Join us for a joyful and reflective Music Sunday as we celebrate the power of music in our community. This special service will feature highlights from our choir concerts throughout the year, showcasing the growth and spirit of our music ministry. We will honor the dedication of our volunteers who make this vibrant musical life possible, and take a moment to look back on a year of creativity, connection, and song. Come be uplifted by stories, harmonies, and gratitude as we sing our way into the future.

            Jim and I were in New York at the end of April.  We saw a ton of theater:  four musicals, an opera, three plays.

            In a play there’s talk and no singing.  In opera there’s only singing.  A musical has both:  spoken lines and songs.

            So we saw all possible combinations from talking only plays, like “Purpose”, a family drama, that won the Pulitzer prize this year, to the entirely sung opera “Salome” by Richard Strauss, and we saw several of the “talking until I just can’t help myself and I start singing” musicals like Gypsy.

            My former friend who doesn’t like musicals (notice I said “former” friend) used to complain about them saying, “but why do they have to sing everything?”

            Well in musicals, actually, they don’t sing everything; that’s opera.  But if plays are just talking, and opera is just singing, how does a musical know when to talk and when to sing?

            The common answer is that music has the ability to express more of our feelings, the big feelings of love and heartbreak and courage, and joy, that we go to theater to experience.  Sometimes, when you’re having one of those kinds of overpowering experiences in life, and if you’re on stage, and if a composer and lyricist has written a song for you, you just break out in singing.

            But I never liked that explanation.  Because it isn’t true that words alone can’t express big feelings.  Tell that to or Shakespeare, or Arthur Miller, or the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Branden Jacobs Jenkens who packed a lot of big feelings into his script for the play Purpose and never needed his actors to sing.

            Big emotions don’t require music.  Just words or even silence can do just fine.  And exclusively associating music with emotion mischaracterizes music, too.  Music can also be cool, thoughtful, even mathematical.  Think of a Bach fugue, or a chance composition by John Cage.

            So why do they sometimes sing in a musical?  Some musicals justify the songs by only including songs in places where we expect singing in real life.  Like having all the songs in the musical Cabaret be sung at the Kit Kat club.

            But that also puts too much of a limit on music.  Music isn’t just for a cabaret or a concert stage.  We hear music at the grocery store, and the waiting room when you’re getting your oil changed.  I sing in the shower.  I hum at my desk.  I whistle in the stairwell.  Someone says something that reminds me of a song and I’ll sing a phrase.  I hear a bird sing.  I hear a distant radio playing.  Traffic in the street makes a kind of music.  A plane goes by overhead with a low rumble.  A siren or a roaring motorcycle breaks the silence.  We sing a hymn at church.

            Life might seem like a play if we just focus on the talking.  But really it’s more like an opera, with constant music all around us.  You just have to tune your ears to listen.  A person speaking has a natural music in the rise and fall of their voice.  Think of the way you call out “Hello!” as you greet a friend.  It’s a little song.  Think of the different music in the voice of a child compared to the speech of their mother or their grandfather.

            I hear music everywhere.  Sometimes I just listen.  Sometimes, I sing along.  Sometimes the music of life is a spoken line, or the sound of footsteps walking across a floor, or the meandering melody of my running thoughts that only I can hear.

The song is endless.  Sometimes quiet.  Sometimes loud.  Sometimes silent, true, but there are rests in music, too.  Pauses between movements.  The expectant intake of breath before the soprano starts to sing.  Sometimes the music is ordered, sometimes chaotic.  Sometimes beautiful, sometimes harsh.  Sometimes deliberate and practiced and performed, sometimes improvised, spontaneous, accidental.

            The music of life makes musicians of us all.  Endless song.  It moves through the dialogue of a play.  It moves through the whispered conversation of a romantic couple at a restaurant.  The music swells beneath the action of reaching up to pull down a jar of olives from the shelf.  The song continues surrounded by the trees and rocks and sky and the dusty trail underfoot.  The tender song of sitting beside a hospital bed.  The determined song of making a presentation at work.  Songs of love.  Songs of hope.  Songs of courage.  The spirit sings its endless song.

            If we listen.  There it is.  When we rise from bed in the morning.  In the quiet before we close our eyes at night.  There it is.  We pick up the notes.  We catch the beat.  Like a heartbeat.  Like ocean waves coming in and out.  Like breath.  A bass line of strength and purpose.  A soprano line of joy.  A harmony line of supportive friends.  A melody of life.  Endless song.