Line by Line - Verse 2, Line 7

that the musical notes and tones become harmonious through the relation of one with another;
~ James Legge translation, from The Sacred Books of the East, 1891 ~

Voice and sound harmonize each other;
~ Gia-fu Feng and Jane English translation, published by Vintage Books, 1989 ~

Music and voice harmonize each other
~ Derek Lin translation, from Tao Te Ching: Annotated & Explained, published by SkyLight Paths, 2006 ~

You know when you're listening to music because you don't hear noise.
~ Ron Hogan rendition, from Beatrice.com, 2004 ~

This is one of those lines that we each know intuitively. Anyone who loves music knows that the sounds of the instruments mixed with the sounds of voices can speak to a person in a most powerful way. When they blend together in beautiful harmony, we can be swept away to distant places or it can cause us to share a sense of brother and sisterhood with our fellow beings.

Instead of waxing poetically today, I want to share a story about a conscious decision to create great disharmony for the benefit of the poor and suffering. (This may serve as the longest post in this whole series.)

As Ron Hogan states above, we know something is musical because it differentiates itself from plain noise. When I was a high school senior, I turned this principle on its head!

I was the Vice President of our school's Key Club (a high school version of Kiwanis). Each year we participated in a number of service projects to benefit our school and community. One of these standing projects was to ring bells to raise funds for the Salvation Army.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but most Americans are familiar with seeing Salvation Army bell-ringers stationed in front of stores and in shopping malls during November and December of each year. It's a rather boring gig. You stand there ringing this little bell and hope that passersby drop coins and bills in your red kettle.

In years' past, that's precisely what members of our club did. It always made for difficult recruitment of volunteers because it was such a drab activity and most teenagers don't like drab. So, during my senior year, I hatched an idea that would be anything but drab.

We assembled a choir and a band. We practiced for several days. When the day came, we assembled in the middle of a local shopping mall and the mayhem commenced. You see, my wacky plan involved an oddball twist in regards to what most people would think.

Ostensibly, it looked like a strategy whereby people would make donations and then our assembled group would perform by playing/singing Christmas carols. But, oh no, our strategy was the exact opposite. Our gimmick was for passersby to make donations in order to shut us up!

Why would people want to shut us up, you ask. Here's where my wacky genius comes in. As this line of the TTC states, the whole point in music is for sound and voice to harmonize -- we purposely did NOT harmonize. In fact, as the director, my instructions to the band and the members of the choir was to play and sing as wildly off-key as humanly possible. In other words, our intent was to make noise, not music! And let me tell you, we sounded absolutely atrocious!

Needless to say, we had no problem whatsoever in recruiting volunteers that year. What teenager wouldn't want an opportunity to act like a complete dork in public, while raising funds for the community? The best part is that our small high school group raised more funds that year than almost all the other service organizations (both student and adult) combined. We set a record for the Kansas City area!

Me thinks Chuang Tzu (maybe Lao Tzu too) would have been damn proud!

To view the Index page for this series to see what you may have missed or would like to read again, go here.