On the subject of singing once again, check out the Hallelujah Chorus at Macys on YouTube. There's a foundation called Random Acts of Culture, and they organized about 700 people to show up at Macy's in Philadelphia and sing Handel's masterpiece in an enormous mall, a complete surprise to the Christmas shoppers there. It was so beautiful to see these 700 singers intermingled with mall patrons, seemingly unselfconscious as they belt it out. I almost cried, but since I was sitting with students at school watching the YouTube version, I had to control myself. Big lump in the throat and all that.
These days, I figure I cry over the stuff that really matters to me. I suppose that if you need to cry, you can cry over Hallmark commercials, and a lot of people do. I used to. Secretly, of course. I remember that one time when I was giving a presentation at IBM to a couple of hundred people, I got all choked up and had tears in my voice. This sudden sense of good will and all's right with the world flowed through me, the fact that we were all there together, that I was part of something bigger. Scary, right? I would have made a good Nazi, I'm afraid. I can be emotionally stirred by some strange things. Luckily, I'm on a better track these days. I don't even cry over commercials anymore, but music is stirring. I personally believe that if we cry over commercials, we don't know how to feel our real sorrow or strong emotions, and all we can do is reach for the sentimental.
Did you know that ardent, conservative Buddhists don't believe in listening to music or singing? OK, we're talking monks and nuns here, but they believe that the purity of their minds is side-tracked by music, which sways the emotions. I took that seriously for a while and I rid my life of music in the house and in the car. There was nothing to pull me from a major funk, and the silence certainly gave more room to examine the funk more carefully. Talk about fun!
But I'm a pleasure-seeking, greedy type of person, and that lasted only a little while. Unlike those Buddhists, I believe that music can pull out some of our deepest, truest feelings. It makes us better people. I remember that long ago, in our New Paltz, NY days, my daughter Jen accompanied the chorus I sang in with her flute during a performance. Jen was so utterly beautiful, her music other-worldly, that I didn't get to sing a note that day. I just stood up in front of all those people with a flood of tears running down my face. How embarrassing. But that kind of beauty goes beyond human.
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