A Great Piano Makes Not A Sound

Recently I was in Los Angeles producing a CD for a classical pianist. For those who are not familiar with the term job description “producer”, that’s the person hired by the people paying for the recording and who is responsible for insuring that the recording is finished on time, under budget and sounds like something that someone will buy. It’s a very stressful job so for a break I would go down the street to the Starbucks and get a sugar-free, blended chai tea and sit outside in the sun where I would convince the artist that the pieces we were recording sounded good and take phone calls from the executive producer and assure him that it was still under budget. One morning while sitting there a young man who said to me, “I love all your movies” approached us! I was confused and didn’t know quite what to say, but he continued talking, “do you have any advice for me?” I thought for a moment and told him, “don’t give up your dreams.” He grasped my hand, thanked me, and scurried down the street. Welcome to LA.

But the real point of this story happened the first day we were in the studio. The pianist endorses Bosendorfer pianos so they delivered a nine-foot, six-inch, glossy black concert grand. Even in this studio that was an impressive instrument and one of the engineers came into the room to see this wonder. “It’s beautiful.” He commented. The artist starting explaining all the sonic marvels of the piano when the engineer cut him off, shaking his head and said, “this is LA, man, it looks good, that’s all that matters.” In a city that celebrates appearance above all else these stories are expected. But in our Christian life are we sometimes like that piano? It looked good but until someone sat down and used it the way it was intended to be used it was a $150,000.00 piece of furniture and made no music on it’s own. If we allow ourselves to be used we might suffer the fate of the piano and pick up and few scratches, maybe blood on the keys and not always be perfectly in tune, but used for our true purpose. By the way I never found out whom the young man thought I was, I was afraid to ask.

Remember, I’m listening.

Ralph Sappington

Singing Thier Own Song

It’s summer in Cape Town. The waves are crashing off of Cape Point where the baboons are looting the cars that were left unlocked in the parking lot, gathering anything edible, and sitting on the hoods of the cars eating their purloined spoils. The church is full on Sunday morning where the parishioners sit for two hours, drenched in sweat, listening to a liturgy translated from German into Afrikaans; the language imposed on the people by the former apartheid government.
“How I wish we could use our own language and sing our own songs.” Motsamai laments to me after the service. We stand on the front steps of the church and watch the congregation create a cloud of dust as they make their way towards the former township, two miles down the road.
“Perhaps in my lifetime.” Pieter Pretorius answers, optimistically.
“But Pieter,” Complains Mercy, his wife of fifty four years, “this is the way we’ve always done church.”
Motsamai was thirty-four and Pieter and Mercy were in their seventies when this conversation took place about ten years ago. Not much has changed except that Motsamai is now the assistant to the bishop and he is still struggling to change things in the South African church before all the young people have left the church for good. You see, they just don’t want to hear that old language anymore.
“How did you change things in America?” Motsamai asked me. “America was once a colony and now you do your own music.” He was visiting the states and came to a worship service where we did a jazz liturgy. I had to tell him that even though on this night, in this Lutheran church we may have played indigenous music on most Sunday mornings it was just like that Sunday in Cape Town; we still were afraid to use our own language and play our own songs.
It’s winter in Cape Town and the rain pours off the roof of the Lutheran Youth Centre. The children running between the building gleefully kick at the puddles of water. Inside the pastor begins the service by intoning, “God es liefde.” Even though it’s in Afrikaans I know it means, “God is Love.”

How does this relate to us? On April 22nd we are presenting the choir cantata “This Is My Story”, the life of Fanny Crosby in story and song. Fanny wrote over 8000 hymns including “Blessed Assurance”. She started writing hymns because the songs they sang in her church were dull, boring and didn’t relate to the people her age who were leaving the church. This was New York in 1856, but it sounds like the story from South Africa in 1996. Come at 10:30am and hear the music and the story of American legend, and one of our first contemporary musicians.
Remember, I’m Listening.