The Promise of Living

Some of the music I have enjoyed the most is the music that found me when I simply let YouTube play the next video.  Such was the case this afternoon when after I was listening to a piece by Leoanard Bernstein, YouTube played a work by Aaron Copland that I had never heard.  I thought that over the years I had listened to most, if not all, of his major works.  This music was "The Promise of Living."  Google told me that if was from one of his lesser known operas called The Tender Land. Some musical performances affect me more deeply than others.  In this case the video affected me as deeply as the music.  The YouTube video was a collection of actual videos from the early 20th century.  The cinema included many scenes of people in the act of living, in city parks, in amusement parks and other places.The black and white videos were in stark contrast to the kaleidoscopic color of the music. So in a sense the color of the music brought those videos into living color.

1971 was a pivotal year for me.  I graduated from high school in June and then spent my summer in Kentucky selling Bibles and other books door to door. I have never before or since been as lonely in my life.  And yet never before or since have I experienced the Presence that would be with me and would guide my life.

The week after I got home I entered the Enterprise State Junior College as a freshman music major. I experienced somewhat of an inferiority complex as so many of the high school graduates went on to more prestigious four-year colleges and universities. So there I was sitting in another class in Enterprise, Alabama where I had sat in class for the past twelve years. I was glad to be out of high school, but felt that I wasn't quite in college.

But to make the best of it, I explored my surroundings and found a room that was to change my life. I found a door in the music suite that I decided to open.  "Opening doors"' would be a metaphor of dramatic proportions. I discovered behind the door a large closet.  As a fledgling audiophile the three turntables, headphones and shelf of albums got my blood stirring.  When I graduated two years later more than anything I learned in any class, the "classical music" I had unearthed in the closet had changed me the most. Now not just the "church music" of my childhood and youth touched me, the music that had propelled me into the "music" in the first place, but my psyche and soul had a relationship with the serious music I would formally study for the next five years.

Four year later, after graduating with a music education degree from Samford University, I continued my studies toward a master degree in church music at what was then a prestigious seminary music school.  Time would fail me to describe what happened to me personally and professionally those two years.  The professors of music and theology had a profound effect on me.  I was a part of choirs and ensembles including a choir that performed Handel's Messiah with the Louisville Orchestra. For three consecutive nights in December of 1978 I stood with that select choir of forty singing with one one of the best orchestras in the world. I kept wondering how I got there. How is this even possible that this is me? The next semester I was honored when asked to perform music on my senior voice recital that I had composed myself. David Helms singing David Helms.  It was quite a moment.  But of all of that and more, the place that had the biggest impact on me was in the basement of school library, the music library,  They had three turntables, headphones and a vast library of albums. The afternoon in the late winter of 1979 when Leonard Bernstein's Mass found me, three hours later I walked into the light of a cold Louisville afternoon, a different person than I was when I walked in.

This afternoon I searched "A Simple Song" from Bernstein's Mass to listen on YouTube.  Listening to any part of Mass is like visiting an old friend. This music has been my friend for thirty-eight years. But who could have predicted that the next up was Copland's "A Promise of Living", music I had never heard.

Isn't it an irony that after forty-five years of listening to serious music, and after enjoying several expensive and sophisticated stereo systems, the place I listen to music is at my laptop with stereo headphones.  Thanks to the magic of YouTube while writing this I have been listening to the complete opera of The Tender Land.  I cannot begin to tell you what if feels like for the music to play my life backwards to that closet in Enterprise, Alabama where I discovered Aaron Copland forty-five years ago.

In August of  2005 I entered college again at the Dalton State College in Dalton, Georgia to pursue a lifelong dream of earning a business degree. While earning those music degrees I would sit in class thinking "shouldn't I be studying math and science?" My advisor not only helped me skip certain classes based on my transcripts, but she walked me to various professors to show them my credentials. After that process several of my credits transferred to Dalton.  Interesting thing. All of them were from the Enterprise State Junior College, my associates degree.  Not one of them transferred from my bachelor or master degrees.

I feel like only a distant relative of that eighteen year old boy who wandered into that closet at the Enterprise State Junior College, in August of 1971. He and I are different in oh so many ways. . And yet if he had not discovered Copland, Barber and Bach for himself I don't know how far he would have gotten in music school. Had he not put on those headphones and dropped that needle,  he may of dropped those classes. That would have been a shame.

"The Promise of Living?"  There is none is there.  But today I have a pulse. I have eyes to see and ears to hear.  I have a laptop, some headphones, blogspot and an internet connection. And I remember another time in another place when he too  didn't need much more.