Good Vibrations: The Universe Through Music

by Eric Stetson

Welcome all. We come from many backgrounds, and share many different ideas of the world, but are bound together by the things that stay constant. One of these, of course, is a mutually mysterious love of music – and though I somehow found a way to open the service by sharing a children's story that subtly advocates murder in an entertaining way [The Composer is Dead by Lemony Snicket] , I plan on bringing it all around and sharing what I hope to be a fascinating testimonial of my life as a composer - still very alive – and the parallels that I come across in music and daily living that serve as the closest thing I have to a Holy Bible.

When I was a small child, I grew up listening to my dad pour his heart and soul out through his guitar, playing the songs he wrote. When I got a little older my parents both helped run one music hall or another for folk musicians, and I was there helping at every show, seeing the performers set up – some nervous, some calm and collected...or drunk, you never know with these people. I had some piano lessons for a few years, joined the school band, took drum lessons for a few years, had a part in the high school musical...no, not that High School Musical. Actually, the reason I ended up here in Statesboro was because I went to the university on a scholarship for Sports Management. It took a couple years doing that for me to get this sinking feeling in my heart, sort of like you get if you start to open a car door that isn't yours.

My decision to become a composer was quick, uninformed, and somewhat arrogant. I had played around with writing music, and figured I could play piano okay from what lessons I'd had back in early childhood. I quickly learned that I had a long way to go. You often hear about young prodigies or seasoned performers who've studied their entire lives since they could crawl – I'm not either one of those things. As of this point, I've had just over four years of actual formal training in music – piano, composition, and otherwise. Since I came to Statesboro I've written music for six theatrical productions and five independent films. I've even dabbled in teaching a bit, all with no credentials other than this crazy composer hair and the work I've done so far to convince people I can cut the mustard.

As crazy as things get with schedules, and sacrificing partying Saturday night with friends for things like...well, things like this. I love it. I love it like a broke college student loves Taco Bell. Even when I hate it, I still love it, being able to carve the tunes out of my head and share them with people, often contributing to something even larger like a show or a film. In fact – funny thing about music in general – everyone loves it. In one form or another, everyone in this room is totally gaga, no not that Gaga – for music. We've romanticized it to the point where it's “undefinable” by some or what “fuels our existence” or other similar melodrama. So what the heck is it?

Music, by definition, is an organized set of rhythms and pitches. The rest is completely arbitrary. Everything that we experience through music, in fact, is about as arbitrary as “A” equaling exactly 440 vibrations per second. It is what it is, because we say it is. It's merely a platform for human expression – like poetry or dance, music is an easel on which to paint the emotions a musician projects to the listener. Whether it's the soothing calmness of Chopin's nocturnes, or the aggressive posturing of Eminem's rap, we like music for the same reason we like a good story. The word “music” actually comes from the Greek word “mousike”, which encompassed poetry, drama, dance, visual arts, and what we know of as music. It was a package deal, and it was understood that they were merely different ways of expressing the same idea. Much like the world's religions, each their own gospel truth, each a Variation from a larger set – for you music nerds.

So, it's math. Really – in short, it's math. The way a beautiful suspended chord hangs and hangs as it hinges on the edge of destiny...until finally a resolved tonic chord. Composers – “they”, or “we” if I'm feeling brave, are playing with your emotions with simple algebraic equations that make up everything from adrenaline-pumping cinematic score, through the use of sudden sforzandos and throbbing eighth-note beats, to lyrical romanticism with tertiary harmonies and extended tonic/dominant relationships. Anyways – English. The point is, it's beautiful because we say it is, like everything else we call beautiful. And so it is beautiful. There is a separate and uniquely stunning beauty in our own arbitrary nature. So where else does this tie in?

I've always approached religion through a strategy of what can only be described as “staunch relativism” - that the journey is more important than the destination, that what we perceive as reality is just as much a part of our world as anything else, being that we only experience the world through our five senses and make up our minds accordingly. So looking at it this way – you say God is love and he is love, you say the way to achieving nirvana, no, not that Nirvana - is through zanshin, or returning to nothingness – then it is. It is in this open relativism that I find my own peace with the world, and why I identify as a Unitarian Universalist. Faith is beautiful because we say it is, and the gospel truth that you or another holds dear exists as the absolute truth because you know it does. The question is not where you will theoretically find yourself after you die, it's how you live your life and create your world before then.

Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise. Sing unto the LORD with the harp; and the voice of a psalm. With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the LORD, the King. Psalms 98:4-6

One of the hardest things I ever had to write was a fugue in four voices, or four separate melodic lines, tasked to me by my mentor and friend Dr. Michael Braz as a compositional exercise. “Fugue” is a compositional technique that involves taking a subject, the main melody, and combining it with another, complimentary musical line, separate but coordinating. Add however many of those on top and you've got a fugue. Each “voice” of the fugue stands up on its own as the melody at one time or another, and they all coordinate together to form the bigger picture. Sound familiar? While writing it I couldn't help but think of it as the perfect metaphor for Unitarian Universalism – are we not all separate melodies, each standing up as our own song, yet intertwined to form something bigger than ourselves? Sometimes it gets so convoluted, trying to get along with one another, that you want to pull your hair out and scream – just like writing that darn fugue.

So where is science in all this? There are countless volumes written on the effect of music on the brain, how Mozart makes your baby smart, how it makes plants grow, how certain types of music do certain types of things... So let's talk about it. First of all, I'm just going to say it – it's not Mozart that makes your baby smart. Or Bach, or Beethoven. There is no one particular person who has unlocked a magic doorway into making organized sound a vehicle for rapid brain development. It's aural complexity that makes our gears turn. Things like fugue, counter-point, harmonic complexities and structural completeness – things Mozart just happened to be a master of, are what does the trick. So yes, listening to Mozart is a good way to wake your brain up, but it's not just ol' Wolfgang, it's any music with aural complexity that forces your brain to recognize a diversity of patterns and make sense of a larger goings-on. You can accomplish this the same way with any genre of music and any artist or composer that strikes your fancy. Music puts your brain into a thinking mode no matter if we're conscious of it or not, because as I mentioned earlier – it's audible math we're feeding into our ears. The more “interesting” the math is, the more stimulated your brain becomes, ergo, we get “smarter.”

“Gotta keep those lovin' good vibrations a-happenin...” -The Beach Boys

At some point in my teen years I learned in science class that the universe is composed of matter. Matter is composed of tiny particles called atoms which are composed of tinier neutrons, protons, and at their tiniest, electrons which are composed of tinier quarks which depending on which realm of physics you subscribe to are either composed of cosmic superstrings or some other derivative elementary particle that all ends up as one thing: vibration. Matter is a giant raucous frat-party of vibrating particles, constantly moving, and never destroyed, only disassembled. This got me thinking at some point – vibration, by definition, means pitch. Pitch means sound, and matter forming patterns like stars, planets, people, and autographed pictures of Keith Moon riding a bicycle – means organization. So that's it then – we are all music, not just by my opinion, but by scientific definition. Every one of us, every thing, is melodies within melodies, our own ceaseless chorus of sound that contributes to a larger piece, the grand opus that forms the universe. If we all play our parts the best we can, the music of our lives we leave behind gives a lasting impression to your fellow music-makers. We all have an exposition, a development – a recap (or mid-life crisis, for some) and a finale that takes us into the next movement in the piece. Who knows what lies ahead of this life, but if I learned anything from performing, what matters most is what's happening right now, if for no other reason than people are expecting a darn good show.

Playing piano, it's easy to forget that hitting the notes is just that – typing in rhythm. You have to truly be in the moment to be “musical”, you have to care how you sound and shape your instrumental phrases as if the piano itself was singing. In all honesty – that's very difficult to do with this cute old Suzuki keyboard [at the fellowship hall]. In any case, when I'm performing, that's when I feel the most alive, because you are living completely in the moment at every second. Take your focus off for an instant and you've fallen behind. Which happens too, once in a while. Of course, I could say the exact same thing about living your life – about staying in the moment, falling behind. You get where this is going.

The first time I was ever asked to write music for a full production, it was a favor to a friend who was directing Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at the PushPush theater in Decatur, GA. Well, he was my friend back in high school. We'd had a little issue where my girlfriend of long past had run off with him, which left me feeling a bit bitter. A long time had passed since then and the girl had, after a good 6 months or so, decided she was better off with me. A year passed. So I had the girl and I thought what better way to repair a broken friendship then to work together on a project like this. I was to be one of two composers, I'd write for half, and for the other, a friend of the director's would write the rest. What ended up happening was I did all my work and this other person did not do any of theirs, so I covered for him at the last minute and wrote all of it, plus original sound effects. When I saw the show a few nights into the run, I got my program and saw “Music Composed by:...” the other guy. Yes, the director I was attempting to make amends with completely discredited me, and gave credit to his friend who I'd actually covered for. They used my work in the show. This other guy who was supposed to help me actually sat at the soundboard, cueing in my music for the show that he was given credit for. I sat there the whole time with my fists clenched I was so angry, and after the show I learned it wasn't an accident and that my old friend I was doing this for as a favor all along had actually used it as an opportunity to use me and play me for a fool. Well, at least I had the girl...

We all get curve-balls like this at some point. There are plenty of people who are so concerned with their own satisfaction and well-being, they forget the bigger picture, the grand opus. In the orchestra, the conductor's main function is not flailing their arms about it in rhythm – though that's the really fun part. It's balance. A balanced orchestra is the difference between a polite applause and a standing ovation. In a choral setting it's the same – a good chorus is not made up of two dozen Whitney Houstons – they are musicians looking to balance their sound to make something bigger than themselves, something great that one person can't possibly do on their own.

As a Unitarian Universalist, I am looking to do the same with myself. To find balance amongst a cacophony of ideas and methods – from my conservative brother who thinks Glenn Beck might make the world some kind of tax-less, aristocratic utopia, to one of my favorite people, our own Rev. Jane Page who occasionally dances and takes her clothes off at church. That joke was for the regulars.

When I was introduced to this congregation a few years ago, I had just under two years of formal training and had never accompanied before. My first time here, come to think of it, was playing for Rev. Jane and Greg Brock's wedding. No pressure on me or anything... I had yet to even take the class they offer on accompanying through the music department, but, since I have this habit of saying yes to things, here I am in front of you now, and quite honestly I couldn't be happier for it. Here I've found a spiritual home and a kinship with my community that is irreplaceable, and this church is going to be one of the hardest things to leave when I move out to California at the end of May, which is now finalized.

Long Before love, there's a burning fire. My heart aches soulfully, my spirit is alive. Awake Desire.

Those are my lyrics. A couple summers ago I broke a relationship with a long-term girlfriend that left me absolutely shattered. I had given my heart completely to this person who I half made up in my mind as the “perfect woman”, because I wanted her to be that so badly. It had been a good five years, if you include the little hiccup I mentioned earlier. I sank into a depression deeper than I knew, and flirted with suicide – I tore my room apart looking for all of her things and didn't think about anything else. My entire life became suffering over this one heartache, and for a time, nothing else even existed – my life was only this grief that felt like my hands and feet had been cut off. Jane actually helped me through some of this as it was going on, until one morning after a particularly difficult night; my roommates intervened and found me lying on my bed, in my room that was torn apart. They didn't know it, but that night I had taken some sharp things and started to scratch at my heart in my chest without thinking about it. I was physicalizing the emotional pain I was feeling, waiting for numbness. After they stepped in, I did get a whole lot better, and thank goodness for that.

The thing that ultimately healed me was writing music to allow that pain to escape. There was one song “Scottish Eyes” which was more of a love-sick pining at the time, and then a show came along that I was asked to write music for - “A Streetcar Named Desire”. I wrote what I was hoping was a soulful jazz tune reminiscent of the inevitability of death and the parallel of a love lost. It's called One Last Dance (for Blanche), and was made to fit in with Streetcar, but the story in the lyrics was fleshed out of my own heartache. When that final curtain call at the Averitt was struck, I knew that I could and would move on from that ordeal and become stronger for it.

I know I said before that music is arbitrary, that it's a system of equations. That the beauty lies in our cognitive functions. But in typical UU fashion, I'm going to offer another perspective. I can't quite describe exactly why I'm drawn to it, why I feel the need, the actual, almost physical need to leave my mark, and when I'm gone be nothing but notes and staff-lines. To have my children remember me by singing my songs – to have people remember me by hearing my scores.

Writing it gives me the same kind of peace that prayer does. Playing it is how I worship. Practicing is my meditation. There's something about raising our voices up in song that makes the world a better place, that isn't in those equations, and can't be analyzed in a brain-scan. It's simply a beauty you can hear and experience. Every culture around the globe embraces it in their own way, but the reason is the same – because music is really freakin' cool. We don't have to write it or perform it to feel that connection either, just experiencing is enough. Even deaf people experience the energy music generates without being able to hear – heck, look at Beethoven. He wrote his 9^th symphony while completely deaf. With that piece he wrote some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard, and he only experienced it in his imagination.

This composer is not dead. This one is very much alive. About a year ago, I had been single for some time and dated a bit, learned more about myself - getting this new, more relaxed perspective on the whole “true and endless love” thing, and I met a girl that I thought was really swell. The way I tried to win her heart was by playing her a song I wrote with my ukulele called “I'm Pretty Sure I Like You”. The lyrics are light and heartfelt...when I looked up after playing it was perhaps the most awkward but sweet moment I had experienced. And music won again.

So I stand before you, and before we launch into our offertory music, I'd invite you to let it course through you. Let it exercise your brain. Let it heal you, let it win your heart. We'll all feel it a bit differently, but we will be bound by our respect for it and the way it makes us feel indescribably better about life at that moment.

It is, of course, the same with God.

Thank you.

-Eric Stetson