There are four sheet music versions of this song available to paid subscriber in the Library section of my Substack - you can find them here
I’ve discovered that there are a lot of versions of my song “The Oneness of Everything” online, on YouTube. It’s kind of an adventure, going through different musicians’ takes on what I have written down. It’s probably not my place to say I’ve been culturally misappropriated (and this wouldn’t be the song to complain about) but there’s no telling what can become of putting black dots on a graph.
I was in a dentist’s office decades ago and there was thankfully no background music playing. At that time, before hand-held devices, I carried around music staff paper in my zippered notebook. I still have a zippered notebook, and it’s still filled with papers. Which is good, because it has a zipper and you can put it on top of your car and drive away and then go back and get it. What organization I have! Everything to be remembered is now on my computer, except for what isn’t. I haven’t figured out how to have it all at my fingertips on the phone, but I know it can be done.
So, the dentist’s office: I pulled out a piece of paper and thought what I could do to pass the time would be to write a hymn tune. Like a limerick it’s a short well-trodden path, four lines mostly, unless you’re going to break away and be radical and add maybe a repeated line or something. I wrote down three tunes, just imagining and not even humming aloud. I have studied enough to be able to analyze what notes of the scale I’m coming up with and put them on a music staff. The other two were forgettable.
But this one, starting on the 5th (sol) and going down the scale, plateauing on repeated 3rds of the scale (mi) before going on down to 1, then jumping up an octave, then 6 and back to 5 – it had something that set the tone of heading out somewhere. This melody came to me in a partnership with the bass starting on the 3rd and making some suspensions in the melody as it climbs up. 3 – 4 against the 5 in the melody. Then – 5 – and sharp 5 under those 3s – and finally 6 and then 4, as the melody jumps from 1 up and octave to 1, or is it 8? (low do to high do).
OK enough numbers and Italian syllables. I tell you this to descript what I think I was thinking. The thing is, the melody goes down as the bass line goes up. We call that counterpoint – grade one. The first long line, ending on 5, then needed a second long line, which eventually cadences back down to the 1 – (do). I would write such things with just a single line for melody and the harmony designated with chord symbols – D/ F# (a D chord with the 3rd in the bass) and so on.
This is not magic, but basic stuff you learn in music school, or on the street or the gig. Well, this melody hung around on paper and I even recorded and instrumental version of it, when I was making some stretching music for a Yoga video. I didn’t use it there, I don’t think.
It was a while later that I did something I rarely do, I wrote words to the melody. I usually work the other way around. Words with at least a vague idea of what melody will serve them. But then I will change my mind or have forgotten what the original idea was. I try to let the words sing to me, dancing to intervals that I will certainly put some thought to, so as not to be just plodding around. I will think, “that word could jump up an octave and get even more meaning and emotion attached to it.”
So having the music first is a little different, not that I’ve never done it, but it hasn’t been a practice. I have a bit of aversion to writing words to music that started as just music and they were given a life that way, setting sail with no dialog or narration. Then someone adds words, like “This is the symphony – that Schubert ne-ver- finished.” Then you can’t get it out of your head.
The third line, melody and bass climb kind of parallel, building up, and the fourth line takes it from there building up again and more, and then has a little extra tag after the four equal lines. And that ended up where the title of the song is
So, walking the woods in Oregon, where I’ll say many good ideas come to me, in the forest. Having just come back from Kansas, I’m reminded that being around trees is a conducive setting for me, including making a musical about the destruction of the forest. More about that later. This song, although it didn’t move the plot along, became sort of the anthem of the musical – kid fights to save his favorite tree from being cut down. But I digress.
The word Oneness, I wasn’t even sure was a word. It is. I wanted to say something about the relationships of everything to everything else. Some of the lines that came to me first have ironically been left out of the shortened version of the song that is in the Unitarian Universalist hymnbook and in some other places. Such is the challenge in the artistic process, how to get some use out of the song, how to get it used. Editors, producers, collaborators, egos, territories.
There are four original verses, and I cut some of two verses out, as the hymnbook folks didn’t want to have verses with different amounts of syllables under the same note, as all verses will be put under one set of notes (“We’re not going to write it out again”). So, these words “From chords that sound of molecules spinning billions to a cell, the call resounds afar, to the sun who warms the dancing Earth and whose song hold it close on the journey of a star” (Ooh, these are long sentences to make sense of) got left out. That was amazing, I took an already long sentence and made it even longer.
I tried this song on the UU Hymnbook Committee that made the gray book in 1991. I had written the song in eighth notes, with a few sixteenths in there, in a slow and stately 4/4 time. That just looked too complicated, and they didn’t take the song, also said it was too long. So I doubled the note values to quarter notes, which I don’t like to do but pop writers do it, and then it looks much easier. Wouldn’t have passed in my Theory classes at Eastman, but it is what you see with so many pop ballads. I’ll bet “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” is probably written out that way, in cut time. I can’t think of another example. Then a decade later when the UUs made another hymnbook, I tried the quarter note version with a verse cut out and they took it. And now there are a lot of performances of the song on YouTube.
Nighttime looking up through Douglas firs to stars (maybe moon or light reflected off clouds) I came to the opening words, “Far beyond the grasp of hands, or light to meet the eye, past the reaches of the mind…” Now in my multimedia concert, I have those words illustrated by views from the Hubble telescope. These are challenges where the artist never gets done, now making a slide show to go with the song. There was a beautiful choreography by a single dancer in the production of my play at Albion College so long ago. But more digression, we didn’t even get a video of it, so long ago.
I’ve made various arrangements of the song, and a choral version is published by Hal Leonard. That version is a soloist with four-part SATB choir. I’ve tried selling them on the idea of offering another version of just choir with no solo, but it hasn’t sold enough for them to want to do that.
What this song is for me is a testament to what I believe. I try not to get too serious about that. I never got it about the bearded old man in the sky, but I do get it about the very round woman in the sky, our mother Earth. Is she a Goddess, a deity? I don’t do that, but I believe she is our mother, our ancestor. Everything we are she modeled a long time ago. And after four and a half billion years, came up with us. And we are made in her image – a little less spherical perhaps. So, this is not my whole treatise on my belief system, but you don’t put your whole life in one poem. There will be others.
The Oneness of Everything ©1988 Jim Scott
Far beyond the grasp of hands, or light to meet the eye,
past the reaches of the mind,
There, find the key to nature’s harmony
in an architecture so entwined.
Like the birds whose patterns grace the sky
and carry all who join in love expanding,
The message of peace will rise in flight
taking the weight of the world upon its wings,
With the oneness of everything.
Peace is in the dance of trees
who stir before the first breath of wind is yet perceived.
Trust in the song, becoming one with the dance,
and all mysteries can be believed.
Like the sorrow of the clouds, whose tears
fall caring on the soil undemanding,
Lessons of love are given that we
might rejoice in the music they bring
Of the oneness of everything.
From chords that sound of molecules, spinning billions to a cell,
the call resounds afar,
To the sun who warms the dancing earth,
and whose song holds it close on the journey of a star.
Songs of lives long past who touch our own
are written in the earth forever giving.
And now to maintain the harmony
gives to us all lives worth living
For the oneness of everything.
Still, we seek to find a truth that we might understand,
and reduce to terms defined,
Vast and immeasurable time and space
all so overwhelmingly designed.
Oh, passing years, just might I know the faith
that winters in the heart, to be reborn in Spring.
To hear and to feel the pulse of life
enters my soul as a song to sing,
Of the oneness of everything.
