Doxology

By Andrea Lingle

Praise God from whom all blessings flow

Johann Sebastian Bach was an eighteenth century composer whose alleged improvisations on the keyboard were so lucent that I have pondered braving life without modern conveniences to travel back in time to hear him. As I don’t have a time traveling machine, the best I can do is to sit down at the piano and play the notes he penned so many years ago. Bach’s Minuets and Two Part Inventions are where I started. As Bach’s themes spun out under my fingers, even in the relatively simple Inventions, the designs beguiled me. The more I played them, the more interesting they became. Perched like an enormous bird on the edge of my piano bench, I watched my fingers with curious interest. It seemed like a miracle to see them weave along the keys, reincarnating a whim of a long dead notesmith. 

Notes I didn’t write. Fingers I didn’t form. Music I couldn’t claim.

Music I could only and immensely enjoy.   

Praise God, all creatures here below;

The piano that sat in the performance hall at my alma mater was satin black. The auditorium seats wobbled up and down and were upholstered in clementine orange velvet. I wore a celery green dress made of dupioni silk. I was playing a thirty minute recital, and Bach was on the program: this time a Prelude and Fugue. His delightful sonic puzzles hadn’t lost their fascination even after two years of music theory and months of practice. 

Oddly, I don’t remember how the music sounded during that recital. I remember what I wore, the heat of the spotlight, and that I had to pull up my dress strap during the Beethoven, but I don’t remember the music. The music I remember is from the hours I spent in the practice rooms training my fingers, scrutinizing the underlying theory, and tracing the motifs from one voice to the next. The high moments with Bach, for me, came in the mundane, daily practice.   

Praise God above, ye heav’nly host;

These days Bach and I still meet. In little hidden moments of the days and weeks, I sneak away to my piano. For fifteen minutes, I play, haltingly, through his tangled ideas. Gone is the polish of hours of practice. I am almost twice the age of the woman who played in silk. Since her time, life has trundled in abundantly. Like the shoreline, shaped by wave after wave (and a storm or two), day in and day out, I have become remote from her without intending to change. 

Even so, we share Bach, she and I. 

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!

What journeys through the years with us shapes our lives. In claiming that the mundane is sacred, we acknowledge that it isn’t the high holy days that shape our souls, it is the toothbrushing and kitchen-sink standing and day after day after day practice.