[Choir] Salmon Rushdie's words...

[Richard Riley]

I do not know where Rushdie's words come from. (Actually, I do: they
come from Audrey Coty, a friend of Susan's!)


"Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe
it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the
world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies,
arrangements, symphonies, ragas, Chinese operas, jazz, the blues; that
such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical
intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all
within the span of a human hand, from which we can build our
cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or
wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just
creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives
are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways
deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world
that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might
be, if we were worthy of the world. Five mysteries hold the keys to
the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the
contemplations of great art, and being in the presence of death or
disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song."