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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 17, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Music can change the way your brain behaves, it can change moods, it can bring people together, Inspire and comfort us. Tyrants often fear the songwriters more than the rebel soldiers, as songs have toppled unjust regimes.
Call to Worship
-By Roberto Juarroz
The bell is full of wind
though it does not ring.
The bird is full of flight though it is still.
The sky is full of clouds though it is alone.
The world is full of voice
though no one speaks it.
Everything is full of fleeing
though there are no roads.
Everything is fleeing
toward its presence.
Reading
WHERE EVERYTHING IS MUSIC
-By Rumi
Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world’s harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.
So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a-spark:
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see.
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the centre of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
Sermon
Have you ever looked at your house, thought “This place needs cleaning!” and put on your go-to house-cleaning music? It’s upbeat, it gets you in the mood to move around and get some things done. Or you go to work out and feel sluggish, but then you turn on your music and you feel strong, ready and willing to do what needs to be done? Music changes our mood. It can change our consciousness too. Some rhythms entrance us, change our brain waves, even our heart beats. Cultures around the world have ancient traditions of drumming, dancing and chanting for healing and guidance.
When we are inside our mothers’ bodies, we hear the rhythm of her heart beat, the swoosh of her blood through the uterine artery. We can hear voices through the uterine wall, voices we can recognize when we get out into the air. We respond to music before we are born. Some music will set a baby kicking, some will soothe.
Mickey Hart, who was the drummer for the Grateful Dead, has become more and more involved in studying the relationship between drumming in a group and a return to well-being. He has funded drum therapy for the child soldiers in Sierra Leone, to return them to wholeness after their drugged killing sprees. Drum circles for at-risk kids in the U.S. and for Alzheimer’s patients and other elderly folks seem to have a good effect. Here is some of what he said in his testimony before the US Senate on the issue:
“What is true for our own bodies is true almost everywhere we look. We are embedded within a rhythmical universe. Everywhere we see rhythm, patterns moving through time. It is there in the cycles of the seasons, in the migration of the birds and animals, in the fruiting and withering of plants, and in the birth, maturation and death of ourselves. Rhythm is at the very center of our lives. By acknowledging this fact and acting on it, our potential for preventing illness and maintaining mental, physical and spiritual well-being is far greater.
People who work in music therapy know that music stays with a person even after they have lost language. Stroke patients who have trouble speaking can often sing with more ease than they speak. People with dementia can remember the words to songs that are important to them, or they light up when they hear music from the time in their lives when they were young. One patient in the documentary The Music Instinct said, (with a strong Brooklyn accent) “Once you get it in your head it stays there.”
Music literally touches us. It makes rhythmic waves in the air that move our eardrums. We don’t only hear through ear drums, but through our bones. When we speak to another person our sound touches them inside their ear. Our words touch their bones. It behooves us to remember this as we speak to one another. One physicist in the movie talked about the tiny string in the center of all particles of matter that can vibrate. Is there a vibration at the heart of all matter?
A baby is born with a brain that grows to understand the music of their part of the world. Some music has harmonies, and those are important, so we hear notes which go together to our ear, Some Chinese and Indian classical music doesn’t rely as much on harmony as on more linear melodies that use many more notes than Western music uses, quarter tones that my ear would not be able to name. When I use a quarter tone, it’s because I didn’t quite hit the note I was going for. Rhythms are much more complex in Indian and African music. African music can use a complex layering of rhythms that don’t necessarily fit the way I was raised to listen for rhythm. Indian rhythm makes all kinds of sense to me because my mother grew up in India and was a fan of the table, and she played that music for us. Our culture is arrogant in ways that we are blind to. For example, in college, in the music department, you are going to likely be studying western music. If you want to study Latin, African, Indian, Chinese music, you are suddenly in the ethnomusicology department. That’s a strange separation, as music is music.
I’m sure as soon as people realize that’s kind of racist they will change right away.
Scientists are studying how the brain is laid out for music, with the cilia in your ears sending electrical impulses to a place on the cortex that’s like a keyboard. Other place in the brain receive the impulses for rhythm, other places for timbre, like is this note a horn or a voice, yet other places for volume and tempo. When they use magnetic resonance imagery, the whole brain lights up when the person is listening to music.. For people with musical training, other places light up too, the places where the hearer is analyzing the music or thinking how they would write out the parts they are hearing. Kids with musical training process not only music better, but language as well. Language and music, they think, are different functions, but with some overlap. They say 75 percent of communication is non verbal. We have all been in discussions where the words “It wasn’t what you said, it was your tone” were spoken. Many languages and dialects are tonal. In the South, language is tonal. You can tell how women at a party feel about each other by the swoop of the call “HEY!” The higher it goes, the less they like each other. You can tell by how someone says “yes” whether it means yes or no. And you can tell, if you have attuned ears, exactly where in the wide range of meanings that “bless your heart” lies.
Now, let’s talk about the breath. The word for “breath” and the word for “Spirit” in the Hebrew language are the same: “ruach.” The breath, the spirit, moves into and out of us, that same breath that circulates through the leaves of the trees and the lungs of the badgers and skunks, it’s something we share. The next most basic element of singing together is the breath being drawn in, given a sound and a shape, and coming out of our bodies. It’s transformation, shape-shifting, magic.
First let’s breathe with our mouths open. If you can be comfortable, please now open them as wide as you can. Now sigh. Again. Now we are going to make a sound with our sigh. Now let’s stop the sigh on a note. Don’t worry about it being pretty. That’s singing! Even if you just do that, it’s energizing.
Music is magic in that it affects more than one brain at a time. You’ve been at Austin City Limits or South by Southwest where there is a field of people moving and singing together. You are having a shared experience. You see other people’s feelings and you imagine that you all are feeling together. Soldiers marching have a rhythm, and sing marching songs, which entrain their brain waves and knit them together as one body. Protesters sing protest songs, and the power of the music can strengthen them. I hope you all know some stories from the Children’s March in 1963, where organizers asked teenagers and even children to be very brave, to be trained in the tactics of non-violence, and march together for Civil Rights. On May 3, the children walked out of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, in groups singing “Freedom…” Bull Connor and his men were out there ready to arrest them and take them to jail. A thousand children between 14 and 17 were arrested that day, and more the next day. Connor turned fire hoses on the children, who sat down and hunched their backs and sang “Freedom….” In South Africa, protesters against Apartheid danced the Toyi Toyi and sang, raising and expressing power, strength and a common bond.
For UUs, as a community, singing in a group is a non-verbal reminder that, even though we are individuals, we are also members of a community and we all choose to come together to do something in concert, to act or think or feel something together that is a needed addition to those things we feel on our own. Look around the room. All of these people each chose this morning to come be here to be with you and me, to see what happens, to feel what happens, to find something, to experience a connection with mind, with body, with spirit. We have our differences, and they matter, and we have commonalities, which also matter. We wrestle with justice, we take our mission seriously, though it’s difficult and demands discomfort and resilience. And we can sing together. And listen together. And our bones can vibrate together. And that can make us strong.
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