The engine and drive train of a typical automobile has about 10,000 moving parts. The entire car has about 30,000 parts. The parts you are usually aware of and concerned about are the starter, the engine(as a whole), the accelerator, the brake, the steering wheel, the turn signal, the windshield wiper, the headlights, the air conditioning (heating and cooling), the stereo and the GPS. The tires are where the rubber meets the road (so to speak) and are extremely important, but you are normally not aware of them unless one of them goes flat.In that case it suddenly becomes the only part that matters. If something else goes wrong, you immediately become aware of other parts of the car.
The number of parts in the human body depends on what you're counting. There are eight major organs that keep us alive--the brain, the lungs, the liver, the bladder, the kidneys, the heart, the stomach, and the intestines. But it is estimated that the human brain contains about 100 billion neurons. Of course a number like that means that nobody knows how many neurons are in the brain. There are seven major parts to the human kidney. The nephron is the basic structural and functional unit of the kidney. It is estimated that there are about a million nephrons in each kidney. There are seven major parts to the human heart. It is estimated there are about 15-70 trillion cells in the human circulatory system. Again this spread means that nobody knows how many cells are in the body. Now here's a number you can wrap your head around. There are 206 bones in an adult's body. That's something that can be counted on a skeleton.
All of this to say, the parts of a car depends on what you mean by "a part of a car." The parts of the human body range from eight parts to tens of trillions depending on what you're counting.
Music has been called the most complex symbol system in the world. Considering that symbol systems include systems such as mathematics, language and science, that's quite a statement. I was thinking about all of this this morning while listening to Durufle's Requiem. If I had never been in a choir performing this requiem, then I wouldn't have been thinking about it at all. I performed Durufle's Requiem about fifteen years ago at the First Baptist Church of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The choir, under the direction of David Long, consisted of about thirty singers. The choir was accompanied by a small orchestra and the church pipe organ. Short of a college professor or conductor of a major orchestra, David is the most gifted conductor I have ever sung with. The entire experience was quite marvelous.
If you attended a performance of Maurice Durufle's Requiem, I would think that you would only hear incredibly beautiful music and would be totally unaware of its intricate complexities. This is not to insult your musical intelligence. I've earned a couple of music degrees and if I had been sitting there with you without ever seeing the score, I wouldn't have been aware of it either.
The entire work is based on Gregorian chant. This chant is extremely simple. It consists of only a melodic line which moves mostly in steps and small jumps. The melody never moves very far from its center. Yet Durufle takes this monophony of one moving part and creates a polyphony of hundreds of moving parts. Again, listening to it you will probably hear the whole of one sound of the combined choir and orchestra. If you've read from the score you will be aware of so much more.
The Introit alone is beautifully complex beyond belief. From the key signature changes quite often, but the time signature changes at times from measure to measure. The time signature in most works of musical art changes at most from page to page. In Requiem, what you hear as unity is broken into hundreds of individual pieces. The measure you're singing may be in 4/4 (common time), but the next six measures could be 5/8, 7/8, 3/4,4/4, 2/4, and 3/4 respectively, The end result is a type of mystical illusion as the music seems to float off the page. As a performer, I almost floated off the stage.
As I listen to the Introit of Requiem now I realize that I am able to forget all that and hear it as I would have without that perspective. This morning it is simply some of the most beautiful music I've ever heard.
So later today when you sit in the driver's seat and start your car, try not to consider that any one of 30,000 things could break. And as you hear the motor spring to life, don't consider that each ear has about ten major parts, but that the brain that decodes the vibrations your ear receives contains hundreds of billions of moving parts. But when you turn on your radio, do consider that the classic rock you're listening to is made up of no more than four or five chords.
What does all this mean? When Don McClean was asked the meaning of all the rap-like facts he spews in American Pie, he said, "It means that I will never have to work another day in my life."
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