I used to love singing this song as a child in Sunday school. The words and simple melody would set my heart soaring.
A song is a wonderful kind of thing,
So lift up your voice and sing!
Just start a glad song, let it float, let it ring,
And lift up your voice and sing!
We shall make music to brighten the day;
Music will help us to lighten the way.
Lift up your voice! Lift up your voice!
Lift up your voice and sing!
Music. Who can live without it? I can't. One of the favorite go-to movies at our house is Mama Mia. At the very end as the credits are rolling Amanda Seyfried sings ‘Thank you for the Music’. It stirs my heart every time I hear it.
Years ago I wrote a research paper for an English class. The entire focus of the ten week course was to write just this one paper. For my topic I chose to explore the motivation behind Antonin Dvořák’s New World Symphony. For weeks and weeks I researched. It was an exhilarating journey and I think I came close, but I never really felt comfortable declaring what was going through his mind while writing his masterpiece. Evenso, my greatest discovery in writing the paper was stumbling upon the American poet Marianne Boruch. Her words spoke to my soul. I leave you with a few of the thoughts I gleaned from Boruch’s article Worlds Old and New …
In Walt Whitman’s poem, “A Song of Occupations,” he philosophically reveals, “All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded by the instruments.” I love that notion — that the instruments simply remind us of what has been there, in the silence or in ourselves, all along. Melody dips and turns and opens into the brain’s most secret part which remembers odd detail and feels it chill.
So music rewards us with its abundant sorrow, a curious form of happiness … which stills and darkens even as it gives us the shining world. What depths open in us when we are so reminded?
Click HERE to download free sheet music
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