The Magic of Music

While I was thinking of a good topic to post about, I remembered a quote from a book that I had been reading a couple of weeks ago, (one of the best books ever, in my opinion) Harry Potter. The students had just finished singing the Hogwarts song, and Dumbledore stood, wiped a tear from his eye, and said, "Ah, music, a magic far beyond all we do here." And music is just that. It has great power and can be used to uplift, to celebrate, to tell stories, to release oneself from the cares and hardships of the day. It both defines and unifies cultures. It can be used to tell a history, how something once was, and can be passed from generation to generation.

I was involved in music through high school and learned to love both instrumental and choral music. However, with choral music, I saw something at the corner of many of the sheets of music that I did not usually see in band-the words traditional or folk song. These were songs that had been passed down for so long, usually to tell a story, that no one knew who wrote them.

My favorite type of music that we performed were the both the African and the African-American songs. They just had this great beat and soul to them. These songs were passed down from generation to generation, and the people were able to sing to remember their country and heritage as well as to plead for freedom. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass said, "They would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought came up, came out-if not in the word in the sound-and as frequently in the one as the other."
(see http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Douglass/Autobiography/02.html)

Being able to weave one's soul into music is what makes it magical, where it can touch the hearts of many generations and live on for ages.