Kurt Vonnegut once wrote "If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: 'The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.'"
Vonnegut died last spring, as we all, God forbid, will.
Yet there is something that seems so resonant and true about this particular statement of his.
My sister came back from working in Uganda in August with pictures and video of beautiful destitute young orphans lifting their hands to the big heavens and singing and clapping and dancing and laughing; wonderful music despite war, disease, and devastation. The world in their smiles made me ironically sorry for all the beautiful affluent young kids I know turning up numb today in America from TV waves and video games.
I wonder if they've ever known something so sublime as music sung in an orphanage.
I wonder if it really was music, as jazz historian Albert Murray thinks, that kept slave suicide rates much lower than slave owner suicide rates in the age of American slavery.
I wonder if all the pomp and production tangled up in Western music today keeps people like me from hearing anything divine in our songs.
I don't think it does — not even in the most unnatural, contrived, over-produced, money-driven forums we can invent. I recently set out to prove so to myself on YouTube. Clicking through awful videos of American Idol auditions, my hypothesis came under heavy scrutiny, and seemed ready to buckle.
After laughing at the first few terrible singers, I began to feel sad because no one loves these people enough to tell them they can't sing. And somewhere amid the laughs, gloom and obstinate drive to test my theory that not even muckraking reality TV can push the still small dialogue between the divine and the human soul out of music, I found myself watching clips of "Britain's Got Talent" (another Simon Cowell show).
In this spectacle that drudged up dancing pigs and puppeteers, I saw a shy cell phone salesmen named Paul from South Wales tell the judges he was there "to sing opera," and I watched them scoff at the possibility. I felt the live audience uneasily shift their collective weight as he reluctantly nodded for the song to start. I heard an incredible hush come over the crowd as he began to beautifully sing Puccini's "Nessun Dorma," and I noticed the judges' mouths begin to fall open with awe. Midway through the audition the audience spontaneously burst into applause and began to stand and shout. As he finished, the final "Vincerò!" brought the building to its feet with applause and welled deep sighs and tears to the eyes of at least one of the judges. I blinked a tear out of my own eye.
You can try and tell me what happened on that silly British TV show was merely physical or chemical or sentimental, and that is a perfectly rational way to look at it. But what swept through that auditorium and brought those people out of their seats does not seem rational in the least.
I looked down my own nose at my own cheek and saw a single tear glimmer there. That strikes me as quite irrational and positively spiritual.
What if all the passion, awe and electricity of that fleeting moment really was divine?
What if there really is a God speaking softly into the night of human souls in this dark world with such moments?
What if His message to humanity, like Calaf's to the Princess in "Nessun Dorma," really is something like "Dilegua, O notte! Tramontate, stelle! Tramontate, stelle! All'alba vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò!"
"Vanish, O night! Set, stars! Set, stars! At daybreak I shall win! I shall win! I shall win!"
To hear the music, to really hear, is to believe in the ultimate triumph of good over evil. It is to know a bright new day is possible even from the depths of blackest night.
Daniel is an English literature senior. He can be reached at daniel.d.wallace@asu.edu.
