John Lennon's Seventieth Birthday: A Secular Hymnody

Those of us who are adults remember where we were at certain moments of history. OS admits to his age when he tells you of sitting in his elementary school classroom on 11 November 1963, seeing a tearful teacher poke her head through the door who blurted out: 'Turn on the television! The President's been shot!'

Likewise, the memory of the moment of hearing of John Lennon's senseless murder is burned in the brain. That terrible sense of loss, knowing that a creative voice had just been stilled.

OS has mixed feelings about Mr. Lennon. He was a brilliant creative voice, who emerged from the neighborhoods of post-war Liverpool; as unlikely a success story as one would ever encounter. He and his mates adopted the American (born in the South!) idiom of rock-n-roll, blended it with their own cultural upbringing (including a good bit of English music-hall material, and a more classical approach to melody than they even suspected at the time), and sang it back to us all. They absolutely transformed the culture of the day, and we're still sorting out whether for better or worse.

Mr. Lennon also embodied much of the 'gonzo' wackiness of his day, and publicly participated in and promoted its drug and ego-fueled excesses, for which we are still paying a dear price. But by the time he was taken from us, he had settled a bit. OS heard awoke this morning to the interview of a journalist who had spent three weeks with the Lennons in New York, recording interviews with John. He had embraced fatherhood, and was particularly proud that he had learned how to bake bread. He was not so much interested in recounting the past as planning for his future, at one point saying, 'Look, I'm only forty! Paul's thirty-eight. Think of Elton, Bob Dylan...we may all have forty productive years ahead of us.'

And, then came the end. So we are left with what he did to that point. Which is a sobering thought, since we are none of us guaranteed tomorrow.

Thirty years on, the press coverage of the wacky excesses becomes a curiosity, and the wacky excesses are just that, no more. His vision of 'Imagine' doesn't hold up, no matter how pretty the song. Like all of us, he had the right to be wrong, and unlike most of us, he did it in public.

John Lennon left behind a body of work that still speaks afresh, and universally. Old boomers like OS grew up on his music, and OS's kids embraced it for themselves. Because it's a wonderful body of work--OS raised very sophisticated kids, not easily impressed.

Here's an exercise: Stop for a moment, and quickly sing back to yourself as much of the following songs as you can recall. Don't think about it, just go for it.

Yesterday
Eleanor Rigby
Help
Michelle

You probably can recall most of the melody and lyric. That's extraordinary, because the list could be stretched to twenty titles. That's a body of work.

John and Paul, at their best moments, created a sort of secular hymnody, a common set of songs that ring in the mind, and shape how many people view their world.

Wednesday night, Mr. and Mrs. OS were daubing tears from their eyes as they viewed the final episode from this season of The Choir, on BBC America. (Here's hoping the episodes are re-run, and that you get to see them. Have tissues close at hand.) Young Gareth, the conductor, takes the choir into Abbey Road studio to record an arrangement of "In My Life", and Mrs. OS exclaims, "It's secular hymnody". And she was, of course and as always, spot on. The video below does not include the final performance, but it shows the choir rehearsing this song in this place most associated with the Beatles. The camera catches faces as lines are rehearsed, and one can almost see choir members' memories scanning back to the people they loved and perhaps lost. The song itself gathers the memories for them, and there they are, singing that song in that place. Words fail at moments like this.

For whatever John Lennon may or may not have done or accomplished, he left behind a body of work that will move millions of people to the bottoms of their hearts for many years to come. Very few of us get that privilege, or accomplish a tenth of that sort of contribution to the world.

May he rest in peace, and may his memory be blessed.

Transcendence: Marines, Sousa Marches, Golf In A Gale, And South Oxhey

OldSouth just returned home from an extraordinary evening, spent in a basketball arena with the United States Marine Band and a large enthusiastic audience. It had been a long day. It was a long drive to the venue. He almost decided against going, and is so grateful he did.

The music-making was extraordinary, on so many levels. As a kid of nineteen, OS sat in a balcony at the Salzburg Festival, and watched Herbert von Karajan conduct Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, with the Vienna Phil in the pit. For them, it was another day at the office. For OS, it was a revelation to hear that music played in its true tradition and context. It was an 'A-ha' moment. 'Oh, that's how it's supposed to sound.'

Tonight was one of those experiences, which (as they always do) came as a surprise. To hear the Sousa marches performed by the organization he so indelibly shaped was revelatory. The music marched and danced at the same time, and the transparency of the scores in their detail became apparent. 'Semper Fidelis' performed with the complement of six cornets and two trumpets seemed almost lighter than air. 'Stars and Stripes' with four flawless piccolos on that countermelody (in tune!) seemed to take wings.

The band presented serious concert literature as well. Paul Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses was heavy going at first, but the audience hung in, and were won over. The Persichetti Psalm for Band, potentially as challenging to a lay audience, held their rapt attention.

The patriotic numbers were more poignant and heartfelt than OS was expecting, as the audience sang along on the opening stanza of 'My Country, 'Tis Of Thee', singing and applauding simultaneously as they arrived at the closing line--'let freedom ring', likewise as they sang Irving Berlin's 'God Bless America'. It was an audience full of vets, of soldiers' families, children and friends. These people have true 'skin in the game', in ways your average Ivy League liberal can never understand. No cynicism here, no intellectual's distance to be found between these people and the words they sang.

After the concert, the one band member from Tennessee was surrounded by a small mob of retired Marines, shaking his hand, having their pictures taken with the kid, slathering attention and love on the young man. It was extraordinary--they were all Marines, from the 80-year old guys in the funny hats to the shy 25-year old in his bright red concert dress, holding his trombone.

It was, well, transcendent. The evening was such a contrast to the banality and cynicism of so much of the culture. This music and this experience put the audience in contact with something that resonated deep within them: beauty experienced in community, in a cause bigger than their own entertainment or satisfaction.

And, it's been that sort of week. Mr. and Mrs. OS watched the season's final episode of The Choir Wednesday evening, with misty eyes, as young Gareth takes on the town of South Oxhey, north of London and essentially marooned and forgotten by the county that surrounds it. As the townfolk found their own voices, and learned how to sing and work together, that transcendence made itself known. And, the intrepid young conductor, on a mission to transform a town and then leave, found himself transformed by it, and remaining.

Transcendence.

Two teams of golfers battle the course, the elements and their nerves, until the American doffs his hat, shakes the Englishman's hand and concedes the match and tournament, and it dawns on the Welsh crowd that their boys just won, by one-half of a point. There was that moment of quiet just before the roar as it dawned upon everyone what had transpired.

Transcendence.

OS believes we cannot live without it, but that it must be the real thing; not the pale imitations promised by those who keep trying to peddle us aphrodisiacs, hair implants, weight-loss schemes, get-rich-quick courses, porn, drugs, political utopias and $80,000 automobiles.

Tonight was the real thing.

'Oh, that's how it's supposed to be...'

Green Shoots Award: 'The Choir' On BBC America

OS got the heads up from a good friend, headed for his remote, and spent the happiest hour of TV he had seen in many months.

'The Choir' has just made it to the US on BBC America.

He hates most 'reality' shows, but this is not about narcissists acting out their most evil instincts for the cameras. It's about a young musician, Gareth Malone, who takes on the project of taking a group of kids in a government school in the UK, turning them into a choir, and getting them ready for competition in the Choir Olympics in Beijing.

The first episode begins with the audition of some 140 kids, trying to find a couple of dozen who show enough promise. He doesn't even get that, but begins anyway. The episode ends with the kids recording their entry recording, four weeks later. The transformation of all the lives involved--choir, families, conductor, and school has begun.

This is what good music teaching does. It transforms lives, breeds discipline, esprit-de-corps, confidence, desire to excel. It breeds hope in lives that seem to have so little of it in their circumstances. 'If I can do this, perhaps there's a future for me out there in one of those other disciplines as well.'

It's not complicated, doesn't require some massive government program. Choral music education is the most cost-efficient of all, as the instruments come pre-installed in the students' bodies. Add one competent teacher with a lot of drive, a piano that is kept in tune, an accompanist, and a few bucks invested into the print music, and you've got the core of a potentially great program. It doesn't necessarily have to take place in a school--churches and community centers do just as well.

(And, unlike football or basketball, everyone graduates with their knees intact.)

OS hopes you enjoy this preview, and will tune in for the episodes.