Previous Articles

Apr/May 03:
What Is It About Music?
Dwight Liles

Feb/Mar 03:
Soul Song
James Eugene Robinson

Dec 02/Jan 03:
The Beating Heart: Music and Healing
Randi Israelow

Oct/Nov 02:
The Healing Power
of Poetry
Joy Sawyer

Feature Article

WHAT IS IT ABOUT MUSIC?
by Dwight Liles

About the author:
Dwight Liles is Pastor of the Mt. Joy Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee. He has had several hundred Christian songs recorded in a career spanning almost twenty-five years. Perhaps the Dove Award winning songwriter's best-known work is "We Are An Offering" a standard at churches the world over. Proficient on piano and guitar, Dwight's diverse catalogue includes southern gospel, rock, rhythm and blues, pop, and country hits, including 19 #1 songs.

For the last couple of decades or so, I have worked as a songwriter in Nashville, writing songs that have been recorded by various people, mostly in the gospel music industry. It's been truly a blessing to be able to make a living doing something that I find almost more like play than work, but it hasn't been without its frustrations. Working in the music industry is a mixed bag at best. I've found myself torn between artistic aspirations and commercial pressures, and anywhere there is money to be made there are the subtle forces of greed and jealousy, which one either resists with great effort or becomes ensnared by.

The greatest joy of being a professional songwriter, for me, has not been hearing my songs on the radio or seeing my name on the liner notes of somebody's hit record. Of course I've enjoyed that, and I'd be lying if I said otherwise. But what has really stayed with me are the recollections of moments like the following: Sometime in the early 1980s I was at the church my wife and I were attending at that time, just before the Sunday evening service. A young man I had never seen was seated in one of the middle pews. I went to greet him and introduce myself, then he stood up to shake my hand. To make conversation, he asked me what I did, and I explained that I was a songwriter. He wondered if I'd ever written something he might have heard. I listed a few songs that had been recorded, and at one of the titles, the young man literally fell back in his seat with a look of shock on his face. I was not quite prepared for what followed. He said, "You'll never know how much that song means to me". Then he explained that at a point in his life where he was at the very edge of suicidal despair, he had heard that song, and somehow that was the turning point from which he was able to find peace and healing.

What is it about music that does that? I've often wondered how a certain combination of chords and rhythms, melody and words, can reach into the human spirit and change a person. There are times when music seems to have the power, not merely to reflect emotions that are often impossible to express in speech (that would be remarkable enough); but also to set into motion a healing process, a change of life direction. A song can affect a person to the point that such a person might actually testify, "I heard this song, and my life changed". That simply boggles my mind.

It seems that God has built music into the very fabric of sound itself. In high school and college, I learned about the "overtone series". It's very hard to explain to those who haven't studied music, but let me put it this way. Every single sound we hear, every sound in all creation, is composed of combinations of tones that have the power to affect us emotionally. Some sounds strike us as sad, and other sounds strike us as happy, or angry, or comforting, or exciting, because of the way they are put together. The amazing thing is that this experience of sound as emotion is universal. It's in every culture, from the most ancient to the most contemporary.

One of my colleagues in the music industry has these words posted on a plaque posted in his office, written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato:

"Music is a moral law.
It gives soul to the universe,
Wings to the mind,
Flight to the imagination,
A charm to sadness,
Gaiety and life to everything.
It is the essence of order
And lends to all that is good,
Just, and beautiful."

Those words were written thousands of years ago, long before symphony orchestras, phonograph records or compact discs, before Bach or Beethoven, Elvis or the Beatles, Aretha Franklin or Ray Charles. I can't tell you how music could do all that then, nor can I tell you how music can do all that now. But it does.