蜜芽传媒

Over the past couple of weeks in the run up to Christmas, and over the past few days, many of us will have joined with others in doing something we don鈥檛 normally do; singing. Despite the rise in popularity of community choirs, it鈥檚 still the case that public communal singing is less evident than it used to be and most of us confine our own singing to the shower or safely soundproofed in the car.

As a society, our relationship with music has changed since the advent of recorded and downloaded music; We can choose the soundtrack to our lives.

But to my mind, there is nothing that can substitute the thrill of music made live, together, and maybe even heard by an audience 鈥� where mistakes can鈥檛 be airbrushed out and a relationship is established between performers and hearers. As a musician myself, I have also never accepted the often rueful admission by many people that 鈥淚 can鈥檛 sing鈥�. Of course some people are better at it than others, like maths or basketball, but our own ability to make music with our bodies; our lungs, our vocal chords, the resonances of our head and chest, gives us a way to connect with the rest of Creation, whose creatures sing and call their way through the world without embarrassment.

In all the Christmas celebrations, the Biblical phrase that is used to encapsulate the birth of Jesus is one from the gospel of St John, whose feast day is today. In the Beginning was the Word. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth.

When I was young, I used to imagine that this was a Word shouted by a booming voice of God 鈥� probably a bit like Brian Blessed. Later on I came to imagine that this Word was not shouted at all, but sung. I hear this gospel singing to me that the world was coaxed into life by an eternal note that underpins the universe; what Pythagoras called the music of the spheres.

An embodied word in a sung eternity; this is the Christmas message; the birth of God among us; heard by the shepherds at work on an ordinary day; songs of peace in a violent world. I want to suggest that as part of our celebrations of Christmas, we could re-discover our own identity as musicians 鈥� all of us 鈥� as a commitment to be resolutely peaceful in an incomprehensibly violent and distressing world. To dare to sing, and in singing, learn again that music is itself a language of the human spirit.

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