jammin' with    God
a Christian musician’s perspective by Pete Caputo

Let’s go back to the Bible for a moment.  In the book of Job, God says to our friend in sackcloth and ashes… “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?  Tell me, if you understand.  Who marked off its dimensions?  Surely you know!  Who stretched a measuring line across it?  On what were its footings set, or who laid the cornerstone, while the stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?”

Cool!  It’s like the stars were God’s boom box playing while He worked on creating stuff.  So now we know that God likes to listen to tunes.  Hmm… stars singing… well if they sang back then, do they still sing today?  Well I believe they do.  And not only are they still singing, but they’re also singing together, according to this passage.  However, in order to hear what they sound like, we need to determine how to listen.  Perhaps in the case of the stars, the best way to listen is through our eyes, because for the most part, this is how we are made aware of them.

But it’s useless to get too scientific here, because we’ll quickly discover that the relationships between sound and light are not as apparent as we would like them to be.  So perhaps exploring the metaphoric implications will guide us toward a more satisfying answer.

For instance, whenever you see a movie with a scene from deep outer space; you usually hear those long slow stringed instruments or choir sounds setting that mood of awe and wonder.  Why don’t you ever hear polka or R&B in those scenes?  It’s as if on some subconscious level, the artist knows what sounds stars should make. 

Now we all know that you really can’t hear stars, because sound waves don’t do well in the vacuum of space.  But God already told Job that they sing, way before Williams, Lucas and Spielberg came on the scene.  So what gives? 

Well, it’s apparent that the right combination of light and sound will catapult our heartstrings, to the point that we’re even convinced we know what stars sound like.  I’ve seen this work with my four-year-old son.  As I drive him home from daycare, the trip involves proceeding downhill for a few blocks before we make it to our house. Now, mind you… we drive this same route home, practically every day and always at the same fifteen miles per hour.  If I say nothing as we start down the hill, he’s totally oblivious to my driving technique.  But… if I include some sound effects… (like; “woooooooo”), as we start down the hill, all of a sudden, you would think we were on a high speed chase down the streets of San Francisco.  Now he’s totally engaged, having the time of his life convinced that Daddy’s the coolest stunt driver that ever lived.  Trust me… I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

And all I had to do was convince my son what speeding down a hill should sound like. So, how does this help us with understanding how stars sing?  Well, let’s look at another principal… pitch.

I believe pitch is one of the most often overlooked rudiments of life.  You see, pitch is more than just tuning into a frequency of sound; it’s also how a baseball is formally presented to the guy up at bat.  But it’s also the way a salesman tries to sell you his snake oil.  Of course, it’s well known as the type of fork the devil likes to hold, but then again, to someone else, it’s that challenging angle of descent as they swoop down the side of a ski slope, or the way someone fastens their tent, after setting up camp for the evening.  But, the next morning, pitch becomes that sticky gooey dark tree sap that you accidentally lean against while gathering firewood, to make breakfast… hence… “son of a pitch”.  Just kidding.

First of all, with sound, pitch is the indicator of tone, the basic building block from which we develop musical melody and harmony.  Likewise, pitch can be used to distinguish between various frequencies of light energy.  Our eyes receive and convert these pitches, or frequencies, into any one of the various colors of the rainbow.  We recognize these colors as the visible spectrum. 

So while our ears are detecting various pitches of sound, our eyes are busy converting different pitches of light waves into colors.  Different receptors for different wavelengths, right?  But check this out. 

Ever meet someone with perfect pitch?  Most of us can only guess at a note, we’ve just heard.  But some can nail it, every time, with no outside help.  However, when it comes to light and color, practically everybody has perfect pitch.  We look at a stop sign and we know it’s red.  We look at the sky and know it’s blue.  We don’t need to refer to any color chart to verify our findings, like we would refer to a piano to verify a musical note.

So can we use our visual perfect pitch capability to help those of us who are pitch “challenged” when it comes to sound?

For instance, if we know that a stop sign is red, then perhaps it sounds like something, the same way the stars sound like something.  Assume for a moment that all colors ignite certain relationships to sound.  For me, I know that when I play an “F” note, my mind associates the color of bluish green.  When I play an “A”, I see red.  Don’t ask me why.  I’m really not sure.  It’s just always there.  A “D” note is yellow, and “B flat” is orange.

Does this help me to have sonic perfect pitch?  No… not really.  I’m probably something like a 300 batter, when it comes to hitting the perfect pitch.  In fact, I doubt if everyone can make the same relationship to colors and sounds as I do.  I don’t think it really matters as much as the idea that there is a subconscious correlation that’s established, and that relationship fuels the imagination as we play and make our music.

I believe this is partly why transposing a song into a different key usually results in changing the entire mood and feel of a song.  Certain songs were just meant to be played in a specific key and that’s that.  Maybe that’s why we call them “keys”, because they unlock certain levels of emotional and spiritual awareness.  Suddenly we can appreciate that specific pitches of light and sound work together and others just don’t.

The same thing happens with chords, (which are melodic combinations of notes, played at the same time).  A certain chord may just feel just right when a certain song is played in E flat… just sends your heart soaring.  But try and transpose that same song up to A, and it probably looses a lot of its original charm.  Go back to our color example and it starts to make more sense.  Here’s what I mean. 

Everyone knows that blending red and yellow paint gives you orange.  But change the pitch of your color scheme and suddenly your blending two different colors.  Now you’re blending orange and green, and the resulting mixture looks like… well… poo poo.  It’s nowhere near, as desirable a finished product as the original combination, now is it?

Now, there are other variables to consider.  For instance, in bright sunlight, it’s easy to see the redness of an apple against its green leaf and stem.  But take a look at the same fruit at twilight’s last gleaming, and both apple and leaf look gray.  Now we know that the apple is still red and the leaf is still green, but why don’t they look that way, anymore?  Well, we need to understand that certain external circumstances, (in this case, the lighting), will affect our perception of color. 

We also know that movement has an interesting effect on both sound and light.  This is especially noticeable with sound.  It’s called the Doppler effect.  A car speeding by is a good example of this.  The pitch or tone starts to drop as the car moves further and further away from you.  And the faster it’s traveling, the more dramatic this sound effect is.  Light is also exaggerated in the same way, however it’s much more difficult to perceive this phenomenon, due to the speed of light.  Basically, the point I’m trying to make here is, that external forces have a definite impact on how we perceive light and sound.

Think about the first time someone decided to call a certain type of music the “blues”.  We can trace this back to the times of slavery and oppression back in the early 19^th century to hear where and how the rudiments of this musical style began, but why was it called the blues?  Who was it that first related the pain and suffering to the color blue?  Why not pink or chartreuse?  Well for whatever reason, blue is the color that stuck, and for the most part, no one questions it. 

It was the external conditions of oppression and cruelty that cast a distinctive color, or pitch, if you will, on the genre we know of today, as the blues.  And as a musical style, it works only when portrayed in that light.  You can play the same notes and chords, sing the same words… but take away the pain and suffering, and suddenly… you ain’t got the blues no more.

You see… every style of music has its own type of light that it shines best in.  And every star has its own unique song that it sings.  You just need to learn how to see it, as well as hear it.

But here’s what I’d like to jam on for a moment.  I couldn’t help but notice in the passage I sited earlier from the book of Job, that the stars didn’t start to sing until there was mention of the “cornerstone”.  Isn’t that interesting?  Now we all know who He’s referring to here… don’t we?  I’ll give you one guess who the bible refers to as the “chief cornerstone”. 

In an earlier jam, we explored how much Jesus was able to accomplish in three short years of earthly ministry.  But maybe we don’t spend enough time thinking about His impact on the rest of creation.

Remember the account of Jesus making his triumphant entrance into Jerusalem?  The crowd cheered and cried out “Hosanna in the highest!”  This made the religious leaders furious.  They ran up to Jesus and told him to make the people stop. 

Well all Jesus could say to them in reply was… “if the people don’t cry out, then even the rocks will begin to cry out.”

I used to think that it was a little cocky of Jesus to say that, until I started realizing that He didn’t say that out of arrogance… in fact, He actually said that out of humility.  If He really wanted to show off, He could have had the stars join in, maybe a few bars of…“Jesus is in the house” or “All Hail the Chief” or “He Will, He Will Rock You.”

OK, I think I made my point here.  But before you go checking out the musical styles of some heavenly body, let me leave you with this one last thought.  We were all created to sing before the chief cornerstone, whether we know it or not.  And just because some choose to sing to another rock, doesn’t change the truth that there is only one living rock… only one that can truly cause creation itself to fall prostate in worship and adoration. 

But what makes Him so awesome isn’t the fact that He can make stones or stars sing,  what’s really mind blowing is the realization that a God as awesome as all that will never force Himself on you.  Instead He just waits for you to come on your own free will.  And when you do… then you’ll finally know what it’s like to hear real stars sing.

Jammin exercise:                           Take a good look and listen to the commercials on TV and radio.  Listen to the musical jingles and catch phrases.  Aren’t they almost always nothing more than just praise and worship for some kind of product?  I don’t say this condescendingly or in a derogatory manner.  I mean it. 

A long time ago, the advertising industry caught on to the biblical principal of praise, and realized that if they can convince their audience that some widget has come into this life to save us, than we’ll cough over the bucks to have it.  They know better than most of us that we were all created to praise.  So day after day, night after night, they continue to “pitch” us their wares and wonders, as we stare googly eyed into the luminous glow of our flat-screened hymnals.

Well… here’s your jamming exercise.  Don’t let Madison Avenue have a “one up” on your praise and worship.  The next time you’re given the opportunity to praise your King, do it with your whole heart.  Do it with the understanding that you were created to praise Him.  Do it with the attitude… “If I don’t do it, then the stones will cry out.”  And finally do it, because He is truly worthy of your praise. 

Hey… you’re not going to let some bright-eyed cutie-pie singing about some bar of soap do a better job at praising than you now… are you?