Thanks for the music

This piece may sound like it’s about me. It’s not. It’s about something that I hold dearly, that has helped me a lot, and for which, together with all the talents involved in its making, I am now most thankful. It’s a tribute thing.

 Aside and together with prayer and other spiritual exercises, what keeps me going, alive and kicking, in spite of all the in-spites-of in this world, is music. Something in it makes my life a kind of heaven here in this vale of tears.

They say that music has charm. That, to me, is a huge, very poor understatement. It’s almost an ugly lie. Music must be divine, for how else can you describe something that has given me the following effects?

It has great soothing and relieving effects. Whatever harshness that tiredness, boredom, tension, emptiness, etc., can bring is somehow softened and even sweetened by music. Music turns the drudgery of prosaic daily life into lyrical poetry. It brings out the beauty of the most ordinary and insignificant events of our life.

It helps the spirit to escape from the body and from the world, allowing it to go to different places and ages, and even to knock at the door of the infinite and eternal, thereby preventing our material dimension to be completely swallowed by purely earthly and temporal laws.

It’s a wonderful abiding companion. It provides a good setting even to your private thoughts. With it, you seem to be guided in an invisible track, you get a sense of rhythm and measure, helping you to avoid the extreme and bizarre reactions of a purely intellectual or emotional understanding of things. In short, you don’t get off-road.

Music seems to connect abstract ideas of the mind with the feelings and passions of the heart. It dresses them and humanizes them, without diminishing their spiritual and even supernatural character. It makes them more understandable, accessible and transmissible. Music is like sugar that makes the medicine go down minus the cholesterol.

With music, you seem to be always accompanied, never feeling alone. In fact, it facilitates further explorations of insights and thoughts, making the whole process pleasant in spite of the rigor of the process. It intensifies and makes more vivid whatever good thought or discovery you may make.

I believe that music aids prayer a lot. In any event, I can’t pray without music playing at least in my head. And I thank St. Augustine for I think he was the one who said that when you pray singing, you pray twice. To me, music never detracts from the solemnity of a public liturgical act nor from the intimacy of a personal meditation.

It’s a great tool to ward off temptations and bad thoughts!

I thank God for giving me a big appetite for music. Since kiddie days, I have been exposed and assimilating all sorts of music, from nursery songs to classical music to liturgical hymns—Gregorian chants, polyphony and the modern English and local versions—and all kinds of pop—jazz, rhythm and blues, etc.

My parents wanted me to learn piano, but I discovered after a few days, I was not cut out for it. But I love to listen to piano. I also love to sing, though I’m not sure if singing loves me. Some say I can, others give me a polite smile. So I restrict my singing to the bathroom and when alone driving.

I hate karaoke because it forces you to sing according to a particular form and standard and I often deviate from those criteria. Music is a very personal thing to me. It springs fresh from the heart. In fact, every rendition I make of a song is always different from the previous one.

So if forced to sing in karaoke in a get-together, I often stop at the beginning of the song when my score is still in the 90s, because towards the end, it usually goes down to the 50s.

Yes, music also makes you a contemporary with any generation. Lately, I surprised many of my friends because I sang an Adele song, masculinizing the very feminine character of her songs. They thought I am only good with Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole.

I wish to thank the many artists who have made my life and work very exciting. To mention a few, Burt Bacharach, Michael Buble, Michael Franks, Jobim, and now Adele.

I also would like to mention Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Saint Saens, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, etc. Oh, there are many of them!

***

Email: [email protected]