Some time ago, my friend and fellow pastor, Melissa, speaking about my struggles to learn to play the cello, with lots of descriptors by me of the screeches and howls I was managing to evoke from my instrument, spoke of her own love of playing and the magic moment when sound turns into music. Even though I haven’t gotten there on the cello, I knew just what she meant.
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A symphony of laundry
from Wikimedia Commons |
The rough and tumble mix of voices in the choir melding into one sweet note of accord . . . the murmur of husband and wife emerging into one long note of love . . . the sing-song cadence of the preached sermon transforming into a spoken song of praise . . . a single, understandable word emerging from a baby’s gibberish . . . the moment on the dance floor when you and your partner move as one . . . when the seemingly random calls of the birds clarifies in my ears into the song of the flying world . . . when the sung notes of a single man in the Baptistry in Piza reverberate into a choir of sound as he sings to and with himself . . . when crunching tires in the snow evoke the rhythms of the swishing jazz drum player . . . when the wind-whipped laundry on the line on a cold and bright winter’s day segues into hand-clapping, foot-stomping, finger-snapping, rhythmic gusto . . . when sound turns into music . . . Melissa’s right . . . it is magic.
