Music can do things politicians and promises and platforms don’t seem able to do. They can move people to come together and, in doing so, make the world a better place.
For today’s younger generations this was probably most evident during the recent Live 8 around-the-world concert that happened this past weekend just prior to the Group of Eight summit meeting in Scotland. The goal of the concert was to encourage the world’s most powerful nations to consider debt forgiveness, trade concessions, and $25 billion in aid to Africa, where many of the world’s poorest countries are located.
Only time will tell if the rockers and legends and country singers and rappers made a difference, but at least they were out there stumping for what they believe. By doing so they provided witness to some problems and also reminded me of another concert, Live Aid, that happened twenty years ago.
Maybe older generations don’t relate to these two events, but had their own moment when music played an emotional role. As the story goes, it was Christmas Eve during World War II. American and German soldiers were camped near each other in some cold region of Western Europe, each group in its own foxhole hunkered down for the night. For all purposes, fighting had ground to a halt.
Then the Americans began singing “Silent Night,” and when they finished they heard the German soldiers singing it in their own language. For those few minutes there were no warring factions; there were only individual humans joined together by the power of music.
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