March 27, 2020

Making Music Together

Hello Fellow Saint Ann's Parishioners,

I write this to you from a new time and space for us all in this era of the coronavirus. I know all of our lives have changed in innumerable ways in recent weeks.

One thing I miss particularly in this period of isolation is making music with other people, ie, singing in the Saint Ann's Choir. Group music-making, I have discovered in a lifetime of doing it, is life-enhancing (singing even requires that you take deep breaths--true vitality!!), community-building, and spirit-boosting. And through singing the beautiful texts that we sing in the Episcopal Church we create an added connection with God--there is a saying that "Singing a hymn is like praying twice: once through the lyrics, and again through the music."

In this time when none of us can gather with each other to do group music-making, many musicians all over the world our employing the remarkable technology available to us today to do "virtual" group music-making. You may have seen many examples of this over the internet in recent days. One that affected me the most was the performance below of the "Ode to Joy" section of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, performed by members of the Rotterdam Philharmonic--from their living rooms!!

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The dedication of people like this, who find a way to offer their craft to make the world a better place in the midst of this crisis, is both touching and uplifting. By giving us their music they are helping to build community, around the globe, through one of the most profound, and joyful!!, pieces of music in the history of Western civilization.