Music and Traditions

As we work our way across the globe, we'll often observe music created for various traditions. Weddings, funerals, religious ceremonies, holidays, and various other gatherings almost always include specific kinds of musics. This, of course, is hardly surprising to most of us--we've been to weddings and funerals and other gatherings ourselves, and those rituals and traditions have almost always included specific music.

For this blog, you're going to explore this relationship between music and tradition by telling us about some of your own experiences. Here are your guidelines:

• Your blog should be at least 400 words long.
• Your blog should include a minimum of two media selections--videos, pictures, sound files, links, etc. More is better. Please embed your videos, rather than just link to them. At least one of these selections must be music that we can hear.
• As always, keep your language respectful.
• Keep this blog centered around your own experiences and observations.
• All writing must be your own--I'm not grading your English grammar here. In fact, don't even use Grammarly. You may use a spellchecker, but that's it.

Within those guidelines, you may take this blog wherever you like. Tell us about all the music at your sister's wedding, or your high school graduation, or your church's Christmas service. Or is there a kind of music you listen to for specific rituals or habits in your own life, or with your friends? What kind of music is it? Who is involved in performing it? Is it the same every time, or does it vary? You can talk about a few different rituals, or go in depth into a single day.

Here's my example, which incorporates two different funeral experiences:

As a professional musician, I've played for many rituals over the years--weddings, funerals, graduations, Converse University events like Opening Convocation and Founders Day, and countless traditions situated at churches, like baptisms and holidays. Out of all of these rituals, I sometimes find the music at funerals to be most meaningful--the family often requests specific pieces of music that were meaningful to the deceased. In fact, over several years now, there's been one specific piece that I've found myself playing at many funerals (and sometimes weddings)--"Gabriel's Oboe." It's a short but beautiful piece for oboe that inevitably tugs at the heartstrings. The backing harmonies are lush and the melody soars. It has no words, but it somehow gives folks permission to cry.

What most of the mourners don't know is that "Gabriel's Oboe" is actually from a movie from the 1980s, "The Mission." In the movie, a Jesuit priest travels to the Amazon in the 1750s as a missionary, to meet and convert the indigenous peoples there. A turning point is when the priest takes out his oboe and plays a tune on it, enraging one member of the tribe but enchanting the others. 

One of the most meaningful times I got to perform this beautiful work was at my own grandmother's funeral. Like the rest of my family, Grandmom Ruth lived her whole life in central and west Texas, but she and my grandfather had made many mission trips with their church, including several trips to Brazil. So it seemed fitting that I play this particular piece--written for a movie about a missionary to Brazil--for my own grandmother, who had made similar trips over 200 years after the movie was set. She passed away while I was visiting my family for Christmas, but it was obvious that she might not make it past that Christmas holiday, so I stuck the music for "Gabriel's Oboe" into my suitcase, just in case I'd need it. Honestly, my mom wasn't sure about me playing the piece for the funeral--mom didn't know the piece, and she wasn't sure that it would be appropriate--but it worked its magic on her, giving her a few minutes at the funeral to sit in silence, remember her own mother, and cry just a little.

This past summer, I had a very different funeral music experience. My brother passed away unexpectedly in early May, and we held a memorial service in early June. It was outdoors at the marina where he'd worked as a general contractor and spent a lot of his time--very different from a Baptist church. The woman in charge--a friend of his who ran the marina--chose a few songs to have playing between the times that various people spoke. One song, "Just Breathe" by Pearl Jam, was one that I'd never heard, but it knocked me off my feet, it was just so poignant and beautiful: 

And, of course, I had to play as well. But somehow Gabriel's Oboe just didn't seem right for the setting or, honestly, as a way to honor my brother. But I remembered a song sung by one of our students at graduation a few years ago, an Irish ballad called "The Parting Glass" that was sung when people left a place, whether to travel or because they'd passed away. Now, we're of Scotch/Irish descent, and Nate was fond of whiskey, and it seemed right for the time. So I read the words and then played the tune. I don't have a recording of the version I played, but here's my favorite recording, done by the Wailin' Jennys.

As you read your classmates' blogs, please comment on how their musical experiences with rituals compare to your own. Did you have the same kind of music present for the same sort of occasions, or was your experience different?