In a week or two I'm doing an evening of Desert island Discs with a crowd of folk in our church at Montrose. Eight pieces of music is a strict ration when there are so many kinds of music I like. But choosing them has taken me back to CDs and LP records I'd all but forgotten I had. Some music I used to like and now have grown beyond. Tastes change and I've often wondered about the various factors and influences that underlie our attraction to certain kinds of music.
At certain times in life we hear a piece of music and it 'fits' or 'takes', in any case it becomes an important vehicle for our joy or sorrow, our questioning or celebrations, our love life or the life we love. Gabriel's Oboe is one such piece. I'll never forget that scene in The Mission where a Jesuit priest calms the fears of the native people by playing the oboe, and that sublime melody Morricone composed replete with a yearning that translated perfectly the human sense of wonder and longed for community with the other.
Other times particular circumstances coincide with music we have known and liked, but for these circumstances becomes a vital language for our faith, or our lack of it, our hopes or their absence, our confidence or our fears. I remember sitting in a friend's living room, a friend who accompanied me through some impossibly difficult days, and who put on Spem in Alium as background music. I had never heard it, and its complex harmonies and calm slowness of movement wrapped me in a sense of new possibility and hopefulness. It didn't solve the problems, answer the questions or take away the challenges of making tough decisions and walking through dark places. But ever since it has been a source of hope, pleasure, spiritual consolation and inner replenishment. Not all music does that.
Then there is the music you heard when you were young and which you'll never let go because it has become part of who you are and who you have been and are becoming. I watched the Johnny Cash concert in San Quentin as an 18 year old. I was hooked on Cash from then on. His anthem Man in Black remains for me an exemplary lyric of social protest, cultural critique and sheer humane defiance of all that dehumanises. Sunday Morning Comin' Down remains for me an authoritative reference point for understanding the pain, cost and loneliness of alcoholism. His later music is deep, dark and amongst the most moving and poignant laments for guilt and regret, and occasionally gives voice, and what a voice, to the trustful openness of redemptive love that enables forgiveness, life and hope in the midst of all that contradicts it.
These three pieces may or may not make it onto a final list which needs some balance, a story to tell, and a point of contact with those who will privilege me with listening to my choices of music. But the choosing has posited some quite intriguing questions about how and why we like the music we do, and what music does in the shaping and enriching of our view of the world.
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