusingly incompetent bluegrass hymn I had an AI make in praise of Poolesville Presbyterian church a year ago. Just twelve months ago, the best AI could do worked for two verses, then descended into something that sounded like speaking in tongues, which isn’t particularly Presbyterian.

Now, it’s perfect, seamless, exactly what you want, exactly what you expect.

The easy Turkish-delight sweetness of it is as tempting as the songs that filled the ears of Odysseus with yearning as he strained against the mast.

So I attend to every new song I hear with care. If the images accompanying the music are all AI generated, that’s a marker. If the musician has no history, no story, and seems to have just popped into existence a month ago, that’s a marker. I ask myself, is this the real life, or is this just fantasy?

I scrub my playlists clean, and seek instead real human voices, in all our most beautiful variety and difference.

And I start considering my tendency to use AI for things that once would have been the realm of artists and photographers.  Those images were only there, after all, to market my writing, to create a visual splash on social media platforms I no longer use.  Why use them at all?  Perhaps now is the time to make that change.

Tell Me a Story

Here's a lovely song, one that I've been listening to a whole bunch lately.  It's the first song on an album produced by the SOIL AND THE SEED Project, a Mennonite creative collective with roots in the Shenandoah.

I adapt their worship resources for regular use in our little church, and this album...telling the story of Matthew's Gospel in the form of a folk bluegrass gospel opera...really floats my boat.  

Sweet, filled with gracious harmonies and organic acoustics, it's a great supplement to the class I'm currently leading on Matthew's Gospel.  For anyone preaching on Matthew this year, it's a fine, fine backdrop for contemplation.  

Give it a listen, and if you enjoy, there's much, much more.

The Hymn I Did Not Like

The survey came to me from the denomination, as surveys so often do.  We're Presbyterian, after all, and we're all about that data, 'bout that data, 'bout that data.

It was exploring the intent of my little church to switch up hymnals, to move from the "blue" hymnals that were brand-spankin' new way back when in the 1990s.  Now, we've got a choose-your-own-color jobbie that's been recently hatched, and they're eager to get it out there.

Some folks, the people who grump about everything, will search eagerly for the hymns that are missing.  Outrage!  My favorite one is MISSING!  Heresy!   But there is, as Jesus once purportedly said in that utterly uncanonical movie, no pleasing some people.

As I wrote when I first encountered "Glory To God," it's a perfectly lovely little collection of sacred music.

Old gospel standards, classic Reformed hymns, Taize music, and a sampling of the better contemporary Christian music?  Excellent.  When I went through it looking for stuff I'd happily have my tiny church sing--because I'd like to sing it myself--I found well over a hundred songs I knew and liked.  That's plenty of Jesus-song to go around.

But when the survey asked me to comment, I realized there was not space there for me to rant about my one issue with it.

There was just one section of the hymnal that bugged me.  Really, genuinely pushed my buttons.  It's deeply heretical, representing a worldview that may never, ever, ever been part of any collection of Presbyterian sacred music before.  It possibly represents an unacceptable conforming of our sacred musical tradition to the blight of modern culture, and if left unchecked, it will potentially corrupt the very soul of the faith.

Alright, sure, that's more than a bit hyperbolic, but I'm trying to generate the requisite sense of net-rage umbrage here.

I am talking, of course, about the page after page of copyright information, permissions, and licensing legalese at the end of the collection.

This--whether in the context of hymns or Christian Contemporary Music--rubbed me a little wrong.  Worrying about copyright on songs of praise to the Creator of the Universe just seems off to my soul.  Attribution?  Sure.  Absolutely.

But ownership?  It seems dissonant, as if any Christian would ever be within their purpose as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth if they sued other followers of Jesus to prevent them from singing and sharing sacred songs.  And here, a whole section, dedicated to the idea of ownership over sacredness.

Grump grump grump, I went.

It got me to wondering: is this new?  I mean, really new?  That I've got a bug in my bonnet about it doesn't mean it's a real thing.  Is this one of those things we do now because the church is increasingly steeped in the values of the marketplace?  Is this yet another manifestation of the ever spreading blight of profit-driven AmeriChrist, Inc.?  Or am I just reading things in?

So I asked my church.  Not the people.  The church building itself.

My church remembers things, it does.  It's an old space, filled with memories of what the church has been.

I have bookshelves in my office, ones that contain hymnals that run waaay back.  Not all the way back to the 1847 founding of the church, but a ways.  So I looked in each of those, to see what they had to say.  I started with the familiar  The Presbyterian Hymnal, deep blue from 1990, which we're using now.  No such section, although there's a wee paragraph in tiny text at the beginning, and little tiny "permissions" text at the bottom of each page.  Copyright is there.

Ratchet it back to The Hymnbook, dating from  1955, back when we were the Presbyterian Church in the United States and the United Presbyterian Church in the USA.  It's paradoxically Red in that Red Scare era.

But not communist, evidently, because there's the copyright notice, comrade.  Same deal as the 1990 hymnal, just a note in a wee font, and a tiny little blurp of text with each hymn where needed.

Then, back to the deep-green-blue of The Hymnal of 1933, which...wait.  Huh.  Just like the brand spankin' new hymnal of 2015, there's a section in it, a couple of pages long, acknowledging permissions from dozens of individuals and publishers.  Well, golly.

But my tiny church was a "Southern" church, in keeping with the very Southern town in which it was founded, so we've also got the deep blue and bold-Gothic-lettered The Presbyterian Hymnal rising out of the Southern church from 1927, plus a dozen or more copies of the words-only mini-editions.  That gets by with one short paragraph on p. II, and some brief attributions.

But wait! There's more!

My office is in an 1827 building, so there are older music books still, ones used by my church in the late 19th and very early 20th century.

There it is, Gospel Hymns No.s 5 & 6, plus several pocket-sized versions, dating back to 1892.  There's a little note, handwritten in a neat cursive pencil, in the front of one.

"Please do not remove from the Presbyterian Sunday School," it says.

The date: September 19, 1902.  113 years ago.

There, on the same page, there's copyright notice, three lines long, small print.

And older still, from 1880, A Selection of Spiritual Songs for the Sunday-School, the cover faded and worn from use.  It's battered and coming apart, and two of the three copies in my office have no remaining copyright pages.  But there, on a worn-away front page in the most complete copy, an announcement:

"THE PUBLISHERS deem it necessary to call attention the the fact that a large part of the tunes and musical arrangements of this book are owned by them..."   And so on, and so forth.

So this has been around for a while, evidently.  The "copyright song" is an older hymn than I thought, one of the few that have carried through the over a century and a half of my church-memory.

It's been the case ever since publishers have printed sacred books as a business, meaning all the way back deep into the modern and industrial era.  Not all the way back, of course.  The Gutenberg Bible makes no mention of it, but then again, Gutenberg did kind of have a corner on the market.

Perhaps my reaction is a strange function of my own newness, of being part of an era when music is everywhere and accessible.  Music itself, almost anything you can imagine, is just a quick skip over to Youtube away.  And sheet music/arrangements?  Those can be found too, right there on the interwebs.

Or perhaps it's that I also spend so much mental time back in the first few centuries of the church, when the passing along of sacred song and story was entirely separate from commerce.  I doubt the original author of that little hymn that the Apostle Paul republished in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians was too put out about lack of attribution.

In that peculiar fusion of the ancient and the net-age, the idea of ownership still jars strangely against both the ease with which we now share and the fierce, unfettered energies of the early church.

But the songs still get shared, I suppose.  Which is what counts.

The Sweet Song of Chaos

For the last few months, I've been listening to just one playlist as I bustle about in our car, shuttling kids from one place to another.   Just one.

It's on an old iPhone, one that's had the sim card removed and every app and image deleted.  In their place, just audio files, thousands and thousands of songs.  I renamed it "Daddy's Tunebrick," turning it a single function device that only exists to store and listen to music without the bother of having calls or texts interrupt my listening pleasure.  

Hey...that sounds like a great idea for a product!  I wonder if anyone at Apple is thinking about such a thing.  Hmmm.

Anyhoo, my Tunebrick has one playlist at the moment.  That playlist is the whole of my music collection.  All of it, every single sound file I possess, set to random play.

Which means, as I drive along, I never know exactly what is coming up next.  If I'm not in the mood for what entropy serves up, I just punch the steering wheel control with my thumb, and we're on to the next thing.  It's not always music.  

Sometimes it's sound effect MP3s, gunshots and explosions that my son downloaded for use in videos.  Sometimes it's the Hebrew teacher who prepared my boys for their bar mitzvahs, teaching and singing her way through a piece of a torah-reading.  It's random. Really and truly random.

Like last night, as I drove my younger son back from his drum lesson.

We clicked through a couple of things, and then listened to a random mp3 from a sound-pack of faux movie trailer voiceovers.  "THERE WAS JUST ONE MAN," intoned the announcer in a rumbling basso, at which we laughed.  We then segued into Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb.  We sang along to that, he and I, as Floyd is his favorite band in the entire universe.  After we'd finished with that, entropy served up the theme song to The Love Boat.

We sang along to that, too, because it's just a bucket of delicious seventies cheese, and when that was done, the universe decided to pitch us Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C Sharp Minor.

"I love this way of listening to things," my son said.  "It's like it's a game whenever we're in the car.  You never know what's coming next."

Just like life, I thought, in a Forrest-Gumpy sort of way.  Just like life.

The Reason We Sing

I was wandering the halls of my son's school this last weekend, as I awaited what was to be the first in a series of performances by my teens.  The little guy...not so little, at 13...had managed to snag the lead role in his eighth grade play, a Roman comedy by Plautus.  Actually rather funny, as it turned out, and he did a great job with it.

It had been an American Suburban Parent afternoon, as I picked up my older son from an all-day rehearsal for District Chorus, and then drove him an hour-and-a-half across the worst traffic in America to swim team regionals, only to then turn right back around to make my younger son's play.

But as I meandered around his middle school, stretching my legs after three-and-a-half hours of kid-shuttling, I came across a sign.  "Music," it said.

Only the word was cast out across a series of other subjects, with the "M" in music being the "M" in math.

The implicit subtext: Music exists here because it helps us perform better academically.  This is a more and more common refrain, as a focus on testing and metrics drives things like art and music, dance and drama out of our educational system.  They are primarily useful, assuming they have utility at all, as a way to neurologically reinforce the important skills that we need to program into our children.

The next day, at my older son's chorus concert, before what was a strikingly beautiful performance, one of the choir directors talked about the importance of music for brain development in adolescents. There was nodding in the auditorium full of parents, and in my mind's ear echoed the words of several dozen conversations with other parents of teenagers.  Their brains are still developing, we say to one another.  The bucket of crazy we're encountering now is just reflective of neurological rewiring, we sigh.  If music helps with that developmental process, then it has value.

Maybe.  Drama teachers and music teachers are hard pressed these days.  Even in Fairfax County, one of the richest counties in the United States, the arts are being cut back to make room for more testing protocols and more administratalia.

And it strikes me, in all of this, that we're increasingly missing the point of both music and being human.

Music has value in and of itself.  It is not subordinate, or a supporting player.  In terms of our humanity, when we assume that the primary value of any activity is its contribution to our productivity, we fail to understand the goal of productivity in the first place.

Oh, we need to work.  Sure.  But once we've gotten a roof over our head and food in our bellies, we do not work so that we can work.  We work so that we can sing, and laugh together, and take time to share our delight in this little flicker of life that we have been given.

Music isn't a bit player, useful primarily because it prepares us for the workplace.

It's the point.

The Strange Songs God Sings To Us

I had a really solid conversation with someone who's planning on joining my little church this last Sunday.  It was technically the opening theological portion of my new member's class, but, er, I don't tend to approach that quite as systematically as other Jesus folks.   Fifteen weeks of theology before you're empowered to tag along for the ride?  Ack.  For some reason, I don't remember Jesus inflicting that on his disciples.  "Set down your nets and follow me, for now I will make you sit through twenty hours of coursework" just doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

I figure, you come, you connect, and when you hear the Gospel and want to join in the sharing of it, you're in.  You've got a lifetime to learn and grow.

My classes area bit more free-range than most, particularly if it's a one on one or just a couple of folks, which it tends to be in a small church.

So our conversation about the Trinity ended up touching briefly on music, and how odd it was that such a universal human thing could be so divisive.  Human beings tend to be musical creatures, and our love of song leaps across the boundaries of culture into every corner of every moment of our history.

It unites us as a deep commonality, or at least that's the idea.  But in actuality, it divides us. We sing, but we sing different songs.  And Lord, but does that bug us when it comes to sharing or being open to other forms.  The "music wars" in churches are legendary, as advocates of traditional music butt heads with those who like "contemporary" music.  Then there are those secular songs we sing in our societies, as wildly distinct as hip hop and country, as modern classical and pop.

I'll confess that I have my own preferences, which tend to be eclectic and wildly variant. I don't like consumerist treacle, I don't like selfishness, misogyny or the willfully simplistic.  But I try to be open, and I try to tolerate other musical styles and find what grace there is to be found in them.  I also can't help thinking how peculiar our arguments over song must seem for God.  Particularly those arguments had by faithful folk of every ilk.

The cultural differences between us, the ones that drive our musical aesthetics, these can't even begin to compare with the depth of the existential chasm that separates us from our Maker.  And as God sings to us, those songs aren't just the ones that we know and love.  Yes, God knows our tunes, and uses them.  But the repertoire of the Numinous goes deep.

There are songs God sings that use words we don't even understand, in languages and forms that are alien to our culture and to our sensibility.  We have to be careful, in our particularity, that we do not close ourselves off to those peculiar tunes.

Dusty Hymns and Songs We've Forgotten

There's a new hymnal recently out for we Prez-bee-teer-yans, one I've heard the rumblings of for a couple of years now.  Within my own teeny tiny church, folks have been asking when and whether we might be making that shift.

Honestly, I don't know.  The whole idea of hymnals in this era continues to strike me as a tiny bit strange and a tich archaic.  I mean, shoot, I love so many of the old hymns, but the hymn as a modern musical form?  Hum.

More new hymns?  I just, shoot, I don't know.  In the now obsolete "blue" hymnal, I almost invariably steer away from the hymns that draw their provenance from the early 1980s.   While I'm typically down with their theology, the lyrics feel like First Church of Portlandia earnest progressivism, and the "new tunes" tend towards lnoodly, indistinct abstraction.

I'll reserve judgment about the new new stuff until a copy lands in my hands, though.

I was musing about our pursuit of new music and the place of the old during the last week, when I had a conversation with my thirteen year old about forgotten songs.  Because even as the old hymns fall away in a wash of Christian Contemporary Music, other music is also fading.

As we drove to his drum class, he connected his iPod to our car radio, then scanned through the artists.  He'd been comparing playlists with his friends at school, particularly one he'd just put together of some of his favorite artists.  He's the fruit of my loins, and that means he's a bit of a mutant, so the playlist in question was entitled "'Nam,"

'Nam?  Shoot.  I was five years old when Saigon fell.  Such an old soul, he can be.  But list was appropriately named, a compilation of his favorite artists from the 1960s and 1970s.

None of my friends knew any of these musicians, he said, a bit put out.  They'd never even heard of them.  He panned down the list of names that bear no meaning for his peers.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.  Creedence Clearwater Revival.  Janis Joplin.  Jimi Hendrix. Meaningless.  You could be making those names up, and his friends wouldn't know the difference.

Not even Hendrix, I asked?  Nope.  And then, as if to drive the dagger deeper, he said, and none of them had ever even heard of Pink Floyd.  It's music that is receding, an increasingly distant ship's smoke on the horizon.

That may change as they grow older, and their base of knowledge expands.  I mean, shoot, I'm not sure I'd ever heard any CCR when I was 13 beyond ads for KTEL compilations.  But then again, it may not.  Those tunes may fade into obscurity.

As human beings have learned to store and keep music, and recordings have become part of our collective memory, the volume of our musical memory just keeps expanding.  Even if you've got complex tastes and an appreciation for the sounds of other generations, there's only so much we can know.

And so we move on, and we forget.  Sometimes, that's for the best.  But sometimes, it means we lose track of our context, and drift away from stories and songs better not forgotten.

Dust in the wind, I suppose.

Echoes, Teaching, and Memory

As I got ready to take the little guy to his drum lesson this evening, he insisted that I download a bunch of Pink Floyd onto my iPhone.  He's been on a hardcore classic rock kick lately, with Zeppelin and Floyd being the rock of choice.  It's history to him, as far back in the past as Count Basie or the Ink Spots are to me.  But good music is good music, and that he is twelve going on thirty doesn't hurt his taste.

And so on the way to the lesson, as we navigated across the snarls of country-worst Beltway rushhour traffic, the sounds of Pink Floyd's Meddle filled the car.

The little guy sat back, soaking it in.   "This is an amazing album," he said.  Then he reclined the bucket seat, and promptly went right to sleep.   In-transit naps seem to be a genetic trait both boys have inherited from their mom.  It's a useful skillset.

This left me in the car, as what was side two of the Meddle record/cassette kicked in.  Back in the analog era, those grooves in vinyl or magnetic variances on a tape would yield Echoes, a twenty-plus-minute drifting bit of sweet psychedelic mind-butter.

As I listened, and as he twitched slightly in his sleep, I was struck by just how long it had been since I last heard that song.  I don't think I've listened to that album since before I got married.  

Twenty years, at least.  Twenty two, more like.

Every note, every change, every word of the lyrics was familiar.  Not a one was surprising, or out of place.  And as much of my life has passed since I last listened to it as had passed when I last heard it.  The last time this music played for me, the Internet wasn't a thing we knew about.  Cell phones weren't common or even viewed as necessary.  I was thin.

Yet my mind received the music like an old and familiar friend, a peculiar assemblage of neurons lighting up in recognition in encounter with the song.

Music is like that.  As are stories.  They linger with us, folding their harmonies and progressions into our minds in a way that simple data cannot.  They become deep memory, and they weave themselves into our identity in ways that are both subtle and inescapable.

Which is why both musicality and storytelling are so key to teaching anything of value.

Family Values and DRM

Over the last few days, as I've downloaded music using the handful of iTunes gift cards that were left over from Christmas, Hanukkah, and my birthday, I've found myself wondering something.

I enjoy music, of all kinds.  But something else I enjoy is sharing said music with my kids.  Their nanos and Touches are filled with music that belongs to me.   I've purchased it, and if it is cool/appropriate, shared it with them.  If I encounter something that I appreciate, I want to pass appreciation for that thing to my kids.  When I download the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack for my own listening pleasure, it immediately populates their players.   It's the fun part of parenting teens and tweens, the part that involves you rocking out together in the van while on the way to drums/swimming/tutoring.

They do the same thing in return, connecting Dad with those things that the younglings are thinking and/or watching.  How else would I have learned of Nyancat, or watched the Epic Rap Battles of History?

Yet I am aware, as my older son grows even taller and high school looms on the horizon, that my boys are growing up.  Soon, Lord willing, they'll be leaving the nest.  That's just how life goes.

And when they do, what then happens to my ability to share with them?   I have no intent of stopping, of course.  But if most of the music is on the family account...hmmm.  I suppose, as things go to Cloud, that they could just continue to snag what they want from wherever they may end up.   This was less of an issue back when I was a lad, and the physical media I owned was the physical media I owned.  It was utterly distinct, physically different, from the collection of music that still rests on silent vinyl in my parent's house.

Everything I own also belongs to my children, and to the grandchildren that will eventually hopefully come.  And to their children, to the thousandth generation, as they say.  But as we go a generation deep into the digital era, I find myself wondering whether DRM and copyright will be used by corporations to trump genetics and inheritance.

I wonder if we'll reach a point where that becomes an issue, when corporations will look at fathers and sons who share a love for the same music, and attempt to prevent us from sharing music and joy across generations.  Will I be able to pass music to my grandchildren, the flesh of my flesh?  Will I be able to have them access my library, without fearing that the RIAA will come knocking at my door, lawyers snarling?

Interesting times, as they say.

With A Stranger's Ears

As I sat in DC rush-hour traffic on my way back from a visit with a church member yesterday, I found some comfort in listening to one of my more centering iTunes playlists.

Like most folks, I have a variety of lists, each of which serves a different purpose.  For working out, I tend to listen to one of two playlists.  "Wide Rhinestone Lapel" is a collection of 70's disco greats, and makes for great driving cardio background.   "Pomp and Bombast" is a collection of blaring loud overblown martial soundtrack music, the perfect ubermensch aural backdrop for chest presses and squats.

But there are others, for other moments.  "Mighty Dorkus" is a collection of the most delightfully overblown music for those times I'm feeling goofy.  "Mr. Wistful" is for when I'm up for a good cathartic emo wallow.  "Nicotine Cloud" is a collection of less-accessible Tom Waits works, which I mostly use to discipline the children.   "You stop pestering your brother NOW, or I'm putting on Frank's Wild Years again!"

In dense traffic, I make a point of staying away from my "Redneck Rampage" playlist of honky-tonk and southern rock.   Instead, I drop into a playlist called "Golden Radiance," most of which is music that reminds me that Jesus Christ isn't just something I say loudly when someone cuts me off.

Yesterday, I noticed something about much of that music.   A significant minority of that list comes from encounters with Jesus music outside of worship, and in the soundtracks of edgier cinema.  Three of the songs, for example, are drawn from Cohen brothers movies.   From "O Brother, Where Art Thou," there's the sublime Down to the River To Pray.  From the recent and quite solid True Grit, I have a pair of songs, both of which were used to reinforce mis en scene, and which play off the old American hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms."

Now, the Cohen brothers, well, they ain't Jesus folk.  In a recent interview, it was clear that they also weren't really practicing Jewish folk, either.   As with so many folks, it was Bar Mitzvah and out for them, pretty much.  

But the aesthetic sensibility they bring to their film-making seems to also give them something of a knack for identifying that which is most sacred or most evocative.  Perhaps it's something in their blood, some genetically ingrained temple-keeper way of knowing that gives them an instinct for the sacred.  Once a Cohen, always a Cohen.

But it may also just be 'cause they know the good when they hear it.

This, I would suggest, is a powerful measure of the value of a piece of Christian music.   If it's musical and aesthetic purchase does not extend beyond the doors of the sanctuary and the hearts of the already-faithful, then it's probably not the best vessel through which to connect to folks who aren't already inside the doors.