MAKING DREAMS MANIFEST

Pastors Mitch and Jennifer have spoken recently about  “discovery” with an emphasis on discovering how to discover and become part of God’s dream for the world.  It made me acutely aware of how, so often, we pray for God to assist us in making our dreams come true, for help, for guidance, instead of feeling into that which God wishes to have happen.

I realized that a music ensemble, like the Chancel Choir, is a microcosm of the latter.  Our task is never about “us” but rather focuses on our collective responsibility to make the composers’ dreams come true.  We are charged with making manifest that which was once in the composer’s “mind’s ear” [like the “mind’s eye”].  A composer hears within a music that doesn’t yet exist on the earth and feels simultaneously compelled to transcribe it to the page.  Musicians read that musical plan and, as fully as they are capable of realizing, build an identical sound sculpture of that which the composer imagined.

If it is sacred music, then the source of this inspiration is also sacred and the author of these sounds and words is most likely the source, the mystery; God.  In the specific instance of Handel’s Messiah, composed in a 28-day flurry, Handel wrote that at one point he felt as if he had seen the face of God.  Handel was serving as a lens; Handel was making God’s dream come true.

A powerful music ensemble, like our Hope Chancel Choir, accepts the task of taking, for example, Handel’s musical score and launching into the air, the collective sounds gathering to actualize Handel’s dream, God’s dream.  In every case, our charge is to take the listener into the music, never the musician.  If the latter occurs, we have failed.  In short, we need to apply everything we know as musicians in order to accurately portray in sound that which is notation/graphics on the page and we need to ‘get out of the way’.

I felt inspired this morning to share this comparison with the Hope family to hear our choir as a living model of applying the self in a selfless manner, not seeking to make my/our dream come true but rather in the service of the composer.  In Genesis, God creates and creates and creates again.  Finally, He creates man in his own image – a ‘creative being’.  The composer creates the music, drawn from some ethereal plane.  The musicians create the performance.  And, when we get out of the way in order to actualize exactly what the composer heard within, a kind of ecstatic wonder results that can take your breath away.

Prof Eric Funk, Director,  Hope Lutheran Chancel Choir.  10/17/2011