please, no Mormon music at my funeral (~200 words, but more is coming)

[ritaxis]

So one of my best friends lost her fiance last week. There's a very complicated, very sad story behind it which I do not deem appropriate to tell here. However -- the deceased, while not a Mormon himself, came from a Mormon family. With whom he had had a rocky relationship -- while they seem to have adapted to the masculine pronoun, they were still pretty much floored by it, after ten years or so, and had in fact told the nieces and nephews that their aunt had died, so the kids, who came to the funeral and were paraded like show dogs, were kind of taken aback.

I did have a point. This wasn't exactly a Mormon funeral. It was just an informal memorial at the cemetery with an open casket, a few floral displays, constant elevator music, and an inoffensive organ player. Oh, and the guy won't be buried for a few days, until the ground dries out. But. The relatives picked the music. We had to sing two of the worst songs I have ever had the misfortune to hear or sing. The words were insufferably sentimental and stupid, as if Smurfs had gotten religion. The tunes. Oh dear dog, the tunes. You know your basic Christian hymn? The old-timey ones like "What a Friend We Have In Jesus" and "Rock of Ages?" Think of the shapes those tunes have. They've endured for a reason: they are as mathematical in their formulation as Mozart. You know what note is going to come next even if you've never heard it before, and it's not boring that you know it, it's comforting, it's familiar and friendly (even when the words aren't sometimes). Now these tunes -- the composers had obviously taken several bars from old-time, familiar Christian hymns, and connected them together in a way that was deliberately different from the standards so they wouldn't be confused with them, and then stuck in a few high notes and weird changes that you just would not expect. And it's not a pleasant surprise: as often as not, when you get to the weird note your voice cracks because your vocal chords want to go to one of the twop or three notes that naturally follow a phrase like that, and they panic when you make them go someplace else entirely. Obviously written by people with tin ears and no sense of rhythm, not even put together by formula, or if they were put together by formula, they didn't understand the formula they were using.

I told my daughter on no account was she to allow Mormons to bring music to my funeral.

Speaking of music, I get to/have to spend Saturday at the East-West Shriners Game, a football fundraiser for the chain of children's hospitals the Shriners run. The Santa Cruz High School Band has been going to it for forty years. This year, because it's one of my many last chances to hear my daughter perform with the high school band, I'm going. Also because I have somehow become quartermaster till the end of the year. That means I fit them into their uniforms and make sure they have everything with them: shiny helmet, plume, gauntlets, gloves (the gauntlets are really cuffs, but I can't help that), "Santa Cruz" sash, plaid sash . . . this time, speaking of funerals, the Shriners are going to have a memorial to Pete Tillman, a local boy semi-famous football player who was shot by his own guys in Iraq. And the Shriners said they might want to spontaneously at the last minute put the bagpipes into the memorial. So the kids have been practicing "Amazing Grace," though it's not really a bagpipe tune and they haven't played it in three years, since one of their schoolmates was swept off the rocks over by Natural Bridges beach and they playted it for her at the school assembly.

It's not a bagpipe tune, but it does sound good on the pipes. The "tradition" of playing "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes at funerals started about the same time as the Star Trek movie featured it -- thirty years ago? or less? -- but as far as I can tell the movie didn't start it, it documented its beginning.

Comments

Amazing Grace at funerals

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

These early versions of the hymn, though, did not use the melody familiar to everyone today. That melody was common in early America under the name "New Britain" or sometimes titles like "Harmony Grove" and, oddly, "Amazing Grace." The authorship of the melody is lost to history, but we do know that the adapting of Newton's text to the "New Britain" melody occurred in 1855; a colorful song leader and evangelist named William Walker ("Singing Billy") put it in his widely used songbook Southern Harmony. From there it quickly became a part of hundreds of church repertoires.

The song got into an even broader range of popular culture when it became a favorite of the folk revival movement in the 1960s. It appeared in the popular film Alice's Restaurant and as a hit single by folksinger Judy Collins. Then, in 1972, the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards made a recording of it featuring bagpipes, and it became a surprise hit, both in England and the United States. The recording helped establish a tradition of pipers playing it at political or military funerals, and at the services for policeman killed in the line of duty.
http://www.pbs.org/americanrootsmusic/pbs_arm_es_religious.html