Today was a musical day for a variety of reasons. For one, I happened to sing backup for hymns with the choir as well as singing special music with the choir for a piece that dealt with the heart, as do many of the pieces chosen by our choir director. Truth be told, matters of the heart (in a variety of ways) are of great interest, and the relationship between love and song was something that came up today in a variety of contexts, many of which I found to be very interesting and noteworthy, and also worthy of deep reflection, as I am prone to do on occasion.

During a conversation with a friend, I chatted with her about our mutual taste in music, and she mentioned that she learned a lot of songs because loved ones happened to like them and expressed an interest in the songs. With this particular person, her taking the time to learn how to sing a song or play it on the piano or guitar is an expression of love. I found this to be a very touching and sweet (and also somewhat indirect) demonstration of love and respect. As someone who tends to create works, whether poems or blog entries, as an expression of love and concern for others, it is always fascinating for me to see how others use similar means of expressing love through performance and creativity, in a way that an intuitive person would appreciate and understand but that might be ignored by those who were simply not sensitive to it.

This evening I went with a fairly large group of more than twenty people to watch the director of the youth choir at our congregation (and the person who recruited me to a barbershop quartet) perform with a large barbership group as well as another smaller quarter that he was in, along with a few other groups that were also performing at the 47th Annual Show of the Oregon Trail Pitchpipers Barbershop Quartet. In listening to the songs and commentary from the various groups, it seemed that certain themes ran through the songs and performances.

For one, there was a great deal of brotherly love between the singers within the groups, which was exhibited in different ways. For one, the existence of close harmony is itself an expression of fraternal love, of people with different parts (usually four parts) blending their voices together to create one beautiful sound. This harmony comes together as a result of practice as well as sensitivity to where other people are at so that one can match them without conflict. This brotherly love often manifests itself in inside jokes and humor as well, a sign that people know each other well enough to have words and phrases and expressions that have a special meaning to the people involved.

In addition, many of the songs the groups sang dealt with love in some fashion. Some of the songs were melancholy songs full of longing, others were songs about the fear or desire for commitment, or the praise of loved ones. It struck me as somewhat ironic that the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America was founded in the late 1930’s amid tension about dictators and a concern about the loss of freedom, with a group of men (and later women) joining together to praise the freedom they still had to sing music together. What is ironic is that a society dedicated to the freedom of musical performance should end up attracting so many people who are pretty old (the concert was attended mostly by elderly people, and a significant portion of the young people at the concert were within our group, many of us who sing barber shop style in the youth choir) and who are singing largely very old songs. By and large, barber shop singing is a particularly traditional and conservative sort of interest, perhaps one of the most traditional and conservative interests I tend to have.

One of the songs at the end of the performance particularly struck me, as the men who formed the Oregon Trail Pitchpipers Barbershop Chorus sang a line: “There is love wherever there is song.” There are many kinds of love involved with song. Those who write music (or create art in general) often do so out of love for others. Those who love others will often sing or learn or listen to music to show their love and appreciation for others. Those who perform in groups or musical acts often develop a sort of love for the people they perform with (likewise, people often tend to watch music with those they care for). In all of these ways, and many more besides, music is an expression of love in its creation, performance, and enjoyment. Just as we appreciate harmony in our own lives when we have mutual love and respect for others that they have for us, we appreciate harmony in music, when voices blend together as one. Such occasions when beautiful harmony occurs, whether in our relationships or our musical performance, remind us that in our conflict-ridden world that there is still at least the occasional experience of unity and cohesion reminding us of how things ought to be.