Divine Inspiration

 

Today over the lunch hour I went to a Just Bach concert at the Lutheran church where I used to sing. The main piece on the program was the Orchestral Suite in B Minor, which is one of my very favorites - the flute does this thing in the second movement that hits my sweet spot every time. There's something so inevitable about a lot of Bach's music, like it had to exist. It's like it comes directly from God. I have always wondered what it was like to write something so divinely inspired. Did Bach get done with the Orchestral Suite in B Minor and think, "This is amazing! People are going to be playing this centuries from now!" Or was he just like, "That's not bad - I think I'll keep it." They say people aren't good judges of their own work, but I feel like I know which of my writing is garbage and which was inspired, because the inspired stuff comes to me so quickly, it's like it already existed and I was just finding it. The two poems I wrote that were set to music came to me very quickly. One I wrote on Christmas morning after a night of partying, when I had to get up five hours later to sing again. It's like it just came out of nowhere. The other one I wrote while sitting through a service at the Lutheran church, thinking how to explain Mary to Lutherans, and I suddenly thought of her as a rose in the garden with all us other flowers, only she's flawless. She's human, not divine (like the Gardener), but she's the only perfect human. I guess the Lutherans liked it, because they are the ones who set it to music and performed it, but the composer tried to get it published by Augsburg Publishing, and they rejected it because it's too, you know, Marian. Maybe he should try to get the Christmas motet published, since that's not so obviously Catholic. He says if either one is ever published I would get half the royalties, so I'll let you know if those big royalty checks ever come rolling in.

Famous Hat