Nancy Scott McBride’s most recent poem to appear here was “The Mouths of Children” (September 2017)
Making Music, Not War
By Nancy Scott McBride
We meet once a month, the guitar player and I,
to rehearse the communion service at church.
It’s awkward at first, tuning the instrument,
finding the right key, tempo, volume, deciding
who sings the melody and who the harmony.
But there’s always that moment when we start
to forget ourselves, when all our self-consciousness
and the many differences between us begin to melt.
We begin to think, feel, breathe together, becoming
one with the guitar and one with each other in
a kind of love, a kind of lovemaking.
We let everything but the music fall away,
and there is only the blending,
the bonding,
the song.
lovely poem! Music has a special power all its own. Getting ‘lost’ in the notes is a way of finding humanity and spirituality all at once. Beautiful writing. I enjoyed. Thanks.
Lovely, so real, captures the creative moment
Dear Nancy, “Making Music, Not War,” is profound both as poem and as descriptive of the unfolding of a process. It took me straight to the heart of making music — not to be confused with technically virtuosic “performance.”
I can speak to your poem from my great love, classical music. Great chamber music , symphony, opera, choral concerts, etc., are moments that feel like they transcend time, space, and person — as though the music is revealing itself through them, and they are not intentionally or consciously playing the notes. Some people think of this as “channeling.” The music is creating the very ones who are “making music.”
Thomas Ogden describes this as the presence of a creative “third” between psychoanalyst and patient in therapy. In music, I can sense or feel it happening, but it is not happening altogether inside each individual, but as if it is a separate presence between them. Thank you for a poem that so deeply penetrates the making of music.