“Music is God’s gift to the spirit’s ear,” I wrote in an inspired moment many years ago.

And I firmly believe it is true, though the ear needs to be alert and listening lest it perchance fail to notice the gift and miss out on the hearing of it.

I somehow got lucky, and have been hearing that gift all my life. One of my earlier memories is of standing on my tiptoes before my mother’s old upright piano, arms above head, stretching upwards as f-a-a-r as I could reach…until—there—my fingers curled over the front edges of the keys. And by pulling various keys downward I could make interesting sounds.

A curious child handy with my hands, I soon learned also how to remove the big bottom board that affords access to the piano’s lower innards, where the strings all attach to the bottom of its big metal harp. And like lucking onto a treasure cave, one can then play with the strings as much as one likes—plucking them, tapping them, zoosing across them all—hearing the interesting sounds they make when thus plucked and tapped and zoosed.

It was a start, and a good one. I’ve never forgotten that early fascinated feeling with changing sounds, particularly when two or more sounds happen at the same time, interacting with each other as they fall sweetly or wrongly into one’s ear. It was my beginning of appreciation for something called “chords,” though I wouldn’t really appreciate that word for another ten years .

With such potential on full view, my mother started me on piano lessons at age six. Interesting at first, that lasted a year and a half until I rebelled. My music teacher insisted I must practice, at least an hour every day, she said—even in summer when green nature beckoned outdoors—on the difficult runs and silly scaled progressions I was required to master, she said, if I was to ever become expert at playing the music of the old masters:  Bach, Liszt, Schubert… The woman was expert and discerning—she always knew when I’d not practiced for the entire week since the last lesson, and made me bear her disapproving clucks.

The lessons stopped when common sense prevailed. I announced that I despised practicing runs because I did not want to play the old masters’ music. I wanted to play my music, which was the pop tunes of the early 1940s, such as Don’t Fence Me In and Temptation and Rainbow At Midnight and Comin’ In On a Wing and a Prayer. And Be My Love, sung with great feeling and intensity by Mario Lanza. I played them all, hundreds of times. Maybe more. And I listened.

Of course I couldn’t play them on the piano, because I hadn’t mastered chords yet. But as an incipient musician, I was a child of my times. I heard those tunes applauded on The Hit Parade every Saturday night while sprawled on the floor in front of my parents’ big old console radio. I owned many of those sweet, exciting old tunes on 78-rpm records—and I do mean possessed them, those songs were mine. We were far from wealthy, but I also had my very own crank-up record player and all the time in the world to play my records as much as I pleased. Could life get any better? More to the point, how could silly classical runs and scales compete with the good music I really liked?

And so I diddled away, quite randomly, on my mother’s piano keys for the next ten years. Flop down on the round piano stool that could be spun so satisfyingly, and diddle the keys for a few minutes—that sometimes became an hour without noticing where the time went. I would later call it learning to play music by fooling around. A practicum of sorts. By early teenhood I knew a lot about chords. I knew it viscerally but could not describe it in words, Of conventional music theory I knew next to nothing and cared less. Finally the war ended and it was the best of times.

All through those growing up years music remained in my near background, often venturing up into the foreground. I learned that not all classical music consists of senseless runs and scales—and learned to love quality works like The New World Symphony, Warsaw Concerto, Bolero, Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, Carmen, Der Abend. Little did I know that many years later I would conduct a hundred-voice choir in a triumphal rendition of Hallelujah Chorus in the cavernous echoing rotunda of our state capitol building…but that would be getting ahead of my story.

My teen years were a time of enormous musical growth. In high school I sang tenor and bass in our excellent student chorus—and one year I went by invitation to Kentucky All-State Chorus, a signal honor. I also played violin in our student orchestra, worked my way up to second chair—and went by invitation to Kentucky All-State Orchestra. And formed a male quartet with three pals, good by-ear vocalists all. And refined my conscious understanding of the pops, classics and theory—as well as the chords I already knew viscerally. I sang in “Chuckles,” a song-and-dance extravaganza composed of musical kids from every high school in Louisville and Jefferson County. Our reward post-performances was an exuberant plane ride to Havana, Cuba for four incomparable days. It was a sweet growing time in music.

Meanings expanded. It was somewhere during these teen years that I first consciously grasped the three-part nature of musical structure, and it is this:  1) melody top, 2) harmony center, and 3) bass/rhythm bottom. By definition, “music” requires all three of these to be music.

Melody is the heart of music. Melody leads. If it lacks a melody, it’s not music. Some crazy experimentalists have tried making music without melody; they succeed only in making very boring sounds, and their sounds often are noise that falleth not pleasantly upon the ear. A drum beating out its rhythm alone, without melody or harmony, is not music, it is a drum beating out its rhythm alone. A series of strung-out chords, droning on and on in a new-agey stream of harmonic-sounding chord progressions that go nowhere, looping mindlessly around and back upon themselves, are not music; they are new-agey harmonic-sounding chords lacking a melody that might actually lead them somewhere. Melody is the essential leader for all sounds that are to be called music. Examples of excellent melodies include Happy Birthday, Stranger in Paradise and God Bless America. Melodies may be vocal or purely instrumental—no lyrics.

Harmony is the context, the surrounding support that both features the melody and renders it more beautiful than it could be alone. If you can, pick out the melody of Stranger in Paradise on a piano—play it alone, then play it again with its proper chords added and listen to the beautiful harmonious context those chords add simply by their presence. Do this with any other tunes you can play—the melody alone stark and bare, then the melody surrounded by all the harmonious context. Hear the difference, feel the difference. I have a theory about that.

If music is God’s gift to the sprit’s ear, harmony is a God-given clue to our purpose for being. We are to notice this clue, quietly and discreetly telling us how to interact harmoniously with each other during our time on Earth. Harmony is the golden rule in application. Harmony is what happens when we care for each other;  when we help each other according to our respective needs;  when we love each other, unconditionally as God loves us. Harmony.

Bass and Rhythm. These two are really just extended harmony, but—Oh!—what an extension. Bass is analogous to a foundation that supports a house, and rhythm is like the concrete footer that supports the foundation and delimits the shape of the entire house.

Bass is always the bottom note of harmony, and is always assigned to instruments (and voices) that can go lower, deeper that the other instruments (and voices). If you saw all this as a page of music printed on musical score paper, melody would be the top line, bass would be the bottom line, and harmony would be all the lines in between bottom and top. This high-to-low placement of notes on music’s scale of all possible notes is called “pitch.” Melody is normally pitched topmost—higher than harmony (though not always)—and harmony is higher pitch than bass.

Rhythm, on the other hand, is not part of the pitch scale at all, it is the timing that governs all three: melody, harmony and bass. It is context, but of a different nature that is temporal. Rhythm tells melody-harmony-bass, all together as a unit, how to pat their feet in sequence. Shall it be 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 (waltz) or 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4 (reel) or something else like 1-2-3, 4-5-6, 7-8-9- (slip jig)? There’s a little machine called a metronome. Some musicians adore it because it helps them keep their rhythm precise—1-2, 1-2, 1-2…others detest it as the devil’s work for interfering with their own built-in-and-perfect sense of timing. But with or without metronome, most tunes stick with one rhythm from beginning to end. If rhythm changes in midstream—say from reel to jig—it’s usually considered a bit odd, though it can be arranged most delightfully. But if rhythm keeps changing it simply becomes noise that is incoherent, it is not-music. And that’s that. Compare “Hap-py birth-day to you-u-u-u-u” to “Hap… peeber… thd… ayt… ooyoo…”  See?

Then there’s infinity. About the same time during my high school years, I came into conscious perception of music as infinite. It arrived while daydreaming in class, I believe, about whether there might be any limit to how many melodies can be invented. Is a limit possible? No, I quickly concluded, it is not possible. You can always add one note. This being true of both music and numbers in general, therefore both music and numbers are infinite in their possibilities. This infinitude makes them rather like God. Think about it. With numbers, no matter how high you count, you can always say “+1.” There is no limit to adding one more number. It’s the same with music. You can (could) always add “one more note.” Even if you had exhausted the number of possible melodies (which is itself impossible)—and all the harmonies and all the basses that could go with the melodies—they’re all infinite in their possibilities. Isn’t that interesting?

Infinity is God-like. Both numbers and music have infinite possibilities, therefore music and numbers are Godlike. Harmony is a hint, perhaps laid out there by God for us to notice, about how we should be behaving with each other. Something to try to live up to, with our free will.

Music is God’s precious gift to the spirit’s ear.

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