Eric Pazdziora

The Best Road

Eric — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:10:47 +0000

or, If God Has a Wonderful Plan for My Life, Why Am I Suffering?

From my files: September 2008.

My long-time readers know that the best way to get a post out of me is for somebody to ask me a thoughtful question. That hasn’t happened as much lately as it used to, but the other day, I got a message from one of my new readers. She has run up against one of the deep questions of the Christian life.

According to the Bible, God cares for us and promises to guide our lives in the best way. “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” as the classic evangelistic booklet puts it. “He promises to direct us to the best road,” as my friend puts it more poetically.

But if that’s true, my friend asks, why does life have so many difficulties? Why do many people’s lives seem to have more difficulties after they choose to trust in God and His wonderful plan? Why does it seem like He doesn’t answer when we pray—especially when we ask Him this question?

Let’s face it: If God’s “wonderful plan” is for people who believe in Him to be free from suffering, difficulties, and obstacles on the road of life, then He doesn’t do a very good job at it. Christians suffer just as much as anybody else. We still have bad days at work. We still have to worry about money. We still get sick and injured. (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”) We experience tragedies and natural disasters. Our loved ones die. On top of that, we sometimes face persecution, harassment, or even martyrdom just because we believe in Jesus. That’s not very wonderful.

If you think that sounds too shallow, consider this: I once saw an anti-God website where it was argued that God doesn’t exist because (and they were completely serious) “Christians are no more successful than anybody else when they gamble in Las Vegas.” Clearly, if we have the wrong idea of what God’s plan is and how He works it out, we’ll come to some very wrong conclusions about Him!

So the question is this: If God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives, then what is that plan, and how wonderful is it really?

Let’s look at the Bible. A popular Bible verse (maybe you can even quote it from memory) tells us this:

“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” –Romans 8:28

That’s a nice thought—everything, even the not-so-good things, work to create good in the end when we trust in God. But how do we know that’s true? There’s a hint at the end of the verse: “according to His purpose.” For everything that God allows to happen to us, He has a purpose in mind. The problem is that too often we just learn this verse by itself, and don’t keep reading to find out what “His purpose” is. The next verse tells us:

“For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.” –Romans 8:29

Let’s look at this carefully: “Whom He foreknew” refers to the people who love God, mentioned in verse 28. God knew long before you were around that you would choose to believe in Him. “He also predestined”—that’s a fancy theological word meaning “planned, and what God plans always happens.” (For those familiar with the theological debate about the doctrine of election: that’s not what Paul is talking about in this verse.) God knew you were going to commit your life to Him, so He came up with a plan for it, a destiny, a final stop at the end of the road He sets for you. What is this plan that God predestined for you? The Bible spells it out in nine simple words:

“To be conformed to the image of His Son.”

God’s wonderful plan for your life is that, when you trust him, you will be changed to look exactly like Jesus. All the love, all the grace, all the truth, all the kindness, all the wisdom that Jesus had, you will have. In fact, Jesus can fairly be called “the firstborn among many brethren”—He is the only begotten Son of God, but He now has a lot of younger brothers and sisters by adoption, and there is a strong family resemblance.

If God’s plan is to make our lives look like Jesus’ life, what does that mean for us? The tremendously encouraging Bible teacher Ron Hutchcraft puts it in these words, which I really can’t improve on:

I have been to the gift shop at those Colonial villages and I’ve seen what the potter can make out of a blob of clay. Every squeeze, every poke, every spin, every cooking is to turn the clay from a blob into a masterpiece. We’re God’s clay. The mold is Jesus. And God designed you to be, through the uniqueness of your own personality and gifts, a replica of His Son.

One of life’s most frequently asked questions is, “Why, God?” The only answer that fits all situations is this—“This can make you more like Jesus than you’ve ever been.” What happens in your life is either something your Father sends or He allows. But in either case, He only allows into your life what can make you more valuable, more Christ-like.

You can’t learn to love like Jesus unless there’s someone in your life who’s hard to love; you can’t learn His sensitivity without hurting; you can’t be Jesus-patient without having to wait, or to put up with someone difficult; you can’t learn joy without circumstances that you have to rise above; you can’t learn peace without some pressure; you can’t learn faith without needs that are bigger than your ability to meet them.

But unlike clay, you choose whether the Potter’s beautiful intentions are realized. If you forget the Potter’s goal, you can become desperate, bitter, hard, self-absorbed. Or you can let Him use it for the ultimate good. If you’re going to get the pain, you might as well get the point! And that’s to make you more like Jesus. The oven and the wheel are God’s tools to transform us blobs of clay into His masterpieces!

—The Oven, the Wheel, and the Masterpiece

I’ve seen this in my own life as well. Ironically, the things I’ve liked the least turned out to be the things that helped me become the most like Jesus. That rotten customer service job was where I learned how to love my neighbor as myself. That horrible summer when I was alienated from all my Christian friends and coworkers was when I first fully appreciated how much Jesus went through for me. If I hadn’t gone to that emotionally abusive church, I might not have learned how to pray for the people who despitefully use me. If I hadn’t been picked on by bullies in grade school, I wouldn’t have had to forgive my enemies. If I never had to wonder where my next paycheck was coming from, I would never have learned to trust God to provide. And so on.

I wouldn’t have chosen to experience those things, and I hated them at the time. Yet looking back, I’m glad that God guided me into them. At the time, I asked God why He would let such terrible things happen to me if He loved me. Now, I realize that the answer is He let those things happen because He loved me.

George MacDonald makes a bold statement in one of his novels:

Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. (Phantastes, ch. 25)

It’s a bit shocking the way it’s phrased there, but I think he’s on to something. It’s not that evil is a good thing, but that when God allows evil to happen, He allows it only for a good reason—the best possible reason, in fact. God causes all things, even evil ones, to work together for good, for the purpose of making you more like His Son.

So God does care, and when you trust Him, God will always direct you down the best road. Not necessarily the happiest road, the smoothest road, or the easiest road, but the road that will lead you to the best thing: becoming more and more like Jesus every day.

Do you have a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know!

Happy National Grammar Day!

Eric — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 06:38:49 +0000

March 4 is National Grammar Day! Hooray!

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to do a hilarious hagiography like I did last year, or much of anything really, being too busy correcting grammar for a living. So here’s the next best thing: What would a grammar holiday be without some rousing choruses of Schoolhouse Rock? Bet you won’t be able to get them out of your head all day now!

The Tale Of Mr Morton

“Interjections!”

Rufus Xavier Sarsparilla

Conjunction Junction (What’s Your Function?)

Here’s a bonus, a ridiculously catchy song from “The Electric Company” about adverbs– written by none other than Tom Lehrer. As a side note, why don’t we get musicians of this caliber writing songs for our kids today? Just think; there was a time when they could commission Philip Glass to write music for Sesame Street… but I suppose that rant could wait for national music education day. (When is that?)

Anyway, many happy returns of the day! Pass around a participle and maybe even split open an infinitive. (No, really, it’s OK.) March forth to the National Grammar Day website for many more ways to celebrate. Don’t miss the “Songwriting Hall of Shame” and “Grammar Noir”…

Giving Up Self-Denial for Lent?

Eric — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:23:21 +0000

Today on a blog that discusses issues of spiritual abuse– the blog in question is directed to survivors of a high-control group that puts a lot of emphasis on finding God through physical suffering, righteous living, and other forms of legalism– a very interesting question was raised in this post:

If you purposely choose to practice self-denial by taking cold showers, limiting sugar, etc – is it really self-denial?

Or put another way…

Can self-denial practiced for the sake of self-denial really be considered self-denial?

And just in time for Lent! My thoughts on the subject are (characteristically) slightly askew, but the other readers seemed to like them. So here is the comment I left, somewhat revised for you:

It all depends whether or not it starts and ends at a position of grace.

When I’ve voluntarily practiced self-denial (e.g. fasting) it’s made me keenly aware of how self-absorbed I usually am (because I can think about nothing but food!) and thus heightened my awareness of my need to depend totally on God. It’s not that it makes me holier; it’s that it shows me my need of God’s grace to make me holy. Kind of like the Law, as properly understood according to Galatians 3:

…So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. …

On the other hand, “self-denial” practiced for the sake of making yourself feel superior to other people (for instance, if you want to feel more committed and passionate for Christ than “worldly Christians” are) is not self-denial but self-gratification. There’s a reason “not by works” is correlated with “so that no one should boast” in Ephesians 2.

On a third hand, Martin Luther once proposed that if your particular besetting temptation is to feel superior and self-righteous for, say, not drinking alcohol, an appropriate act of self-denial for you might be to “have a drink to spite the devil.”

[Here's the full quote of that and a thoughtful explanation via "Internet Monk": link]

What about you? How have teachings on self-denial helped or hindered you in your spiritual journey? How do you keep your spiritual disciplines in the perspective of God’s grace? Inquiring minds want to know!

Interview with The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond

Eric — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:30:15 +0000

As you might have noticed, I haven’t had too much time for writing lately, being absurdly busy with work and life. But somewhere in the past few weeks, I did find time to sit down with an up-and-coming blogger known as Mr. Pond for a discussion on music, writing, faith, spiritual abuse, and many other widely ranging subjects of interest. The interview will be posted over the next few days; I think you’ll find it interesting.

Here’s the link [Edit: updated to include all three parts! Collect them all!]

Part 1: On my interests (writing, composing, faith) and how they all fit together.

Part 2: The fusion of faith and arts–creating “a state of wonder.”

Part 3: Spiritual abuse, and how music and stories contribute to healing.

If you’re interested in some very good writing on fantasy, literature, writing, and novelists who may or may not be mad, you’ll definitely want to give The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond a look.

Heavens! A St. Peter Joke with Good Theology!

Eric — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:30:41 +0000

Good heavens! Rev. Bosco Peters of Liturgy.co.nz has gone and found it. It’s a St. Peter joke (you know, this guy dies and goes to the pearly gates and he meets St. Peter and St. Peter says….) that actually has good theology. Well, for a St. Peter joke. Have a gander:

A man dies and goes to heaven. St. Peter meets him at the pearly gates.

St. Peter says, “Here’s how it works. You need 100 points to make it into heaven. You tell me all the good things you’ve done, and I give you a certain number of points for each item, depending on how good it was. When you reach 100 points, you get in.”

“Okay,” the man says, “I attended church every Sunday.”

“That’s good,” says St. Peter, “that’s worth two points.”

“Two points?” he says. “Well, I gave 10% of all my earnings to the church.”

“Well, let’s see,” answers Peter, “that’s worth another 2 points. Did you do anything else?”

“Two points? Golly. How about this: I started a soup kitchen in my city and worked in a shelter for homeless veterans.”

“Fantastic, that’s certainly worth a point, ” he says.

“Hmmm…” the man says, “I was married to the same woman for 50 years and never cheated on her, even in my heart.”

“That’s wonderful,” says St. Peter, “that’s worth three points!”

“THREE POINTS!!” the man cries. “At this rate the only way I get into heaven is by the grace of God!”

“Come on in!”

Tip-o’-the-hat: Liturgy. (With some great serious resources for you worship-minded types, by the way.)

By Any Other Name….

Eric — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:50:05 +0000

A while ago, I was paging through the books at a Christian bookstore when I came across one called 101 Reasons You Can Believe: Why the Christian Faith Makes Sense. The author, Ralph O. Muncaster, presents an assortment of things that he believes point to the truth of Christianity. Some were predictable (e.g. messianic prophecies fulfilled in Christ) and some are quite creative (e.g. Beethoven).

The first one in particular caught my eye:

The Rose

Emily sat down beside the brook and marveled at the harmony and serenity of her surroundings. Water bubbled and swirled around the rocks in a pattern whose beauty was far beyond that of any human art. Every shade of green appeared in the foliage of the banks of the stream and the fields beyond. Overhead the sun shone brightly, and the spring afternoon was scented with daffodils. Butterflies were everywhere. Bees buzzed.

She looked at her feet and a splash of red caught her eye. Nestled among some pure white daffodils was a rose. How odd, she thought. A single rose in all those daffodils. She reached down and picked it, fascinated by its color, its shape, its form. The vivid red petals framed the bright yellow pistils tucked at the core of the flower. Drops of water beaded on the leaves. How intricate and precise was the detail of the tiny parts of the inside of the rose[...].

Who would create such a thing? she wondered. Why? For what purpose? Could this be evidence of a loving Creator richly rewarding His creation with pleasure?

(photo © E.M.P.)

A bit too much straining for effect, perhaps (where on earth is Thomas Traherne when we need him?). But certainly the aesthetic appeal of nature is something I think apologists, and Christians in general, could make a great deal more of. The pleasure we can find in seeing the beauty of the world around us is a lot more than can be adequately explained in materialistic terms. Granted the plant needs its flowers to survive, but the pleasure we get from seeing them is a lot more than is necessary for survival.

However, for all his good intentions, I’ve got a suspicion that Mr. Muncaster doesn’t actually spend much time in gardens. I have done, mainly because my dad is an avid gardener, but it’s really its own order of pleasure. When you think about it, gardens are very spiritual places: according to the Bible, Mankind was created in a garden, corrupted in a garden, redeemed because of what transpired in a garden, and, if all goes well, will spend eternity in a garden.

If Emily had more closely observed the beauty of her garden, the story might have gone like this:

She looked at her feet and a splash of red caught her eye. Nestled among some pure white daffodils was a rose. How odd, she thought. Pure white daffodils. That’s one you don’t see every day; most daffodils are yellow or gold. Somebody’s been making some very clever hybrids. And what’s this? A single rose in all those daffodils? Now how did that get there? Roses usually grow on bushes with dozens of blooms.

She reached down to pick it, and let out a scream. “Stupid thorns!” she yelled, nursing her wounded fingers. “How could I forget that those grow on rosebushes?”

Then she realized that the daffodils, which grow from bulbs, indicated that somebody had planted this as a garden, and that it’s not good manners to pick somebody else’s flowers without asking first. Good thing those thorns were there after all, she thought in italics, or I might have gotten in trouble. She leaned over instead to get a closer look. How intricate and precise was the detail of the tiny parts of the inside of the rose….

The rest would pretty much stand as written, though I’d add that the thorns on the rose show that great beauty can miraculously come out of something that causes suffering.

And then I’d add Reason to Believe number 102:

The Sense of Humor

A gardener read through a book and chucked at the writer’s innocently ignorant mistakes. Then he stopped and thought: If the world is really meaningless like some people say, why do we find it so amusing when people get their facts wrong? And if the universe is really absurd, why do we recognize absurdity, and even find it hilarious? And why on earth am I thinking in italics?

Friday Funnies

Eric — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:13:39 +0000

Because we all could use something funny this week:

1. Tax Advice

Failblog reports that the following appears on the IRS website:

Living in Chicago, I have to admit I’m not entirely surprised, but still… doesn’t this explain so much about our political system?

And in case you were wondering, yes, it’s totally real. There’s also this: “Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.” You too, Mr. Capone.

2. Speaking of Politics…

Do you ever wonder why some folks say the Democrats are trying to force us into socialism or communism… but the Republicans are the ones who live in Red States?

3. Curiouser and Curiouser

Depends. Do you live in Cheshire?

(via Criggo)

4. Fortune Cookies, part 1

The slogan in my first fortune cookie informs us:

Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools.

To which I am compelled to add, “And if you don’t believe me, look it up for yourself!”

5. Fortune Cookies, part 2

The slogan in my second fortune cookie informs us:

Fortune Not Found:
Abort, Retry, Ignore?

They’re getting pretty good at this, actually.

6. Absolutely and Utterly Shameless:

(source)

OK, OK, I’ll stop. However, if this sort of thing amuses you, you might be interested to hear that you can often get more of the same at my Google Reader feed, did you know? Now you do.

“I Have a Sign”: Answering Spiritual Abusers According to Their Folly

Eric — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:00:24 +0000

“Are you looking for a sign from God? This is it.” — seen on too many church signs

In the popular imagination, Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist “Church” probably deserve their status as the archetypal hateful ultra-fundamentalist spiritual abusers. (They’re the ones who popularized the infamous slogan, “God hates [anti-homosexual slur redacted]s.”) For reasons unfathomable to the rational mind of man, they recently decided to bring one of their hateful protests to the corporate headquarters of Twitter in downtown San Francisco. (The gay pride parade I can see, but Twitter?)

How would you respond if someone brought this kind of message of hatred–really of spiritual abuse, because it’s in the name of God–to your neighborhood? I’ve seen lots of responses on various occasions reported in the news, but this one takes the cake, the pie, and the cookies with a great big cherry on top. As gleefully reported on LaughingSquid.com, Phelps and his minions “…found themselves severely outnumbered by a crowd of absurdist pranksters…WBC’s hate-promoting signs were answered by multiple signs of randomness, nonsensical yelling, and even a unicorn.”

“Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.” (Proverbs 26:5)

The best one, not pictured but mentioned in the comments, was “God hates #tags.”

My hat’s off to the brilliance of these counter-protesters in using absurdist performance art to skewer the Phelpsians at their own game. I think that, intentionally or not, they’ve stumbled on an amazing (and actually, deeply spiritual) response to this kind of abuse. See, many people, on seeing this brand of hate and abuse propagated in the name of God, would be likely to respond with an equal bitterness, anger, sadness, rage, sarcasm, cynicism, what have you. That’s understandable; it bites close to the heart when you hear anybody say that, for whatever reason, you’re not loved.

But you know what? To bring a message of hatred and rejection in the name of Jesus–whose message includes the facts that “God loves the world” and that you should “love your neighbor”–is nothing other than sheer raving nonsense. For any practical purpose, the spiritual abusers’ signs stating “God hates ***s” are nore more sensible than a prankster’s sign saying “Build prisons on the moon.” God is love. God loves you. To say otherwise is to say something so untrue, it may as well be nonsense. Nonsense never hurt anyone; in fact, it’s pretty funny. You don’t get mad when you see someone with a sign that says “Rabbits are made of cheese.” You laugh, and maybe even go away feeling a bit better, knowing that it isn’t true–it isn’t even sane.

When you know the truth, the lies don’t hurt as much–they can’t hurt as much. The truth is that, whatever else you can say even on a contentious issue, God loves you. God loves straights. God loves gays (read the article at that link if you need some convincing, or encouragement). God loves your enemies. God loves you. Heck, God even loves people who rail and hate and lie in His name–God even loves Fred Phelps.

The epilogue is a perfect ending touch– after the absurdist counter-assault of nonsense at Twitter, the WBC folks apparently had had enough, and actually canceled their planned appearance later that day outside the theater playing Fiddler on the Roof. (Again, presumably for reasons beyond the ken of human sanity.) The nonsense protesters showed up anyway, to the bemusement of the theatergoers. Hey, freedom of speech includes the right to say silly things, right? Maybe there’s a lesson here too: when we don’t treat spiritual abusers as so deadly serious, when we laugh at their lies and make fun of their attitudes–not out of spite but because frankly it is a bit funny–sometimes they’ll just shut up and go away.

The protesters even managed to find some spiritual truths in a rickroll:

Here’s to them. Next time the spiritual abusers come to my neighborhood, I’m going to be right out front with a sign that says… hmm, let’s see… how about “Heisenberg for President”? “Sell me a fish”? “Kittens in space”? “Van Buren Forever”? “Cthulu likes legumes”?… Let’s get together some ideas, shall we?

Tip-o’-the-hat: LaughingSquid.com

Music Geekery: Other Things Being Unequal

Eric — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:28:37 +0000

Not long ago on the always interesting and uber-nerdy Language Log, Mark Liberman directed readers’ attention to a recent paper supposedly studying what gives music its emotional resonance (Daniel L. Bowling et al., “Major and minor music compared to excited and subdued speech“, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 127(1): 491–503, January 2010). They explain:

The hypothesis examined here is that major and minor tone collections elicit different affective reactions because their spectra are similar to the spectra of voiced speech uttered in different emotional states…. the spectra of major intervals are more similar to spectra found in excited speech, whereas the spectra of particular minor intervals are more similar to the spectra of subdued speech.

Unfortunately the paper is available to subscribers only, so I can’t get at the whole thing. Apparently there’s some rather complicated acoustical analysis involved, but I don’t know the methodology and assumptions that went into it, so I can’t comment on that. If the conclusion implied in the abstract is true–that musical intervals can be correlated to the inflections of speech patterns–then it’s very interesting indeed. But I have a few reservations.

Of course, it’s no great surprise for anyone who knows a bit about music to learn that the cadences and rhythms of music may sometimes reflect the cadences and rhythms of spoken language. That’s how you write a song, after all, and it’s why we don’t think it’s entirely unnatural when characters in operas or Broadway musicals suddenly start singing their lines. When I’m setting a text to music, I often begin by doing an expressive reading of it, and find halfway through that a good tune has practically written itself.

But the researchers claim to have gone one better, and found a correlation between speech patterns and the structure of major/minor tonality. As quoted on Language Log:

Other things being equal (e.g., intensity, tempo, and rhythm), music using the intervals of the major scale tends to be perceived as relatively excited, happy, bright, or martial, whereas music using minor scale intervals tends to be perceived as more subdued, sad, dark, or wistful.

If that’s the assumption that drove the research, then I’m immediately and implacably skeptical of everything else. My problem begins in the little four-word scientific cliche: “Other things being equal.”

When you’re doing a scientific experiment, of course, you want to make other things as equal as possible so you can eliminate all the variables. That’s fine for science. But I can’t see how on earth you could possibly get it to work with music. “Other things” in music are simply never equal in any way you can quantify.

“Intensity”? In what way? There’s all the difference in the world between a tune that’s being played intensely on a banjo or the same tune played intensely on a solo french horn. A chord played on a piano or the same chord played on an organ. A song sung by a boy soprano and the same song sung by a heroic Wagnerian tenor. A fortissimo passage by a full orchestra and the same volume from a rock band. And if you wanted to, you could notate them all precisely the same way in score. Forget other things being equal; the same things aren’t even equal.

“Tempo and rhythm”? I’ve read that someone once asked Johannes Brahms why he didn’t put metronome markings on his scores, because it seemed inconvenient to the performers. The composer retorted, “Do you think I always want to hear my music at the same speed?” Any good performer knows that a metronome marking is a suggestion–helpful for determining the composer’s intent, to be sure, but impossible to replicate with mechanical precision unless you’re actually playing with the aid of a machine. (Metronomes, computers, and click tracks come to mind–mechanical aids the lot of them.) A good performer will vary the tempo ever so slightly depending on the acoustics of the room and the emotional temperature of the crowd. Conversely, some entire genres of music (think Chopin) demand to be played rubato, slowing or speeding the tempo at will within a phrase to increase the emotional effect. The same piece never sounds the same twice.

That’s just where things are supposedly the same. Changing it up makes it even more complicated. The same chord in open voicing or closed voicing (if you’ll pardon a bit of theory shop-talk) has a completely different effect before it even gets off the page. Placing a melody in a different octave, or a different key, or a different chord progression, has a subtle but instantly noticeable effect. You can arrange the same song a dozen different ways. “Other things being equal”? Not very likely.

The only way to construct musical samples that are “equal” in all respects but one is to create lifeless clinical notes, things that can only exist in laboratories, not in concert halls. And that leads to a disproportionately fascinating point brought up by Liberman: In an unpublished study, subjects with musical aptitude were played computer-generated musical samples in which the only difference was between a major chord and a minor chord (raised or lowered third, for you theory folks). The subjects were by no means tone deaf or musically illiterate, but they couldn’t hear the difference.

That’s completely flabbergasting to me, but then I have perfect pitch and have spent a good part of my life determining the difference between notes as a profession, more or less, so I’m probably not the ideally objective clinical subject. If you’re inclined, you can test yourself with the audio samples on the link; I’d be very interested to know your results.

But, whatever the cause of that, it serves nicely to make the point: Even in an arbitrary, artificial, clinical instance where other things are made as equal as they can be, they still aren’t equal, unless they’re so equal it spoils the whole experiment.

That’s why the rest of the rest of the premise doesn’t work: It’s simply wrong to think of all music in major keys as “excited, happy, bright, or martial”, and all music in minor keys as “subdued, sad, dark, or wistful.” Not true at all.

I’m sure the examples that spring most readily to our minds do fit those patterns– “Happy Birthday” and the “Bridal Chorus” are in major tonalities, while the “Funeral March” is minor, to pick some painfully obvious ones. But escape the realm of the obvious into real-life music, and I’m sure you can find plenty of examples that work well outside the perceived box:

That happy, bright, and cheery Christmas carol “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen“? Minor key.
Does any piece of music known to man more purely express “wistfulness” than Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday“? Major key.
Lest you think this is only about associations with lyrics, have a listen to Chopin’s subdued, melancholy, and wistful waltz in A flat major (op. 69, no. 1).
And in case all these melancholy major-key songs are getting you down, how about Hans Zimmer’s excited, happy, bright, and martial theme music from “Pirates of the Caribbean”? In a minor key, savvy.
If you were wondering, my latest composition “Mick McGuire” is jaunty, cheeky, comical, and minor.
[I bet you've got an example or two of your own. Add it in the comments!]

An exception may prove a rule, but a whole bunch of exceptions disprove it. Don’t misunderstand; although I’m pointing out the flaw of the simplistic thinking that says major is always happy and minor is always sad, I’m certainly not attempting to fall off the other side of Martin Luther’s horse. My point is simply that, although harmony and tonality clearly have some degree of built-in “affective reactions,” they aren’t nearly as distinct as the researchers seem to think. It’s not much good trying to discover the causes of a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.

I haven’t even gotten into another obvious fact: “Major” and “Minor” are fairly arbitrary and recent developments in western harmony–a way to adapt melodic modes to triadic harmony–and not even all western music follows them exactly. Lots of modern jazz, blues, and rock, for instance, can’t be placed strictly into “major or minor” categories at all, as they can be based on modes rather than scales. It’s even more pronounced if you listen to music from other cultures: Jewish Klezmer music, for instance, usually sounds “minor” to western ears, yet is easily capable of expressing sheer undiluted joy better than most western major-key songs can dream about. (Think “Hava Nagila” or “Hinei Ma Tov” if you’re lost here.) And a good bit of 20th-century art music did away with tonality altogether, to the general bewilderment of the listening public. Again, if you want to discover something universal about music, you’d have to think a lot bigger.

Now in spite of my gleeful nitpicking and faultfinding here–hey, I work as a copyeditor; it’s kind of what I do–there is a positive point to all of this: Let’s let music be music. When music tries too hard to be “equal,” it fails. A song that sounds just like another song is a boring song. But if you listen to enough good music, you’ll hear things that are completely and gloriously different. The differences are what makes them interesting, exciting, and worth listening to. A few obvious parallels to life might be drawn here.

As E. B. White said of humor, it “can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” The fact that we can’t explain humor scientifically doesn’t stop jokes from being funny. What makes notes on a page, played by certain instruments, present a certain (and fairly consistent) emotional response in its listeners? I don’t know. But it works even if I don’t. That’s why we keep coming back to music, that sense of indescribable wonder.

Melancholy in major: Chopin, Waltz in A flat major, op. 69, No. 1. (11-year-old Sophia plays it as well as I do. Who am I kidding; she’s better.)

Delight in G minor: Chanticleer, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” (Plus some irrelevant “Today Show” chatter!)

Gaimanography

Eric — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:30:00 +0000

Here’s a little something for you fantasy fans. As you might have heard, because I can’t stop talking about it, I’m a fan of fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, author of books (such as Coraline or The Graveyard Book) that enchant children and give nightmares to adults–often from the same story.

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Overheard on Twitter:

@FakeAPStylebook If I write “generally referred to under the rubric of” instead of “named”, will it impress girls?

@masto It depends. Are you Neil Gaiman?

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One of these days I’ll get around to writing some literary appreciation. For now, let’s have a little “Stuff and Nonsense” style fun. See, the thing is this. I can’t look at a picture of him without thinking that he reminds me of somebody….

Carrie has another interpretation, though. She thinks he looks more like….

You saw it here first!

…But what do you think?

Here’s just a sample of why I love this guy: very good advice on how to live your life, if you happen to find yourself in a fairy tale. Who knows; maybe you already are!

Neil Gaiman Reading “Instructions”