I\u2019ve been around music all my life, for as long as I can remember. In fact, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s ever been a time when I didn\u2019t have a tune in my head or a piece of music in my hands.<\/p>\n
Music runs in our family. I was a voice major in college; my husband, Bill, is a composer; our six children have studied in the finest music schools and conservatories. All of us have performed together around the world with our own group, the Annie Moses Band, started when the kids were young.<\/p>\n
After a show, someone is sure to come up and say, \u201cYou\u2019re all so talented. I wish our lives could be blessed by music like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo reason they can\u2019t,\u201d I\u2019m quick to say.<\/p>\n
Music is a gift from heaven, meant for everyone, not just the winners of American Idol <\/em>or The Voice<\/em>. It\u2019s for anyone who has ever tapped a toe to a tune on the radio or hummed a movie theme.<\/p>\n It\u2019s for people like my grandmother Annie Moses, namesake of our band, who survived the soul-dulling drudgery of picking cotton with one song after another. Music lifted her out of misery. That\u2019s what music does. It moves us, inspires us, gives us courage, comforts us, connects us to God and to others.<\/p>\n It shone like the sun on Annie Moses\u2019 hardscrabble life, which is why we honor her in song. I can\u2019t count the ways music makes our lives better, but I\u2019ll try.<\/p>\n Music helps us listen.<\/strong> On Sunday nights, we sang the classics like \u201cI\u2019ll Fly Away,\u201d \u201cThe Old Rugged Cross\u201d and \u201cIn the Sweet By-and-By,\u201d the harmonies filling the air. Anyone who wanted came up to perform: gospel quartets, banjo pickers, washboard virtuosos, singers who aspired to be the next Johnny Cash or Patsy Cline.<\/p>\n Were they perfect? Goodness, no. But we leaned forward, listened, clapped and hollered. If we didn\u2019t get a melody or all the words, we got the performers\u2019 intentions, which must be the way God hears us.<\/p>\n Listening to music is good for our hearts and <\/em>our brains. Scientists have shown that babies are born favoring the songs and voices they heard in their mother\u2019s womb! As they grow up, children gain nuances of accent, timbre, inflection and tone from exposure to music. It improves memory.<\/p>\n A good musical education isn\u2019t about training prodigies for world-class performance; it\u2019s to expand young minds for whatever profession they pursue. It opens them up to a universal language. Maybe we should add a fourth \u201cR\u201d to the three we already have: Readin\u2019, \u2019Ritin\u2019, \u2019Rithmetic and Rhythm.<\/p>\n Music puts us on a team.<\/strong> First she insisted that Daddy buy a piano. For twelve dollars a month he financed a spinet that sat in the living room like a short, stout nanny, a doily on her head, surviving spills, wax buildup, termite swarms, mice and cats.<\/p>\n I was five when Mama gathered my two older sisters and me at the spinet and taught us to sing in three-part harmony. We sounded like some fusion of the Andrews Sisters and Alvin and the Chipmunks. No matter. We hit the road.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Daddy took us up in his Cessna, evangelizing by air, landing in cow pastures, beside cornfields and on empty back roads. In tiny cracker-box churches, Daddy preached and we sang, Mama at the keyboard of some old pump organ.<\/p>\n We learned to own a stage, to speak and perform in front of others, uplifted by their applause, delighted when folks sang with us. Our music made us an integral part of Daddy\u2019s team. But you don\u2019t have to be a performer to know that feeling.<\/p>\n Just sing with someone else, even if it\u2019s only \u201cHappy Birthday.\u201d Every voice makes a difference, every part counts. The whole is always greater than the sum. Jesus said wherever two or more are gathered in his name he is there. Seems like that gets amplified when we make music in his name.<\/p>\n Music expands our horizons.<\/strong> There we were taught by Mrs. Johnson, a large woman with royal-blue eye shadow and her hair in a French twist, who had a profound love of music. She would clinch her baton and click time infallibly on the edge of the piano. God help you if you couldn\u2019t keep the tempo.<\/p>\n Mrs. Johnson gave me a whole new repertoire for the piano: tunes from Broadway musicals, movie themes, Hanon exercises, classics by the great composers, all performed at our semi-annual recitals.<\/p>\n I\u2019d hear an older student, one more experienced than I, play a challenging \u00e9tude or a two-part invention and think, Maybe I can do that someday. <\/em>We\u2019d go to local and state competitions, sweating through adjudications under the auspices of the National Guild of Piano Teachers.<\/p>\n For a country girl who lived in the hills where we could barely get TV reception, it was eye-opening. I\u2019ll never forget going to a competition in Little Rock my sophomore year of high school. First I played\u2014did all right\u2014 then wandered into another hall and sat down to hear a master class with a distinguished voice teacher.<\/p>\n A college-age girl with long, bushy hair and a loose-fitting dress stepped out onstage and began to sing in a foreign language. I couldn\u2019t believe my ears. An enormous velvety voice took hold of a difficult melody and reached for the stratosphere. I was on the edge of my seat.<\/p>\n Then I listened to the teacher. With just a few comments she made what I thought was a perfect performance even better.<\/p>\n Oh, Robin, that kind of singing is for rich city people, <\/em>I told myself, not you. <\/em>But what if I could study with a voice teacher like that and become a singer too? \u201cInez Silberg, Guest Vocal Instructor,\u201d the program said.<\/p>\n As fate would have it\u2014or rather, as God would\u2014that very teacher, Mrs. Silberg, became my instructor several years later at Oklahoma City University and she worked her wonders on me. But first a dream had had to be planted.<\/p>\n With music there is always something new to hear, something new to learn. Your world keeps getting bigger.<\/p>\n Music gives voice to our prayers.<\/strong> Or take the 150 prayers at the center of our Bible, the Psalms. We should never forget that they were written to be sung, sometimes with the musical instructions right in the text: \u201cwith timbrel and dance\u2026with strings and pipe.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Words were set to music for very practical reasons in a preliterate age. It was easier to remember them when you sang. But music also helps us give voice to our prayers. Through music we can express our deepest longings; we have access to what we might not be able to say otherwise to God.<\/p>\n Today I like to remind our oldest, Annie, who sings and plays the violin in the band, what a lot of noise she made as a newborn. She cried constantly.<\/p>\n Once I left her in the church nursery and when I returned to reclaim her, the nursery director gestured to Annie\u2019s bawling face and told me, point-blank, \u201cDon\u2019t bring her back.\u201d<\/p>\n The only thing that calmed her was George Gershwin\u2019s \u201cSummertime\u201d sung high and loud. I didn\u2019t care where I had to do it\u2014singing top volume while putting her in the car seat or pushing the shopping cart through the supermarket\u2014 as long as it had its soothing effect.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t long before I realized one of the verses was really a prayer, a prayer a mother sings to her child: \u201cOne of these mornings \/ You\u2019re gonna rise up singing \/ Then you\u2019ll spread your wings \/ And you\u2019ll take to the sky\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n And that\u2019s exactly what happened to Annie and to all of my children. They have spread their wings and taken to the sky, with their music, their lives and their careers.<\/p>\n My prayers have been answered beyond my wildest imaginings. Music has blessed them and they have spread the blessing, in the Annie Moses Band, in every piece we play and every song we sing. May our music bless you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been around music all my life, for as long as I can remember. In fact, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s ever been a time when I didn\u2019t have a tune in my head or a piece of music in my hands. Music runs in our family. I was a voice major in college; my husband, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":"","_ppma_block_editor_authors":"","_wpscppro_dont_share_socialmedia":false,"_wpscppro_custom_social_share_image":0,"_facebook_share_type":"","_twitter_share_type":"","_linkedin_share_type":"","_pinterest_share_type":"","_linkedin_share_type_page":"","_instagram_share_type":"","_medium_share_type":"","_threads_share_type":"","_bluesky_share_type":"","_mastodon_share_type":"","_selected_social_profile":[],"_wpsp_enable_custom_social_template":false,"_wpsp_social_scheduling":{"enabled":false,"datetime":null,"platforms":[],"status":"template_only","dateOption":"","timeOption":"","customDays":"","customHours":"","customDate":"","customTime":"","schedulingType":""},"_wpsp_active_default_template":true},"categories":[252],"tags":[62,189,203,57,51,72,36],"ppma_author":[848],"class_list":["post-22599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finding-life-purpose","tag-blessings","tag-church","tag-community","tag-creativity","tag-inspirational-stories","tag-stories-of-faith","tag-success"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nMy daddy was a missionary in the rugged Kiamichi Mountains in Oklahoma. Our little church never had more than 60 or 70 people in the pews, but on the stage in front of the congregation everybody was welcome and everybody participated.<\/p>\n
\nMama didn\u2019t have much more than a year of piano and voice lessons from a teacher in junior high school, but she was determined that her three daughters get every opportunity that she lacked\u2014no mean feat in our rural area.<\/p>\n
\nMama insisted on looking for the best music teacher she could find for her children, which meant driving us in Daddy\u2019s pickup 20 miles every Saturday morning on rutted dirt roads to Mena, Arkansas.<\/p>\n
\nWhen the Israelites were brought safely out of Egypt, they thanked God in their prayers, but how did they do it? With music, with song. \u201cI will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously,\u201d goes the Song of Moses, \u201cthe horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea\u201d (Exodus 15:1).<\/p>\n