Thoughts from a Musician's Heart
The Beautiful Sing: An Advent Essay by Daniel Paul Horn
I am haunted these days by thoughts of memory and forgetting. For three years, since she moved into a senior living facility near us, I have been watching my 93-year-old mother with bittersweet love as she slowly, irrevocably slips away from her vibrant past as a devoted teacher, deeply influential church lay leader, inquisitive world traveler, and creative artist whose work encompassed photography and poetry, towards the darkness that closes this life while anticipating the dawn of the next. Ann Horn has forgotten how to use her camera, her phone, and her computer, and struggles to put together coherent words to express what she is experiencing. She still knows my wife and me, treasuring our visits. Like my late brother before me, I drive her to church on Sunday mornings. She delights in the change of scenery, and happily receives greetings and hugs from dear women in the congregation, even though she cannot remember from week to week who they are. I wish I could know exactly what she gets out of the weekly liturgy, the scripture readings, and the preached word, but I am keenly aware that when the organ resounds and I place a hymnal in her hands, she is profoundly present. She responds to every word, seems to read the musical notation, and joins in with God’s people, raising her voice, which though never conventionally pretty, has been lifted in confident, thankful praise for as long as I can remember. Whatever else is going on as she participates in morning worship, my mother is actively singing to her God and Savior.
I sing beside her, listen, and remember another family moment, over 25 years ago. As my 95-year-old grandmother lay on what would become her deathbed, a number of us came to visit her – my mother, an aunt, cousins, my brother, and me. Grandma Hill was not very lucid by then, but as we gathered around her, she began to sing a lovely, half-forgotten Methodist Christmas hymn from her youth: “There’s a song in the air! There’s a star in the sky! There’s a mother’s deep prayer and a baby’s low cry! And the star rains its fire while the beautiful sing, for the manger of Bethlehem cradles a King!” Like her daughter a generation later, my grandmother had lost much of what made her the matriarch we knew, but to the end there remained in her a hidden treasure of song that arose from her when not much else could.
These two generations of testimony speak to me and encourage me. I reflect that those of us for whom music is a calling are far more like my mother and grandmother than we might care to admit. As musicians, we have all had remarkable, even numinous experiences, and some of us have accomplished much by worldly standards. But for all of us, even the transcendent is transient; our careers are subject to the whims of the profession, to accidents of health, and circumstances of life. In the midst of everything, we can be tempted at times to imagine that we have very little. When we come to the end of ourselves in such moments of doubt, the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26). It was Felix Mendelssohn who wrote that music expresses that which is too specific for words, and surely music ministers to and through us in special ways as a gift of that Spirit. It is with us as we begin our journey through life, and through the Spirit continues to resonate at journey’s end. I think of the words Olivier Messiaen placed in the mouth of the dying Saint Francis: “Lord! Lord! Music and poetry have led me to You. Deliver me, enrapture me, dazzle me forever by the excess of Your Truth.” With the Apostle Paul (II Corinthians 4:16-18), I am encouraged not to lose heart. I saw in my grandmother and continue to see in her daughter that the wasting away of our outer selves leaves in its wake an inner self that is constantly renewed in preparation for an eternal weight of glory. Like applause, reviews, and musical accolades, Mom’s degrees, publications, and achievements ultimately have scant significance. What is left are her prayers, now too deep for words, the gratitude of her children, biological or born of shared faith, and the kingly glory of God’s creation shining upon all that she ever was and will be. Above and through all of this, the beautiful sing, joining with everything that has breath (Psalm 150:6). If I forget all else, let me always remember this.
Pianist Daniel Paul Horn is keyboard chair at the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music. He lives in Winfield, Illinois with his wife, mezzo-soprano Denise Gamez.
