This article was originally published in the Spirit of Jefferson on May 24, 2023.
Those who do music and many who just listen both agree on the power that music has over their lives or in their lives. It’s obvious for musicians because of the many, many years of practice they devote to it. The point of the dedication people give to doing and listening to music has to have some reason for being. Where does the power of music sit? It’s obvious that it has to come from the performers, the composers, the song writers, and the sound technicians. But it also comes importantly from the audience and the performance venue.
Musicians say that there’s a real difference for them between performing live and performing in a recording studio. Listeners say the same regarding their experience of music. It’s better when you’re part of a live audience than when you’re listening off a CD or on Spotify. A live performance will have some reason for being that contributes to the experience and can heighten it for musicians and audience alike.
On May 13, Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church had a reason for getting together. It was the occasion of their congregation’s PeaceFest, the theme being Peace and Non-Violence. The Reverend Gusti Lennea Newquist, the pastor at SPC, describes the PeaceFest as a regular occurance at the church where a group of musicians and an audience get together to make and listen to music and for the church to promote one of its peace initiatives.
This concert’s initiative was titled Guns to Gardens, an effort planned for June 11th as a “Gun Safe Surrender” event. On June 11th, the church in cooperation with the Shepherdstown Fire Department will accept voluntarily offered, unwanted guns to be dismantled and forged into garden tools and art.
The music made and heard that night resonated with the theme. One song “Jesus on the Mainline,” sung by Todd Coyle has the refrain “Tell Him what you want.” Coyle passed seamlessly into “For What It’s Worth,” with the lyric “There’s a man with a gun over there. Telling me I’ve got to beware,” and then part of the refrain, “It’s time we stop.”
The lyrics were well known to much of the audience, many of whom had witnessed first hand the turmoil of the 1960’s when the country was struggling with violence. And the audience responded emotionally to the memory of those times.
Sam Jannotta later sang and accompanied himself on the guitar to two poems by Stewart Acuff, the Spirit’s contributor to the Between the Rivers column and a longtime social organizer. One line went, “Let us understand the beauty and sweetness in our hands,” an allusion to not seeing hands as means of destruction.
Many of the performers sang works they had composed themselves. Don Oehser sang “Not Out of Time,” with the lyric, “Maybe it’s always been this way, hoping for a better day. Hope we’re not out of time.”
Lisa Lafferty played the piano and sang, accompanied by Don Oehser on guitar, the Susan Tedeschi song “It’s so Heavy,” carrying a strong message emphasizing the difficulty and sadness of our present situation. “Oh, I thought we were past the time, when injustice was a leader, and liberty last. Oh, it’s so heavy. Oh, so heavy.” Her powerful styling conveyed the intense emotion driving the song.
The intermission in the concert was filled in silence except for a single bell rung 221 times, once for each of the mass killings that have taken place so far this year across the country, The bell ringer, Aristotle Potts, represented the Eastern Panhandle Youth Alliance, a group of LGBTQ young people who stoked the idea for the Guns to Garden theme and created the artwork for it.
Each of the musicians, those I’ve cited and those I haven’t, contributed to an experience that brought the audience the mix of pleasure, reflection, emotion, and even tears that live music can evoke. It was a charmed evening.
That power of music, live music especially, resides in something universal to humans. Not being a musician myself, I talked at length with David Rampy of Shepherdstown about that strength of music. Rampy comes out of a different musical tradition than the folk and blues tradition at the Guns to Garden concert.
Rampy was a professional operatic tenor, who before retirement, performed across the country and internationally. He has, as you’d expect, a strong liking for classical music, even teaching classical music classes at Shepherd University’s Lifelong Learning Program, But, he made it clear, he likes all music. He was in attendance at the SPC concert.
As a professional he understands that the making of music is a creative act, both in composition and in performance. And it’s that insight he has into the creativity of music that’s a pleasure in itself. It transcends the many issues that divide us. He said, “The one thing that should not be politically charged is music. The person next to you enjoying a concert could be conservative or liberal, and it won’t matter.” An old Chinese proverb has it that “If the king loves music, there’s little trouble in the land.” But it’s not obvious that our present day “kings” are listening. Bob Dylan in his book “Tarantula” said, “The world is run by those who never listen to music.”
The object of music is to give your emotional side some exercise, but that will depend on how you’re predisposed to prefer some music over others. So it’s OK to pay your good money to see a performance or an artist that you expect you’ll enjoy. In Jefferson County that could be Celtic, rock, folk, jazz, country, and classical. Some venues are small and intimate, in a backyard or restaurant; some are in concert halls on the Shepherd campus or in our highschool auditoriums; some are open-air at Morgan’s Grove, Sam Michaels, or Evitts Run. Some are lounge type acts at the Hollywood Casino. There’s also a lot of music to be experienced in easy drives to one of our neighboring states.
Rampy also mentioned the health of music education in the county with excellent middle school and high school concert and marching bands. Musc forms bonds between people individually or in building team spirit. But it can do more. It can heal.
Reverend Newquist mentioned that she came to Shepherdstown from Tucson, AZ. She was living there at the time the Tucson community suffered through the politically motivated shooting that claimed six lives and critically wounded Representative Gabby Giffords.
Rev. Newquist described her own reaction to the shooting as a long lasting sense of despair, wondering where the next bullet would come from. She questioned how she could re-engage and make a difference, when the politicians seemed incapable of doing so. Her answer and her recovery from that despair she described as coming from aligning music and art with a social purpose–PeaceFest.
Most people know the saying, “Music has charms to soothe a savage beast,” but that’s only the first part of the quote. The rest of it says, to “soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” Updating that sentiment to today’s world, we could say “Music has powers to calm, to bend and melt metal.”
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