Category : Music
(Telegraph) Jonathan Leigh–'Music education is vital in today's pressured world'
In a more ethereal sense, singing is an influence for a lifetime. Sometimes it has been derided as not cool but the real truth is that it is something beyond and altogether different; a gift from nowhere.
Well rehearsed, like all the best things in life, it becomes time to appreciate something deep and far more than oneself. It is an ultimate in sustained concentration, a skill too often denied at times by multitasking emptiness, in a rushed existence of stressed over-communication.
The last generation has witnessed the switch to an existence where pace of life is often overwhelming.
Music, whatever genre, is timeless in what it means. Recent reflections on British values are seldom encapsulated in the great Anglican tradition of making time in the present.
Music to Soothe the Soul for a Tuesday–To the River by Down like Silver
Listen carefully to it all.
Lyrics: I walk to the river
Waiting to hear the water sing
I sit down beside her
Trying to hear the quiet ring
The leaves break the falling
Of the sunlight that covers these banks
I’ve seen the water running, I’ve seen the color wash away
I come to the river heavy and tired to the bone
I lay down beside her
Grave as a slowly sinking stone
I see clear to the bottom
I watch how the shadows play
I’ve seen the water falling, I’ve seen the colors bleed away
The light turns silver
Draining the hours from the day
The weight of the water
Pulls at the branches along the banks
And it tears at the fallen and it carries the broken on its way
I’ve seen the water rolling, I’ve seen the colors fade away
I’ve seen the water rolling, I’ve seen the colors fade away
South Carolina Religious leaders honor grace shown after church shooting
Around 9:30 a.m. Monday morning, as state Senators filed briskly into chambers and protestors waved their red rebel banners outside, about 100 people congregated amidst the chaos in the South Carolina Statehouse rotunda and sang “Amazing Grace.”
But first, Hal Stevenson closed his eyes and led them in prayer.
“We pray for our state. We pray for our nation. We pray for our world that the grace that’s been displayed in our state will catch on, that your holy spirit will direct each of us to love our neighbors as ourselves and do your will.”
They’re not activists, Stevenson said. They don’t represent any formal organization, either. But they are Christians ”” from multiple denominations, races and political ideologies ”” moved by the showing of grace from the families of the nine people murdered at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston last month.
The Full Text of America’s National Anthem
O! say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming.
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming.
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
”˜Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ”˜In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
–Francis Scott Key (1779-1843)
(B+C) Wes Jackaki on the New Brian Wilson Movie–Love & Mercy
The film’s title alludes to the opening track of Wilson’s 1988 debut solo album. The film delivers both in spades. Mercy is certainly shown to Wilson in the film, which skips the darkest period of his life, a fifteen-year-stretch between 1968 and the transformation that came after Melinda Ledbetter (his wife-to-be) met him. During those lost years, he was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, battling auditory hallucinations, spending much of his time in bed, using drugs, and grossly overeating (his weight soared to more than 300 pounds).
Melinda (played by Elizabeth Banks) is really the central character in the ’80s narrative, and her perseverance and genuine concern for Brian’s well-being ultimately get him out of his abusive relationship with Dr. Landy. Love & Mercy celebrates the gift of Wilson’s music by focusing on his most fertile creative period and the light shining through after almost two decades of darkness. What makes the Wilson story so wonderful is its genuinely redemptive arc. With Melinda he has enjoyed a newfound stability (they’ve been happily married for 20 years) and a return to the music spotlight with 2004’s Grammy-winning Brian Wilson Presents Smile and later with the long-awaited release of the masters for Smile in 2011.
While love and mercy may have both landed in the title, justice is also central to the film. In the scene that generates the largest applause, Dr. [Eugene] Landy is served papers for the lawsuit that ultimately cost him his license to practice psychiatry. That may suggest why Love & Mercy is so compelling. It avoids the formulaic quality of so many recent biopics, but it’s not ashamed to tug at our heartstrings. And above all, it captures the joy of creation.
Monday Music Food for the Soul–Nickel Creek's Sweet Afton
Listen to it all and you can find an article on other great Nickel Creek songs there.
(AP) It’s the end of an era in Charleston SC as mayor opens his last Spoleto
Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., who helped establish the internationally known Spoleto Festival USA in South Carolina nearly four decades ago, took a final bow Friday as he opened his last festival.
It was Riley who helped persuade the late composer Gian Carlo Menotti to establish the performing arts festival in Charleston as a companion to the composer’s Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.
Riley has opened every festival now for 39 years. Friday’s was his last because Riley, who has served as mayor longer than anyone else in Charleston’s 345-year history, retires at the end of the year. This year’s festival continues through June 7.
“There is nothing like the Spoleto Festival USA in the world, and for everyone who participates, when the festival is over, they are changed,” Riley told the hundreds gathered in front of Charleston City Hal
Charleston's Fantastic Spoleto Festival Kicks off Today
You can read about it there. Also, please note that this is 10 time mayor Joe Riley’s last one to open: “Mayor Riley helped convince the late composer Gian Carlo Menotti to establish the festival in Charleston almost 40 years ago.”
Don't call 11-year-old Joey Alexander a jazz prodigy: 'I just like to be as myself'
The 11-year-old musical prodigy has been making waves recently with his beyond-his-years skills on the keyboard, and on TODAY Thursday the Jakarta, Indonesia native showed off those talents first in an interview and jam session with Lester Holt, then later in the studio.
(NPR) Howard Seniors Look Back On The Soundtrack To Their College Years
Taylor Davis
On a moment that Lauryn Hill’s “Just Like Water” reminds her of:
“When I was on spring break, I went to Miami. And I went to South Beach at night. And I was having this moment just by myself with God. I was just looking at the waters. I was feeling the sand and the sky and the moon. …
“I was just so in awe of creation and it was beautiful. When you’re in a place of God’s presence there’s just total peace. Whenever I’m going through anything crazy at Howard, because crazy things happen all the time, whenever I can just center myself and drown in God’s presence, I know that things are well and all is amazing.”
Read it all and you can listen to the music also.
(CT) Wen Reagan–The Best Worship Music You Won't Hear on Christian Radio
Studying the cultural history of contemporary worship music means I listen to a lot of albums. Arriving at the dissertation stage of my doctoral studies has required listening to 40 years’ worth of music from one of the most significant movements in modern church life””the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. It’s a lot of music. And trust me, there’s a lot of ugly.
But because I also serve as a worship director at a local church, listening to contemporary worship music is not just a scholarly exercise””it is also serious pastoral business. My people need solid spiritual food from their church music. They need songs that will sculpt their theological imagination and give voice to their praises, prayers, and confessions. The good news is that both as a researcher and as a worship leader, I have found many artists worth hearing.
To find these artists, I had to go beyond the Top 25 song list from the ubiquitous Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI). Today hundreds of talented songwriters are crafting excellent music that will never land on the CCLI charts. Their craft is just as good as that of the heavyweights, and their songs are more musically and theologically diverse. Consider three that represent the breadth and range you’ll find beyond the charts: Liz Vice, Miranda Dodson, and Cardiphonia.
(Atlantic) How Sufjan Stevens Subverts the Stigma of Christian Music
Stevens, both a Christian and musician, nevertheless stands in stark contrast to those in this category. Representing a different camp of “Christian art,” with completely different motives and characteristics, he’s distinct among other artists of faith, who tend to produce bad, kitschy work””whether heavy-handed films like Facing the Giants and Fireproof, or the musical travesties on the Wow compilation albums. Instead of dealing directly with religious or biblical matters, Stevens’ music embodies what theologian Francis Schaeffer called the “totality of life,” as opposed some sort of “self-conscious evangelism”””an approach that turns the whole Christian-music stigma on its head.
Music created by Christians””and other forms of art for that matter””hasn’t always been met with sighs and sneers. In the bigger scheme of history, today’s disdain is a fairly recent phenomenon””an anomaly, even. For centuries, Christians dominated the arts and shaped culture, from Michelangelo and Van Gogh to Bach and Beethoven to Tolkien and Eliot. It wasn’t until the 20th century that a shift took place, specifically in the area of music.
(CT) Alissa Wilkinson–Why Popular Culutre is Hooked on Heaven and Hell
So what does our fascination with tales of the afterlife tell us? A few things, but the most important recurring theme in Entertaining Judgment is that we partake in narratives that ease anxiety about our lives. In other words, stories about the hereafter make us feel better about the here.
Tales of ghosts, for instance, “beckon us forward toward our future . . . to become the people we are called to become.” Stories from people who returned from the dead might “shine a light into the unknown and tell us something that might assuage our anxieties”; they tell us that human beings can change and grow. Vampire stories satisfy “our desire for an eternal life in which we will be perfected” and “tap into our spiritual and emotional desires to have that which is good now . . . and could only be better when we are perfected spiritual beings.”
Demons and devils may be symptoms of our failure to “take ourselves and our own evil seriously.” Angels teach us that “we are endowed with choice . . . that it is really up to us.” Tales of a heavenly realm have “helped to dry the tears of the suffering and offered the possibility of some greater meaning in our earthly lives.” Hell, too, can assuage doubts about the world’s goodness: For “every real-life spectacle that appalls or irritates””racial cleansing, chemical warfare, children kidnapped and held as sexual slaves, stop-and-go traffic””hell offers itself as a partial explanation, and as a powerful [image] that helps to explain, at least to some extent, the existence of such cruelty and suffering.”
(Telegraph) Perfect harmony: how singing in a choir can make us more ”˜moral’
Children who sing in a choir, play in an orchestra or take to the stage are more likely to make good moral choices than their fellow classmates, a study has concluded.
But contrary to belief that sport promotes ideas of fair play and team spirit, the research concluded that playing games does nothing to strengthen people’s moral fibre.
Meanwhile those who go to church or other religious observances regularly emerged more likely to fare better in the face of moral dilemmas than their peers who do not.
(NPR) In 'Dear Father,' A Poet Disrupts The 'Cycle Of Pain'
In his new memoir, Dear Father, J. Ivy describes the pain of being abandoned by his father. But the book is not just about that relationship and what might have been. It’s a retracing of a unique career, and what it took for Ivy to get to the place he is today. A Grammy Award-winning poet and spoken-word artist, Ivy is also the author of the book HERE I AM: Then & Now and has collaborated with Kanye West and Jay-Z.
He tells NPR’s Rachel Martin that his path to becoming a writer was a long one….
One of the chapters [in his new memoir] is actually titled … “Forgiveness is Remembering to Forgive Again.” And I learned that because there would be so many moments, you know so many life moments that would happen and … I wish my father was there for me to pick up the phone and talk to him. A year and a half after that moment, after us reconnecting, he passed away. … There was a lot of regret, which would lead back to those moments of anger. And there was guilt and there was sadness. And, you know, there were just these things that would reconjure in my mind. And it wasn’t until I wrote this poem that I was able to exercise that forgiveness on a regular basis.
PBS ' Religion and Ethics Newsweekly–Bruce Cockburn
COCKBURN: I don’t spend much time thinking about trying to get a message across. I feel like, I feel a compulsion to write about what I experience and what I think I see and feel and I have a compulsion of some kind to share that with people. I guess it’s the conceit of every artist that, you know, you think that what you have to say is worth putting out there, that people are gonna be interested,
FAW : And a compulsion too, he makes clear, to being receptive to a mystery he does not fully understand.
COCKBURN: I don’t see how you can have a relationship with God that doesn’t involve a state of receptivity. And a receptivity to lots of stuff because God does show up in all kinds of odd ways. That there’s all kinds of different ways that that relationship can be made manifest and it requires a state of receptivity to know that that’s what’s happening.
FAW: He has a different perspective now, he says, than in that earlier “Christian songwriter” phase. But what is not different for Bruce Cockburn is his status as a seeker.
(NPR) Andrae Crouch, 'Father Of Modern Gospel,' Dies
Legendary gospel singer, composer and producer Andrae Crouch died Thursday at the age of 72, his publicists announced Thursday night. He had been hospitalized in the Los Angeles area since Jan. 3 following a heart attack.
The seven-time Grammy winner was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 1998. His songs were recorded by Elvis Presley and Paul Simon, he collaborated with Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Elton John, Quincy Jones and Diana Ross, and he was a backup singer on several Michael Jackson songs.
Some of Crouch’s most beloved songs were “The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power” and “Soon and Very Soon,” which was sung at a memorial following Jackson’s death, reports KPCC.
An Absolutely Must not Miss 60 minutes segment on a Harlem Middle Aged Choir
A show opened in New York recently that didn’t get a whole lot of attention, but it features some of the most powerful singing voices you’ve never heard. You haven’t heard them because for most of the performers, this is their first time on the stage. They’ve been singing their whole lives — in church, in amateur groups, in the shower — but like so many who had dreams of making it big, life somehow got in the way.
The show was created by a theater producer and former disc jockey named Vy Higginsen, who has made it her mission to preserve a special part of American culture: African-American music, both gospel and popular music like soul and R&B. She found a pool of untapped talent, men and women in what she calls their “second half of life” just waiting for their chance to shine.