Sing out: even if you can't carry a tune.

Years ago, before I was married (there were giants on the earth in those days and dinosaurs roamed ...), Regina was a music major. She and her friends invited me to a Christmas party, where we gathered around beer and a fire and someone suggested a song, and they all struck up a near-perfect madrigal. This is what parties should always be like, I thought at the time--some of the time you spend together should involve people singing, and not badly.

A few years and a couple of children later, remembering this, we decided to gather a group of friends to sing madrigals. We met every three weeks or so to sing, with beer and food afterwards. We weren't much good at the singing, but the company was good and the effort to come together in a good song was thoroughly pleasant. Sometimes we weren't so bad--not being so bad was as good as it got. Other times we massacred "O Mistress Mine" and "The Silver Swan" and the "Coventry Carol."

After we moved to New York for seminary studies and then to serve a parish, we spent a lot of time visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One day we found ourselves in a room where the acoustics were good, something a touring group of students noticed. They stopped, formed a circle, and spontaneously began to sing. It was a glorious set of late medieval and Renaissance songs, and when they finished the crowd that had gathered to listen applauded enthusiastically as they embraced one another, amazed at what they had just done. It was one of the loveliest moments I've ever known, and when I talked to a couple of the singers I learned that they attended a small Evangelical academy in Florida and were taking a class trip to New York.

The reason we don't have more of these moments is the result of a mixed blessing technology has brought to us. Before recordings were available, people had to wait to hear wonderfully performed music; at home, people either went without or made their own, at parlor spinet pianos or on the porch with guitar and banjo. Now we can buy the best music and listen to it anytime we like. Why should I try to sing madrigals with friends when I can buy any number of CDs on which people are doing it so much better than we could?

Remembering the joy that our bad madrigal singing brought us, and the obvious pleasure the spontaneous singing of the students at the Met brought them and all the people lucky enough to hear them, I thought of how much we've lost. I am grateful for being able to buy and play CDs of Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, REM, and the Berlin Philharmonic's rendering of the Brandenburg Concertos, but I also remember the pleasure of sitting in a hotel room in Northern Ireland with a bunch of people--most of them priests--who had gathered for an afternoon theology seminar. After dinner, we were singing, taking solo turns and singing the songs we knew together (whiskey helped us out). We don't do enough of that common, self-made art.

The "slow food" movement has grown during the last couple of years. It emphasizes the importance of buying food locally, and of taking time with the preparation and enjoyment of a meal. It would be nice if we began to look at entertainment the same way. There is a joy in trying to make music together that can't really be found in anything else; it is a participation in the same beauty we enjoy when it is done brilliantly, even when we can't come close to being brilliant at it.

The best musical experience I can remember came when I was driving alone through the mountains of Pennsylvania. There is a stretch of I-80 that I always look forward to passing through, and once the wonderful landscape opened in front of me as I was listening to a beautiful CD, The Best of the Renaissance, sung by the Tallis Scholars. The music was gorgeous; so was the world I was driving through, and listening to the most glorious art humans are capable of making while seeing God's glory was overwhelming, and I found myself weeping for joy.

Although the Tallis Scholars sing with a purity our ragged madrigal group could never attain, my appreciation of the moment was given an added intensity by remembering those experiences. The joy of singing together, or of making music together in some other way, is a little like the joy of sport: it is wonderful in part because it really doesn't matter at all. It is a form of play, and it has something to do with God's joy, with knowing the world as essentially good and the pleasure we take in that fact as a blessed thing. Going back again to the time when we were engaged, I remember something Regina said when we were listening to some birds in a beautiful park: "Birds sing," she said, "but they don't harmonize." Harmonizing is a human thing, and nearly divine.