The Meanings of Music

A Manifesto for HUM

Dedicated to HUM.

Our lives have meaning.

From birth to death, we spend our lives in a quest for meaning. Life is nothing more and nothing less than this.

In this quest language was invented. We communicate many things, some mundane, some important. But consider this: in times of great danger, what will our last words, the words we truly want to say, be?

These then, are the things of the greatest importance. It is for these things that language is born.

We don’t just speak. We sing.

We don’t just sing. We draw, we dance, we paint, we shape.

Music, art, is the longing to share what we can glimpse, experience, point to — but never hold.

What is real.

What is deep.

And what is true.

It is the most meaningful use of language in all cultures, all ancient civilizations, all religions, all humans.

Music is soul moving soul.

A sense of place is a moment in time.
Music embodies a sense of place, in one moment in time. It moves us — no, it compels us to, with our imagination, carry us to a place we long to be.

This world is a strange lot. We put the sick away in hospitals. We leave the elderly in homes. We hide the dying in hospices. In steel cages, we drive past inner-city schools, and avert our eyes.

We look but we cannot see.

No man is an island. The happiness and suffering of others are not separate from our own happiness and suffering. “There is no denying that our happiness is inextricably bound up with the happiness of others. There is no denying that if society suffers, we ourselves suffer.”

Healing Using Music brings music to the convalescing; the wise in years; those writing the last chapter of their lives with dignity; and the young, and amidst their limited resources, full of potential.

HUM is you and I, united: musicians, stagehands, volunteers, alike; building bridges with music, to islands long forgotten, using our very hands if necessary.

And what do we get in return? We get nothing. Gifts are not for the giver. We do it for a world made more beautiful.

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. We believe a life without music is not worth living.

We are HUM. This is why we exist.

“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”