The lights are down and we’re all just silhouettes against a backdrop of faint yellow lighting. It’s as if everyone onstage and in the audience has collectively agreed to hold our breaths in quivering anticipation. And then the lights go on, flooding our bright eyes and stoic poses with gold. We all inhale sharply when the conductor raises his hand. Finally, the first chord is played with clarity on the piano, and we sing, our voices energetic and full. There’s magic in the air.
Image source: StockSnap
Last quarter, I participated in UC Davis’ University Chorus. Throughout high school, I’d been in and out of the choir and had never found myself feeling completely ingrained in the music. It had always been a class I went to during the day, enjoyed when I was there, but afterward never gave much thought to. Singing with a large group of people had never been something I was totally invested in. I’d decided when I auditioned for University Chorus that this experience was going to be different, because of something one of my friends had told me over the summer.
We were talking about whether we believed in God. I do believe in Him but, in the back of my mind, I’ll always find myself questioning whether or not He really does exist. I’m a pretty logical person — I need to see something before I really believe it, so a belief in God is sort of counterintuitive to me. So I asked this friend how he was so sure that God exists, and what he said struck me.
Image source: Pixabay
He described the feeling he gets when he sings. From his point of view, there’s a special kind of string plucked in your heart that you can only feel trembling when you sing, especially with a group of people, that could really only be attributed to something spiritual or supernatural, like God. I was surprised when he said this, not because it was a foreign idea, but because I was surprised by how familiar the concept sounded. I thought back to all of the times I’d been onstage, lost in music, and my friend’s explanation of what singing felt like, and it made so much sense.
I rehearsed with University Chorus two times a week last quarter. What my friend told me about music as a spiritual force has always lingered in the back of my mind. I would focus hard on feeling those strings being tugged at in my heart, and it sounds cliche, but it’s true — I’d feel like I could fly. I still have my doubts about God, but I definitely do believe there’s something beautifully supernatural in the air whenever I’m singing.
Image source: Pixabay
That’s why I perform. The lights illuminating me and my peers, the dissonance in our perfectly blended voices, the tilts of our heads and scrunching of our shoulders as we move to the music — all of it comes together to create the magic that dances through our hearts.
Cover image source: Pixabay