Howdy everyone, Daniel here!
So I've been here for a few months now, and I'm sure a lot of you have seen me on Sunday mornings playing with the band for worship. However, most of you probably would not guess that, until very recently--as in the last coupla weeks--I couldn't read a single note of music. Now, when I say music, I'm referring to musical notation or, as I've always referred to it, "dot-dot-dots", cause that's pretty much all that it meant to me:) Several weeks ago, however, I went to my mom's house over in Edgewater, and found that my fourteen year-old sister Elisabeth could read musical notation, and was able to play songs straight from "Phantom of the Opera" (they had the song book for it). She sounded so wonderful that in that moment, I put aside two decades-worth of resistance to the "dot-dot-dots", and asked her to show me how to read it.
Since then, I've been practicing diligently to get this musical notation stuff down. I'm currently writing a piano piece so that I'm forced to learn where all the notes go and what all the little symbols mean. In doing this, I've really begun to realize how amazing music is.
Have you ever thought about that? Until very, very recently in human history, all music was played live: no CD's, no radio, no cassette tapes, no vinyls, nothing. If you wanted music, you had to create it. In our modern-day culture, music is blared everywhere we go from restaurants to the car next to us at the stop light. It seems that our culture is overflowing with music, maybe even too much. Music is cheap, it's easy, and it's entertaining. But this was not always so.
Think about the world before electricity, before cars, before cities; back to the world where we began. It was a quiet world. Anyone who has been in the woods for several days at a time knows what I'm talking about. There is an engulfing silence that seems to fill up the wilderness, and after you've been immersed in it long enough you feel as if it may even consume you. We don't often experience this today, because we have created a world that is filled with noise and voices and music, all directed at us and for us, but it was out of a silent world that music came forth. In that time, music was too precious, too valuable to play as the background to a soda add, or to be sold for 99 cents on Itunes (not that they had soda or Itunes back then, but hopefully you get my point). Music was something sacred; something that had the ability to pierce through the darkness and the fears and the silence and bring something that was not of this world, something that could touch the heart in a way that is deeper than the eye can see.
Music is a way that we can express the infinite movements of the human heart into the physical world.
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