Angels We Have Heard on High

Surveying the collection of carols in American hymnody, one might be excused for thinking that Christmas was about angels.

The Christ child gets attention in carols like “O Holy Night” or “O Come All Ye Faithful,” and the magi of Matthew's gospel take center stage in “We Three Kings,” but we just can't get enough of those angels. Whether the heavenly host sings alleluia in “Silent Night,” or angels greet the newborn Christ with sweet anthems in “What Child Is This,” it's rare to find a Christmas carol that doesn't mention them. We just can't get enough of the angels proclaiming Christ's birth to a group of frightened shepherds.

The angels take center stage in the story of the first Christmas in “Angels We Have Heard on High.” In the structure of the song we are neither shepherds receiving the announcement of Christ's birth, nor are we angels declaring the news. We are instead a third party, wandering the countryside and arriving too late to witness the stunning tableau that transpired outside Bethlehem.

Imagine and take it in for a moment, what that spectacle would have been like. The gospel of Luke mentions a group of shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem tending their flocks of sheep, one presumes in connection with the sacrificial system at the Temple in nearby Jerusalem.

On the one hand is the landscape, barren except for the scrub, meadow muffins and a small flock of sheep that dot the area. Scattered through that flock are rough-spun shepherds, some sleeping, some possibly drunk and some watching the scene with whatever emotion sits in the hearts of a shepherd late at night. On the other hand is a heavenly visitor who has just appeared, illumined and illuminating with an unworldly light that burns with a wondrous terror.

Caesar and other rulers concern themselves with halls of power and faraway kingdoms. Whenever they have an important proclamation to share, like the birth of an heir, they send messengers throughout the realm to declare it to the mighty. The angelic messenger is here to declare that God has restored the royal line of David, Israel's golden king.

Fifteen hundred years earlier, Moses went to Pharaoh and declared that God had sent him to save Israel from slavery and genocide, and to deliver his people to their own land. Now the angel is declaring that God is sending a new Moses to free Israel again, but the announcement isn't going to Caesar or even to Herod. It's going to the beneficiaries of that news, a group of social outcasts who can't even give testimony in court.

It's hard to tell which is a bigger shock to the shepherds: that the messiah has been born, or that they're the ones who are receiving the birth announcement.

This is the scene of wild, uncontainable wonder expressed in the opening lines of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” That first verse comes from the shepherds themselves, struck senseless with wonder. They have seen a host of angels and heard those angels, lost in worship, as a heavenly song rolled over the plains and came echoing back from distant mountains.

This is their witness account of what they heard and what they saw, and frankly it is incredible.

By the time we arrive on the scene, it is 2,020 years later. The angels are gone. Their music, however glorious it once sounded, has faded into silence. There is no one left living whose great-grandfather might have been stirred by that song. All that remains is what purports to be a written record of their encounter, and whatever questions we have.

The first verse is the account of the shepherds; the second verse is ours, and it is addressed to the shepherds. Why this celebration? Why this singing? What could you possibly have heard to set you to such celebration?

These are all reasonable questions, whether they are asked as the shepherds rush toward Bethlehem, or two millennia later as we wonder at the story we have heard. Either way, the shepherds' response in the third verse is the only one suitable. They don't argue theology with us. (As for how they feel about it, that should be obvious from the major key and upbeat tempo to the carol.)

Nor do the shepherds even talk about what they think the birth of Jesus will mean for them personally, for their nation, or for the world. Their initial response is simply “Come to Bethlehem and see.”

What do we find there? A baby, certainly; some would say, no more. The remainder of the third verse, and the fourth verse as well, state what the shepherds themselves believed they would find: Christ the Lord, the newborn king, Lord of heaven and earth, laid in a manger.

And woven throughout the song at the end of every verse is the song of the angels itself, rendered in a rolling chorus that rises and falls in rapid tempo, the Latin Gloria in Excelsis Deo, “Glory to God in the highest.”

This, then, is our cue, as visitors to this pageantry. We have missed the angels, and are witness only to the record of what Luke tells us the shepherds found.

Follow the shepherds. Come to Bethlehem. What do you see there?



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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"Angels We Have Heard On High"

1. Angels we have heard on high Sweetly singing o’er the plain And the mountains in reply Echoing their joyous strains Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo! 2. Shepherds, why this jubilee? Why your joyous strains prolong? What the gladsome tidings be? Which inspire your heavenly songs? Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo!

3. Come to Bethlehem and see Christ, whose birth the angels sing; Come, adore on bended knee, Christ, the Lord, the newborn King. Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo! 4. See Him in a manger laid, Jesus, Lord of heaven and earth; Mary, Joseph, lend your aid, With us sing our Savior's birth. Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo!

'O Come, O Come, Immanuel'

This Sunday is the fourth Sunday of Advent, something I suspect has escaped the notice of many Christians in America.

What we popularly consider the Christmas season technically is the Advent season. Advent is a part of the traditional Christian calendar, beginning four Sundays before Christmas, and ending on Christmas itself. The four Sundays of Advent are marked by lighting candles on a wreath, each with a different theme. The fifth candle, the Christ candle, is lit on Christmas Eve or Christmas. In a liturgical sense the Christmas season does not begin until Christmas itself, and lasts for 12 days before ending on Epiphany, or Twelfth Night.

Fortunately, this doesn't make a difference to any but the stodgiest and most annoying people. Luckily for the rest of us, they have their own churches where they can fret over these things and wait until Christmas before they start singing Christmas carols, without ruining the fun of the season for the rest of us. (You know who you are.)

Advent technically has its own set of carols, such as “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” written by Charles Wesley; but for whatever reason these have not received the elevated status of Christmas carols. With some exceptions.

Chief among these exceptions is “O Come O Come Emmanuel.”

Like all other great songs, whether they are hymns, Christmas carols or something else, “O Come O Come Immanuel” is best learned not from a lyrics sheet but by immersion. You grow up hearing it sung as the last leaves fall from the trees and as the sky first grows leaden with winter. You first sing it yourself before you can read, and learn to lose yourself in its somber notes at an age when it still thrills you to watch your breath chill in the air around you.

Some Christmas carols contain lessons on the meaning of Christmas, or they retell a familiar story around the Nativity. Some try to do both. None of that applies in this case. There is no progression of ideas in this carol, no breakthrough or “aha” that it tries to impart. Each verse begins the same way as its fellows, and each verse ends the same way: God, come rescue us. We are suffering here for want of you.

“O Come O Come Immanuel” was not written as much as it was grown — not from among the mountains, fields and forest rivers, nor from the bustle and jostle of our cities. It springs instead from the eternal longing in the human heart to transcend this sullied flesh and to connect with God. It is the prayer of a soul chained to the earth while it longs to dance in fields of glory.

“O Come O Come Immanuel” is not merely a hymn. It is Advent itself, given words and stretched over a frame of music that glides by as regularly as the chimes that call monks to prayer. It is a song that exudes the universal yearning for relief from the tedium of mortality. We are exiled here, we are under sentence of death, we are oppressed, we are weary. Come save us.

And always, in the same cadence that it gives voice to our longing, the carol returns to that same patient reminder: “Rejoice! Rejoice. Immanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.”

So we wait. Thousands of years ago God's people waited in faith for the coming of the promised deliverer, whose arrival we now celebrate from the vantage of a faith rewarded. We also wait for his promised return and the fulfillment of the deliverance that he began when he first arrived. And lastly we wait for him to come more fully into our hearts and change us.

You came into the darkness and you made a difference, Anglicans pray at this time of year. Come into the darkness again.

Even so. Come, Lord Jesus. We are waiting. Amen.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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O Come O Come Immanuel

1.O come, O come, Immanuel, And ransom captive Israel, That mourns in lonely exile here, Until the Son of God appear. Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. 2. O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free Thine own from Satan's tyranny ; From depths of hell thy people save, And give them victory o'er the grave. Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. 3. O come, Thou Dayspring, come and cheer, Us mortals by thine advent here. Disperse the gloomy clouds of night, And death's dark shadows put to flight. Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel.

4. O come, Thou Key of David, come And open wide our heav'nly home ; Make safe the way that leads on high, And close the path to misery. Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. 5. O come, Adonai, Lord of might, Who to thy tribes, on Sinai's height, In ancient times did give the law In cloud and majesty and awe. Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel.

Breaking it down for Steven King

Steven King has an interesting question.

King, R-Iowa, was part of an MSNBC panel discussion on Monday afternoon, hosted by Chris Hayes, along with Charles Pierce, a writer for Esquire; and reporter April Ryan. Discussion turned to the predominantly white makeup of the Republican Party, and King objected. The problem? He's tired of this whole “old white people business.”

“I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about?” King asked. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

“Than white people?” Hayes asked.

“Than Western civilization itself that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world,” King said. “That’s all of Western civilization.”

Hayes cut off the discussion immediately, undoubtedly hoping to stop an ugly discussion before it grew even uglier. (He since has conceded that he might have made the wrong decision.) But let's give King some credit. He has tried to initiate an important discussion on race in our country. What noteworthy contributions have non-whites made to the United States, to the West and to human civilization in general? It's only fair to ask.

For starters – and this is an easy one – black labor powered the engine of the North American economy for about two centuries. Black slavery began in 1619 when colonials brought African slaves to Virginia to work the plantation fields, but it was really in the 1660s that slavery grew and hardened into a hereditary institution in which blacks would work, and whites would reap the benefits of that labor.

For the next two centuries, blacks would receive only the barest compensation for labor that consumed their every waking hour for six days a week, while their stolen wages fattened the wealth of the white families that owned the labor camps where they toiled. (In our genteel way, we call these “plantations.”) It's safe to say that without stolen labor artificially suppressing the price of cotton, the American economy never would have been as powerful as it was by the time of the Civil War.

But I'm sure that King is tired of hearing about slavery, so let's not dwell on that. We'll also overlook the cultural contributions of black performers such as Sidney Poitier, Paul Robeson, Diana Ross and Louis Armstrong; the very existence of jazz music and spirituals that have been mainstays in church or around campfires for generations, such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”; and cultural icons like Bugs Bunny, largely derived from Gullah stories of Brer Rabbit.

We also should discount the contribution of the black and Chinese laborers who built the railways out West. I'm sure King wouldn't count that as significant, since anybody could have built railroads or paved roads. The real movers and shakers were the tycoons who owned the businesses and who received millions of dollars from the efforts of these laborers. God's eyes are on the workers, but it's the wealthy who matter to us.

Should we focus on people like Daniel Hale Williams, the first person to successfully complete open heart surgery? Williams was black, but perhaps he won't count for King, because Williams only pioneered a new lifesaving procedure in medicine and didn't actually discover a new field of medicine.

Other such inventions and innovations include blood banks, the refrigerator, the electric trolley, the dust pan, the comb, the mop, the brush, the clothes dryer, the lawn mower, traffic signals, the pen and the pencil sharpener.

Still, these are mere inventions, King might object. That Kenmore refrigerator is important, and you miss it when it stops working in the heat of the summer, but that's not as foundational to civilization as the very notion of democracy.

Alas, it is not. So let's look at the foundations, and see where they lie.

Agriculture began around 9,000 BCE far from Europe, in the fertile crescent, where farmers started to raise wheat and barley; and around 8,000 BCE in South America, with the first potato farmers. Cultivating crops may mark the start of human civilization, since agriculture allows formerly nomadic people to settle down and begin to see one spot of land as home.

As agriculture improves, the land begins to support more people in smaller areas. Cities are about as foundational to civilization as we can get, and the first known cities were nowhere in Western Europe, Eastern Europe or the United States. The oldest cities arose in ancient Sumer, around 7500 BCE. Writing first appeared around 3200 BCE, in Sumeria and in Egypt. China developed its first writing around 1200 BCE.

There was approximately nothing going on in Europe at this time. Greece was in decline and had entered a period called the Greek Dark Ages, and everything else we've learned of the rest of Europe we've had to deduce from graves.

Back to those ancient cities. Living in close proximity to one another often gives rise to other innovations. With space at a premium, there is a need to stack people atop one another more efficiently.  So architecture also may be said to have originated in Sumer, along with government and means of records-keeping.

That also means that economies (and economics) began in Sumer, although money wouldn't come along for several centuries. Lydia, a city-state located in present-day Turkey, generally is credited with minting the first coins in the seventh century BCE, but it was the Tang Dynasty of China that gets credit for inventing paper currency in 740 BCE.

King also claims credit on behalf of Christianity, for its contributions to Western civilization. It's worth remembering that Christianity isn't actually a European or Western religion. It began in the East, and embraces many Eastern ideals such as the union of body and spirit, and judging a man on his actions rather than on his words. The gospel was preached in Africa before it reached Europe, and the biggest churches today are in Asia, not the United States. How anyone could link this to white people is beyond me.

So, there you have it, Mr. King. I'm no historian, but while I'll agree that European and American societies have gifted the world with tremendous literature, music, art, philosophy, science and God knows what else, I'm not sure there is any basis to your claim that we've done more than any other race, color or ethnicity. Discount the black contribution to America, and you erase America. Discount Africa and Asia, and you've just erased human history.

Tired of this whole “old white people business?” Then come on out and join the rest of the human race, Mr. King. There's a whole lot going on out here, and you don't want to miss out.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

who'll stop the rain (new lyrics)

Long as I remember, rain's been coming down.

Clouds of mystery throwing confusion on the ground

Must be ten years gone now, trying to find the sun,

And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain.

I went to Virginia, seeking shelter from the storm.

Caught up in the fable, I watched the tower burn.

Broken vows and new starts never loose the chains,

And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain.

Heard the children singing, how we cheered for more.

We huddled close together, trying to keep warm.

Still the rain kept falling, pouring on our ears,

And I wonder, still I wonder, how to stop the rain.

Remember when music shaped the world?

Music used to be something that inspired us. It drew us together, made it possible to get through hard times together, and even made drudgery bearable.

When I was a kid we sang together in the car on long car trips. People sang together in church, not just choirs or worship teams but the entire congregation. We sang along with the radio. At Christmas time people went around caroling in groups from one house to another. There was music to educate, music to protest having to attend school, and songs like "This Land is Your Land" that everyone just knew. We didn't sing all the time, but it did happen.

Nowadays it seems like music is an empty exercise in narcissism, either of the singers who write only about themselves, or in the listeners who use their iPods as a shield against the world. I

t's hard to believe that only 40 years ago, people were using music to bring an oppressive establishment to its knees here in America, speaking up for Civil Rights, protesting war, and not only imagining a better world, but believing that it was within our power to create it.

Where are the Pete Seegers of today? Does no one perform powerful music this beautifully anymore? I was in tears listening to this song, and I hope that you were too.

the legacy of Pete Seeger

For much of this afternoon, Evangeline has been singing an adjusted protest song from the 1960s:

If you love your Uncle Sam,
Support your troops in Iraq.
Bring 'em home --
Bring 'em home.

The song has its origins with Pete Seeger, who popularized it during the Vietnam War, but it came to us via Bruce Springsteen in "The Seeger Sessions." Evangeline is finding that she favors the music of the 1960s, so naturally she loves this song.

She also has decided that one of her goals this trimester -- students at the charter school get to individualize their course of study -- is to write and perform a song of her own composition.

I got ten bucks says it's a protest song about something at the school, in the footsteps of Arlo Guthrie, who wrote his first protest song in fifth grade, about a math test.

Deconstructing CCR on the road

This past Sunday night my oldest daughter began to take possession of the folk rock song"Who'll Stop the Rain."

We were in the car, returning from a trip to visit relatives, and — as is our practice on long car trips — we were making the time pass by singing as a family. It was raining, and as one might expect, one of the songs selected was that old standby of Credence Clearwater Revival. The girls both know it well.

The song had ended, when Evangeline, who is entering fifth grade a little more than a month from now, spoke up.

"He's not talking about the rain, he's really talking about ..." And with those words, Evangeline began to deconstruct the song.

Her analysis: Rather than a weather report, Fogerty's song is a social commentary about all the things that are wrong with society, and how we all cry out for someone to set things to rights. She even rattled off the names of some people through the ages who have been "trying to find the sun": Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy and Barack Obama.

I felt for a moment like I was sitting astride a flying horse that had been Mrs. Whatsit, and talking with Charles Wallace as we looked down upon a shadowed world. She didn't deconstruct the entire song, but what she got still was impressive.

I didn't entirely realize that she had reached this level of abstract thinking. The educational psychologist Jean Piaget said people generally don't until they're 18 or so, and many don't reach it even then. Listeners naturally will associate the song with rainfall, but its social implications won't occur to them unless someone points them out.

And even they do realize that the song is about the pursuit of social justice, many listeners probably won't catch the cynicism about governmental five-year plans and New Deals, nor the barren view of Woodstock in the third verse. The verses, instead of being filled with hunger for the redemption of society, instead become a maze of disjointed images, pointing nowhere and meaning nothing.

I said that Evangeline began to take possession of the song. That's because songs exist in three distinct forms.

The first form is the essence of the song itself, whatever it may be in isolation, if in fact it is anything. Usually we come closest to that when we look at the intent behind its composition.

Second is the song as the singer performs it, with his own interpretation of its meanings, import and motivation. Note that this can change over time, as the singer's own associations with the lyrics may shift, and the "crowds of people" in the third stanza may refer specifically to the youth at Woodstock at one point, and years later to the idealistic youth of another generation, or to the bitter and angry adults trying to force society to their will.

The third is the song the listener hears and understands herself to be listening to. The five-year plans to one listener may refer to an effort in the war on drugs, for instance; while someone else may see it as a comment on the war on terror; or to something else entirely. There is a lot of divergence on this end.

This happens to every song or story. The song exists as an entity to itself; the performer imbues it with a meaning and direction of her choice, driven by the context of her own life experiences; and audience members receive the song in themselves, coloring it according to their own prejudices and experiences.

In many cases the gulf between the song as the performer delivers it and as the audience receives it is so vast that it's unclear what shared experience they have had, if any. That's particularly true with shallow readings of a song or a story, such as the woman who hears Elton John's "Daniel" and associates it with her grandson, who is not leaving tonight on a plane and whose eyes are just fine, simply because his name is Daniel.

But that disparity persists even with more mature readings of songs. Earlier in this post, I shared my own understanding of "Who'll Stop the Rain": that it views Woodstock, the cultural flower of the 1960s counterculture, as an effete exercise in changing the world.

That's based on my own understanding of the first two lines of the third verse of the song -- I have no idea what Fogerty intended, nor to be honest, have I given it much thought what happened in Virginia that he would have sought shelter from the storm there, or what tower burned. (Maybe someone will tell me, and it'll be so obvious in hindsight that I'll feel a need to drool.)

But even if I did have specific interpretations of those lines, they would be informed by the context of my own life, and the weight I give each line or word would reflect those biases.

That's apparent from all the readings of Don McLean's "American Pie." McLean wisely has never said what the song is about, with the result that "definitive" readings have it as a chronicle of the 1960s, as seen through the changes in America's music scene; as a response to the assassination of President Kennedy (and, one presumes, to the assassinations of his brother and Dr. King); and to the Vietnam War.

I've even come across interpretations that tie it to the Crucifixion, because of the references to the king with his "thorny crown," and to satanic figures like the jester and the devil himself.

In the end, as I told Evangeline, songs belong not just to the performer, but to listeners as well. She's free to impart her own meaning to symbols of rain, towers, golden chains, and clouds whenever she sings "Who'll Stop the Rain," and even to change words to suit her fancy and preference more.

I learned the song by listening to a CD, and Evangeline has learned it by singing with me, words misheard and words misremembered, in true folksong style. The song no longer belongs to CCR or to the label the band recorded it for. Through that chain of passage, it has come into her possession as freely as any song sung on the bayou. She already rearranges it for her own vocal range, just as I did for mine,  and one day, she may even play it on the piano, choose her own chords, and compose a whole new bridge between verses.

It's her song. The arrangement, the lyrics and the notes are all her own to choose.

And so is the meaning.


Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'the last temptation'

I never cared much for Alice Cooper, not even when he appeared on "The Muppet Show."

My younger brother liked him enough that he actually went out and bought the album "Alice Cooper Goes to Hell" after seeing the episode -- to this day I'm amazed that our mother consented to let him buy it, let alone listen to it -- but I never really "got" him. Over the years, I've read a few articles and interviews with Cooper that have piqued my interest a little, but never enough actually to listen to anything he's recorded.

Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, I can't get enough of.

So it was Saturday afternoon that I got my first exposure to Alice Cooper in more than 25 years when I saw a Dark Horse Comics trade paperback at the library. The title was "The Last Temptation," and as it turns out, the comic is based on a concept album that Alice Cooper did several years ago with Neil Gaiman. (I kid you not.)

The plot's pretty straightforward, really. A young boy named Steven is at that most awkward age, when he is neither a boy nor even properly speaking a teen. He's too old for childhood activities like trick-or-treating; and he's just at that age where he's starting to notice a je-nais-c'est-quoi about girls that he finds enticing, almost titillating.

Steven feels trapped and unsure of what comes next, when a mysterious showman appears. Amid a theater of horrors the showman offers him the opportunity to become a rock star in exchange for his future.

Standard Faustian stuff, really. The chief difference is that the Steven's good angel is watching out for him, and Steven discovers the dark truth about the showman and his history. He not only escapes the theater of the damned, he also destroys all that the showman has accomplished over the years.

Not a great comic, to be honest. It was worth borrowing from the library and reading once, I suppose, but I returned it Tuesday afternoon with a ton of other books. The best part was Gaiman's foreword. It was creepy and crack-up-out-loud funny at turns, but that alone isn't worth the price of buying a graphic novel.

Maybe I should get a copy for my younger brother. He always did seem to like that Alice Cooper album when we were little.

hebrew and arabic cds

Well, we're back on the homeschooling wagon for at least another year. Rachel missed the cutoff date in our district by two weeks, so we have elected to put her through kindergarten at home rather than miss the opportunity.

One of the things we're trying to do is to expose her to languages other than English. Spanish is easy -- on our recent trip to Mexico I commented that it was virtually like being in Iowa because there were so many people around us speaking Spanish -- but I'd like to include some non-European languages as well, if not to learn then at least to build some familiarity with the sounds and the ebb and flow.

And of course, one of the best ways to experience another language is through music, especially if it's a tune we already know. Music makes it easier to remember and even memorize a song, and if they're songs we already know, it becomes easier to get the meaning.

Amazingly, none of the Judaica shops that I have visited in nearby Hoover Point -- which has a significant Jewish population -- appear to carry CDs with Hebrew or Israeli folk music, or other music in Hebrew. I can continue to rely on YouTube for the experience, but that's kind of a pain in the tuchis. Does anyone have a suggestion where I could find some decent music in Hebrew without exorbitant shipping rates? This could be folk music, such as recorded by Ofra Haza, but it could also be the ever-popular Children's Songs from Hell, or even soundtracks of Disney movies and Broadway shows.

I'm also looking for CDs of Arabic songs of that nature, since it's the lingua franca of the Middle East. The Arabic I'm most familiar with personally -- I can say "Marhaba" and "Shou ismac" -- is Lebanese. It seems kind of odd that the language would be that varied from nation to nation, especially since the Quran must act in some capacity to tether the dialects together, but then I imagine Arabic is an older language than modern English, and had more time to develop regional variations before mass communication set in.

Anyway, I am told that Egyptian is the most universally understood dialect, owing to the popularity of Egyptian television. Maybe that would be a good place to start.

And as I've been thinking about this further, I suppose the best songs to start with really would be songs they're already familiar with, whether popular children's songs, or soundtracks from movies and plays.

woody guthrie tribute

From the day they started singing, I've encouraged my girls to think of whatever songs they sing as theirs. They have liberty to add verses, change lyrics, and even alter the tune if they think it appropriate. Cleaning up the study, I just found this new verse to "This Land is Your Land," scribbled out by Evangeline:

As I was walking, and the world was waking,

My legs were tired, and my back was aching.

Yet all around me, a voice was chanting,

"This land was made for you and me."

Play it, Sam: Finding the value of our shared musical heritage

My children love to sing, and I couldn’t be prouder of them for it.

We played a game of Encore on Sunday night with a friend of ours and her son, and my girls performed in style. They knew theme songs from TV shows that were canceled decades before they were born (Schlemiel! Schlimazel!), they knew songs about folk heroes like John Henry and Casey Jones, they knew songs about their country, and they knew songs from Broadway.

I’ve lost track of how many songs my girls know. Even though she won’t be 5 until this fall, Rachel has amazed me by knowing the words to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and by singing show tunes from “Les Misérables,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and even “Man of La Mancha.” Evangeline’s pretty much the same.

Music, I have come to realize, is as fundamentally a part of being human as speech itself is. We tap our heels, we whistle, we clap our hands, we snap our fingers and we stomp our feet. And we sing.

Or at least we used to. Anymore these days, music is a spectator thing. We listen to iPods and radio stations, but if someone starts to sing along, we usually tell them to shut up, because they’re ruining the song.

It used to be at a ballgame that everyone would rise to her feet and sing the national anthem before the game would start. It was a communal effort, a joint profession of allegiance to something bigger than ourselves, something that united us all under one flag, no matter our race, heritage or class. Nowadays we all shuffle our feet and listen as one person sings it over the intercom, or (what’s worse) we stand patiently as a recording plays.

When I was younger, the congregation at my parents’ church would sing hymns that had been around since before the English language. I wouldn’t have complained if the organ had caught fire, and I wouldn’t have minded something more interesting than “We’ve a Story to Tell to the Nations,” but even if the songs were dull and the organ was uninspiring, worship was something everyone took part in. If you had been around long enough, you didn’t even need to look at the hymnal to know the words.

Good luck finding a similar experience today. The music is a little fresher than “Nearer my God to Thee,” and the electric guitars and drum sets are guaranteed to wake you up rather than lull you into a coma, but something’s been lost. Watch the congregation, and you’ll find that more and more people are listening to the worship team, and if anyone’s singing, it’s often a half-hearted thing done through half-shut mouths. The music is louder than when I was a boy, but fewer people are joining in.

It’s not quite the same thing, is it?

As a culture, we are losing something important. When songs attain that coveted status where children learn them from their parents, without benefit of music or lyrics sheet, they create a solid anchor to the past for each generation that comes. They become a medium for passing knowledge, sharing history, and creating identity.

My girls have laughed to some of the same songs that entertained a young Laura Ingalls Wilder on the frontier a hundred fifty years ago, and they’ve sung some of the same tunes that John Lennon and Pete Seeger used to protest the Vietnam War when I was still learning to crawl. These songs are part of their heritage, and they’re part of what makes them American.

They’re a part of our identity, and we’re letting it slip away.


Copyright © 2007 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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how's that?

I'm confused. When did trading integrity for sales start counting for respectable behavior?

If you follow Christian music, you've probably heard of the band Jays of Clay. I don't follow it myself, so I don't know how to describe their music except that it's popular with the church kid crowd. Apparently the band's lead vocalist, Dan Haseltine, is disgusted with the shallowness of the Christian subculture. Good for him. I'm disgusted too.

In a column on Argus Leader Media, writer Robert Morast discusses Haseltine's frustration with the failings of contemporary Christianity. That includes the self-delusional lie that Christians are more moral and better off than non-Christians, the too-earnest desire to turn everything into a scree on why people should be Christians, and so on. He quotes Haseltine:

There's such a facade that we have all our crap together, that we don't wrestle with what other people have to wrestle with. And that's just not true.

That's honest -- refreshingly honest for a Christian musician, who's usually expected to talk about how great God is, how following him has ended all the struggles we used to have -- and I'm with him a hundred percent on that.

But where Haseltine loses me completely is in this: The band won't perform or release some of its deeper or more controversial songs -- the column specifically notes unnamed "war protest songs" -- because it could hurt record sales.

There are many in the evangelical church to equate godliness with Republicanism and middle class values. Too many Christians are willing to break fellowship over issues like abortion, creationism (or Intelligent Design, as the new label has it) and gay marriage. And there are many who see George Bush as God's president, and therefore equate any disagreement with him or criticism of his presidency as an attack on God.

Here's what Morast has to say:

And in today's America, being "Christian" seems to be tied to being a "patriot." Basically, if you're an outspoken Christian, you're assumed to be a conservative Republican who backs President Bush without question, supports the war and believes abortion is wrong.

No question that breaking from the party line on an album is a risky thing. A lot of people, not just evangelicals, consider Christian to be inextricably linked with conservative, and have a hard time accepting the reality that there is a Religious Left out here, and that we're growing louder. Criticizing Bush or claiming that war -- any war, not just the Iraq war -- is contrary to the teachings of Christ is sure to cost a band sales and fans.

Even breaking from the tepid formula of "Gosh, how I love Jesus" can make a big mess. Amy Grant did that back in 1990 with "Lead Me On," and got angry reactions from all across the church because the album wasn't stuff like "El Shaddai" or "Thy Word." It was, in fact, a deeply personal, deeply moving and deeply spiritual without being superficially churchy album, but all that was lost amid the huggermugger over her failure to drop Christ's name into every second line of each song.

So I can see what Haseltine is saying that the band could take some hits for really speaking honestly about social issues. But Truth, not popularity, is supposed to guide believers. If the band has something more meaningful and original to say than the stuff that the Christian labels spew out with nauseating regularity, then it should come out and say it.

If Haseltine believes that the war in Iraq is wrongheaded, stupid, ill-conceived and not something Christians should be supporting -- and he'll get no argument from me on that score -- and he wants to say so, then he has an obligation to his listeners to go ahead and do it. Sometimes there's a price to be paid for revealing how ridiculous ridiculous things really are, but it's always worth it.

On the other hand, if Haseltine doesn't want to voice his views on the war because he considers them irrelevant to what Jars of Clay does, that's fine too, but then he has no business complaining the Christian recording industry is too shallow, because he and his band are just as much a part of the problem as their listeners.

Haseltine may have won new respect from Morast, but he's lost any I had for him.



Copyright © 2007 by David Learn. Used with permission.

a magic moment

Today in the car on the way to pick up her sister from school, I was surprised to hear Rachel singing from the back seat:

How many roads must a man walk down, before we call him a man?
How many seas must the white dove sail, before she nests in the sand?
How many times must the cannonballs fly, before they're forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

The lyrics weren't exact, and the tune was a little off, but she was definitely singing "Blowin' in the Wind." Rachel is only 4, but she already knows Dylan. How wild is that?

the artist: out of her time

Today on the way to the pharmacy, I was amused to hear Evangeline singing, without prompting:

All day, all night, Cary Grant.
That's all I hear from my wife: Cary Grant.
What can he do that I can't?
Big star, big deal, Cary Grant.

and:

I know a man named Mr. Lang,
And he has a neon sign.
And Mr. Lang is very old,
So we call it "Old Lang's Sign."

These are some of the lyrics to Allan Sherman's "Schticks of One, a Half-Dozen of the Other," a medley of mangled folk songs. Sherman was a variety singer who did send-ups of popular and well-known songs, such as Petula Clark's "Downtown." He also did the voice of the Cat in the Hat in the CBS TV special, but he is most famous for his "Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda" song, in which an unwilling camper pleads for the chance to come home.

In any event, as someone who appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, he made his splash when my parents were my age. I have (somewhere) a CD of "My Son, the Greatest: The Best of Allan Sherman," which is fairly unusual for someone my age. That Evangeline enjoys his music is nothing short of astonishing.

In other words, congratulations, Mr. Sherman. You've achieved a form of immortality that most artists only dream of.

the musician

Some songs every child should learn by the time she is 4:

• "American Pie"
• "The Phantom of the Opera"
• "Yellow Submarine"
• "My Deliverer is Coming"
• "Awesome God"
• "Casey Jones"
• "John Henry"
• "Turn, Turn, Turn (To Everything There is a Season)"
• John Williams' score to "Superman: The Movie"
• The theme from "Spider-man"
• "Follow the Drinking Gourd"
• "Yesterday"

This is just a sampler of the music Rachel knows. She has made quite an impression on people by singing these songs with great enthusiasm, especially "American Pie" and "Phantom."

My newest interest: playing piano by ear

Piano is proving surprisingly easy to pick up by ear.

I'm under no illusions that I'm a great -- or even a merely good -- pianist, but I'm pretty pleased with my progress. Last night I figured out how to play the melody for "It is Well with my Soul" in about 20 minutes, adding it to a rapidly growing repertoire that also includes the recapitulation from the "Phantom of the Opera" and a handful of old folk tunes and classic hymnody.

At the moment I'm pretty much just playing the straight melody line of these songs, sans left hand, sans chords. I still hit the wrong key at times because my hands aren't familiar enough with the keyboard; and of course I'm rearranging almost all the songs to start with C natural because I'm playing by ear and haven't a clue how to read sheet music for the piano. I'm not even sure I can play it on the tuba anymore, and that's an instrument I played for six years.

More dexterous fingers will come with experience. Chords and a clue about what to do with my left hand should come with the next few lessons.

But considering I've been tinkering with it for only a couple months, I think it's pretty good that I can figure out a new song in about 20 minutes and still play it right the next morning. And I've done all this without spending six months of music lessons playing nothing but those frigging scales.

One thing I've started to notice that I don't think I ever picked up when I played tuba -- perhaps because the tuba almost never gets the melody -- is the relationship between a note and the notes that precede and follow it.

I don't know if I can explain it, but there's a definite flow to the music in one- and two-steps between the notes. The vast majority of the songs I've figured out how to play literally go up and down the scales one step at a time for several notes, stay in the same octave, and so on. It's almost mathematical,

The double irony here is that I took up the piano pretty much as a way of encouraging Evangeline, and she's lost most of her interest in it. She had been keyed up to learn piano, so I talked with a friend who agreed to teach her how to teach herself, and his first lesson was so simple and straightforward that I realized I probably could teach myself too. Now I'm playing it almost every day, and she's barely touching it.

Still, if I keep this up, it's may not only rekindle her interest but grab Rachel's as well. And isn't that how knowledge and skills are supposed to be passed on, from parent to child?

Reverse influence of children on parents

In our house, sometimes the water flows uphill.

The principles of influence generally apply the way they always have, and you can safely say about the girls, "Oh, she takes after her mother that way" or "She gets that from her father." I take great pride in Evangeline's burgeoning interest in Greek mythology, and there's no doubt that my wife appreciates the relish Rachel has for the outdoors and nature. What parents don't love it when their children emulate them?

But lately, in my own life, I've seen that sometimes the tree doesn't grow too far from where the apple falls. Every once in a while, the water flows uphill.

Evangeline displayed a flair for artistic self-expression as early as 2 years old. Her interest waned for a few months, but particularly after we lost Isaac, she threw herself into drawing with abandon. We enrolled her in courses at a nearby art academy after she turned 5, and she had her own art exhibit there a year later.

What's curious is how this has affected the others of us. I've noticed in the last few weeks that Rachel has started displaying previously unknown levels of interest in art, particularly when it comes to painting. Tuesday night she painted herself a rainbow with an unmistakable bow shape to it, and when she draws, she's paying more attention to detail than ever before. She's spending more time on her art, and getting better every day. She's becoming an artist.

So am I. On Monday I asked the art instructor enough questions about Evangeline's art supplies that she told me I should just start taking lessons myself. I've noticed that my knowledge of different techniques, and my level of effort, have shot well past the stick-figure level where they effectively lingered for twenty-odd years.

In order to jumpstart Evangeline on the cover for her Roald Dahl research project, I drew my own sloppy copy and was reasonably impressed with the results. I'll never show at the Guggenheim or the Museum of Modern Art, but with a little effort and some coaching, I might actually turn out to be half-decent. It's a shocker.

The real shocker, though, has been musically. All the way through high school and college, I heard from my more musically attuned friends that I should give my vocal chords and their ears a rest whenever I felt the urge to sing. I had played the tuba for six years, and had been seated ahead of the all-state honors band player, but the general consensus of my friends was that I would do everyone a favor if I just left music to the musicians.

Generally speaking, I have. Even setting aside the question of vocals, there's not much demand for tubists in any sort of small-band capacity, I don't think I even remember half the valve combinations anymore, and I've always considered the time requirements for learning to play a new instrument to be too unwieldy at this point in my life.

As fate would have it, about two weeks ago, Evangeline started pleading for piano lessons. I had been trying to teach her piano from a music book during kindergarten, with mixed success, since I had no idea how to play it myself, and homeschooling texts are notorious for claiming how easy it is to teach a children a language or knowledge base that you haven't mastered yourself. (Mind, it's not impossible, but it is a lot of work, and it requires humility since you have to learn alongside your child, instead of imparting things from your own experience.)

But Evangeline was persistent, so I asked a friend who plays keyboards for his church if he would be willing to give it a shot. Rob, who is trained in elementary music education, took a different approach from the theory-scales-songs progression I recall from school. It's more like getting the kids to "think musically," and letting everything else follow. Professor Harold Hill may have been a con man with his "76 Trombones" and "Trouble in River City," but I have to say, I like Rob's approach just fine.

He taught Evangeline exactly one note, C natural, and told her to use that as the starting point for any song she wants to sing. After she matches her voice to that note, she then finds the next corresponding note on the keyboard, and then the next, and so on, until she has learned to play the whole song, entirely by ear. She undoubtedly will rearrange the song from its more familiar key in the process, but she's training her ears and fingers to match the notes she plays with what she sings.

Once she has learned to play two or three songs, we're supposed to call Rob for her second lesson. Practice, in the meantime, is at her pace and set by her level of interest, although we encourage her to practice and try to redirect her when she starts wandering off. (Forcing the issue with regimented daily practice times of 30 minutes a piece, I'll attest, leads to resentment, frustration, and not picking up the bloody instrument again once you graduate, so it's safe to consider it counterproductive.)

Rob insisted up front that he would not accept payment of any sort, since he simply enjoys seeing others learn to play, and is not trying to turn her into a concert pianist. That's a lucky thing for us, since Evangeline has already lost most of her interest in the piano, despite her initial enthusiasm.

But if Evangeline has lost interest, I've gained it. I already have figured out how to play some fairly simple children's songs like "Mary had a Little Lamb" and "Twinkle Little Star," which Rachel loves to hear me play; and "Majesty," a praise-and-worship chorus popular in charismatic churches in the late 1980s. I'm now working on "Holy, Holy, Holy," a more complicated and theologically deeper song that has been a church mainstay for ages.

I'm doing a decent job and one day soon may even be able to play our keyboard for our family devotions time, at least for one or two songs. I doubt I'll ever lead worship at church, and I'll certainly never play at Carnegie Hall, but I'm experiencing a renaissance in an area of artistry I never knew I had, and that alone makes it worth the price of admission.

And since both Rachel and Evangeline see my renewed interest and enthusiasm for the piano and drawing, I've a feeling these things will be a part of our family for years to come. If the water continues to run uphill and the trees keep growing near where the apples fall, we're going to have quite a tidy little orchard before long.

if thine ear offends thee

So I'm one of the organizers of Arts in The Park, an upcoming arts festival over in Highland Park.

Last night, at one of our nearly-there meetings, we had a brief discussion about the live entertainment we're trying to schedule for two stages. We're down at least one, possibly two, acts because of a cancellation, and we're trying to find some bands to perform on the day of the festival. During the meeting, one of the other committee members mentioned that an R&B/gospel band had expressed interest in performing, and there ensued an awkward discussion about whether an explicity religious band would be appropriate.

Now I'll be the first to admit that most Christian bands aren't appropriate for concerts outside church, mostly because they stink. The melodies are flat and uninteresting, the choruses are uninspiring and dull, and the time spent listening to them could be put to better use weeding the garden. That's not what we were discussing -- in fact, I have no idea if anyone on the committee even know what the band sounds like -- no, what was expressed was concern that a religious band might offend festival attendees.

This may seem appalling since I'm so deeply religious, but I really didn't say much at the time. Having given it some thought now that I'm home, I wrote an e-mail to the group's Yahoo! list to voice my concern that we are considering not going with a group just because their lyrics are religious.

I can understand the concern about people taking offense, but I don't think the reactions people might have should be a consideration in whom we invite to perform and who we do not. It may sound a bit facile to put it this way, but no one is being forced to listen to any particular band; except for vendors and some of the volunteers, people will be free to come and go from the festival as they wish, to move around the festival, and to do any number of other things that will remove them from earshot of any bands they don't want to hear.

And really, using a person's beliefs, rather than the quality and nature of their music, as a litmus test for acceptability seems especially odious to me. It's the nature of art to explore themes and to express the artist's inner beliefs and thoughts; I hope it would be unthinkable for anyone to ask someone not to display artwork that expresses her faith, whether in God, Christ, Buddha or the importance of eating fresh fruits and vegetables. By the same token, I would hope that we would not want to discriminate against hiring a live performer simply because their lyrics or musical structures reflect their beliefs.

There are, of course, any number of other perfectly legitimate reasons to reject a band, some of which may apply in this case. What concerns me, though, is that we were actually discussing making that decision based on the religious content of their songs.

soul anchor

Several years ago, when I was interviewing Mike Card on his then-new album, "Unveiled Hope," he mentioned that there was only one album left to do to complete his musical tour of Scripture: an album on the book of Hebrews.

He mentioned that one of the reasons for the delay is the heavy theology in the book, and the difficulty he was finding putting it to music. It was at this time that I made a suggestion he might find helpful. He did find it interesting.

Imagine my profound disappointment to listen to his album "Soul Anchor," which deals with the book of Hebrews, and not once hear the lyrics "Oh what the heck / It's Melchizedek."

eric clapton

A friend of mine asks, "Is there anything Eric Clapton can't do on guitar?"

Puh-lease. As if he's so special. I can think of plenty things Clapton can't do on guitar:

Sound like a tuba.
Summon a herd of elephants from deepest Africa.
Direct traffic.
The backstroke.

Come on and impress me.