Music and Magic

I go to church mainly for the music now. In fact, the last four times I was in a church (during the runup to Christmas), three of them were for Christmas concerts (the other was for a retirement party- not mine).

To me, the church mass is all performance. All those rituals are a form of performance. The trouble is that the performance of rituals at Mass tends to leave me cold. I can enjoy doing scripture readings in church, but I then I just enjoy performing readings, and I feel a bit odd about that. I feel like an actor, not a worshipper. But music truly can be heavenly- especially if there's a choir and the voices blend together in weird and wonderful ways.

I'd like to join a choir again, I love to sing. It wasn't always thus. In fact, I remember not having a clue in the high school choir. I believe I was informed that I was tone deaf. But over the years, as I listened to music, I somehow learned to intuitively make sense of how it worked- how all the strands worked together. Then, when I was living on my own in New York, I started to sing more and more in order to cope with the anxiety attacks that had become part and parcel of New York life. It was around that time that I bought an audio primer in vocal harmony (at least in pop music)- the Good Vibrations box set by the Beach Boys.

I was already familar with the Beach Boys' big hits, like "Surfin' USA" and "California Girls". I was also familar with "Pet Sounds", which is actually rather differant from most of the other Beach Boys stuff- combining rather advanced Beach Boys harmonies with complex, nearly symphonic instrumental arrangements- it all sounds very romantic, actually, in a bittersweet way. But I'd always thought that the Beach Boys didn't do anything of interest after 1966. Not quite true. The Disc 2 of the set included about 20 minutes of the unreleased album "Smile", including sheer beauty in "Wonderful" and "Surf's Up", as well as otherwordliness in "Cabin-Essence" and in some of the "Heroes and Villains". Meanwhile the third disc showed that the band managed to eke out some creativity in the late '60s and early '70s- that was the time when they produced some of their most interesting work, actually.

The box set inspired me to start writing songs and trying to put together vocal arrangements, which was not easy since I was musically illiterate. Still, I have tapes of layered a cappela vocals from those days, including one song that has so many layers it reminds me of "Cabin-Essence", or even Heart of the Congos (a reggae album by the Congos and produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry, where the tape-on-tape layering of vocals was done so often that it often sounds like the backing vocals are filtering in from the outer cosmos). The chorus of that song expressed my yearning, uncertain spirituality:

"Somewhere in the distance, in that great expanse,
must be some kind of answer: I search for it, entranced."