"We made the room ring"

He didn't show up all that often, so when he did, old Gray-beard, their teacher, was really on edge because the Superintendent of Schools had real power. Gray-beard--that's what the boys called him--was hyper-concerned his scholars perform well. 

Francis LaFlesche's The Middle Five (1909), a collection of vignettes drawn from his boarding school days on the Omaha reservation, tells the tale of the Superintendent's visit and his quizzing the boys, an early version of the Iowa Basic Skills maybe. After a few standard questions--"Boys, who discovered America?" --and, ironically, a few wrong answers, the fat man who drove up in a black carriage, asks Gray-beard, "Are the children taught music?" Gray-beard proudly says the boys enjoy singing standard Sunday School repertoire. 

"I wish you would sing an Indian song for me," he says to the boys. "I never heard one."

And then, as they do, the heart of this story beats:

There was some hesitancy, but suddenly a loud clear voice close to me broke into a Victory song; before a bar was sung another voice took up the song from the beginning, as is the custom among the Indians, then the whole school fell in, and we made the room ring. We understood the song and knew the emotion of which it was the expression. We felt, as we sang, the patriotic thrill of a victorious people who had vanquished their enemies.

The response is unexpected. "That's savage," the Superintendent said. "That's savage! They must be taught music."

Francis LaFlesche, like his famous sisters, profited greatly from his boarding school education and became the foremost ethnologist, not only of his Omaha people, but the neighboring Osage as well. In his stories, Gray-beard doesn't fare well; this is not the only moment in the book when educated white men vividly illustrate that, culturally at least, they're, well, "savages." 

I remembered Francis LaFlesche's story last week in church when, at the end of the service, we sang "By the Sea of Crystal," a hymn which has its own slightly garbled story. A Rev. William Kuypers so loved the score of "Pomp and Circumstance" that he determined, in fine Calvinist shape, to redeem that wonderful music with a text drawn from scripture. And he did.

But the denominational hymnal committee understood that using the music was out of the question given the copywrite, so they created a contest--who could create the finest musical score to carry this new lyric created by Rev. Kuipers?

The committee received--get this!--150 entries, and chose first, second, and third place, then opted, oddly enough (some rumors were afloat), that the new hymnal--the very first (1934) to contain hymns--would publish this brand new hymn, set with the score of one of the contest's honorable mentions. Go figure.

"By the Sea of Crystal" became the theme score of the broadcast ministry of the Christian Reformed Church, the Back to God Hour. Had you asked, my dad would be thrilled to tell you that one of the grandest eras of his life was his six years on the national board, which means that whenever we sing that old hymn (not often), Dad has this strange habit of showing up.

No one ever called "By the Sea of Crystal" savage, and if singing it were ever banned anywhere in the land, I'd be shocked. But last Sunday, I couldn't help but think that what little Frank LaFlesche remembered from his boarding school days was a phenomenon that others have also experienced. 

Magically, music opens itself up to layer after layer of rich, human experience that can and does tumble out totally on its own, as if there were no such thing as time, even "savage" music.

I don't mean to minimize what's behind the incident Francis LaFleshe remembers during the Superintendent's visit. It is, whether consciously or not, naked cultural prejudice. 

I only mean to express the immensity of our shared human experience. What little Frank experiences, he does because music has carried him back to beauty itself. That phenomenon, I dare say, is something we all know.