I thought I’d do one last post on Brad Wilcox’s now-infamous youth fireside. Tuesday I wrote about his offensive take on race and the priesthood (for which he has since apologized, though on the question of its sincerity ymmv). Yesterday I posted about the problems with his expressed views on gender. And today I’m going to look at what he said about other religions.
But today’s post is going to be a little different. Because at one point, he invoked a metaphor. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he said, is like a piano keyboard.
Some churches play a few notes, some churches play several octaves, but we’re the only church that has a whole piano. So when we are saying, “We’re the only true church,” we’re just inviting people to come and see what we can add to the truths that already fill their lives.
A few seconds later, he adds that he doesn’t “want to lose a whole piano. You walk away from the church, say goodbye to the whole piano. Have fun playing ‘Chopsticks‘ the rest of your life.”
His metaphor, as I gather it, is that a piano represents the fullness of the Gospel; anything less is inferior and, in fact, grossly limits the scope of what you can play.
And look, I love piano. I’ve played piano since I was five (and sax since I was nine or ten, guitar and flute—albeit not well—since I was a teenager, and various wind synthesizers since I was in my twenties). As a result, I feel supremely qualified to comment on his metaphor.
And on its surface (and even under its surface) it’s deeply offensive to other religions, implying, as he does, that the truths they enjoy are lesser than and inferior to the ones we enjoy. And, as people have pointed out, it’s also scaremongering members to stay in the church.
But I want to take his metaphor seriously for a minute, because I don’t think it actually leads to the conclusion he thinks it leads to. His conclusion errs both on the side of understating what keyboards without 88 keys can do and overstating the completeness of 88 keys.[fn1]
88 Keys Are Not Complete
Look, I love an 88-key weighted keyboard as much as the next person. But why choose a piano as your representation of completeness? Why not, say, the Tabernacle organ? I can’t find exactly how many keys and pedals it has, but it has five manuals, each of which probably has 61 keys, plus I counted roughly 32 pedals. That’s more than 300 distinct notes that you can play on the Tabernacle organ.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that pianos have 12 notes per octave. You’re stuck with those twelve notes. But there are far more than 12 pitches possible within an octave. Many musical styles, including but not limited to Indian music, take advantage of these microtonalities. And even Western classical music has been experimenting with microtonalities for more than a century.
Now my ears are accustomed to Western 12-note octaves (though I’m fascinated by some of these other scales). But to argue that an 88-key piano represents the whole of music is just not true. There are instruments with more keys, there are notes between the notes available.
And that’s fully consonant with Mormon doctrine! After all, we believe all that God has revealed, all that God currently reveals, and we believe that God will continue to reveal things. We don’t believe that our church contains all truth or all possibility. Just like a piano—it’s really cool, it has enormous potential, but it’s incomplete.
Fewer Than 88 Keys
So if we take Wilcox’s metaphor seriously and say that we alone have an 88-key piano, and we take me seriously when I say 88 keys is not complete, what about all those people who have fewer than 88 keys?
They’re fine. Seriously. I’ve never played a song that demanded I use all 88 keys on the piano. (That’s not to say there aren’t such songs. There may well be, but most pianists don’t play them.) And you can do seriously amazing things with fewer than 88 keys.
I mean, check out the late Chick Corea, playing more on a 36-key keytar than I could on any instrument. He’s only got 36 keys, but this is absolutely not “Chopsticks.” (Warning: extreme 80s clothing and hair in the video!)
Or you can watch jazz legend Herbie Hancock on a slightly-larger 48-key keytar. This is also not “Chopsticks.”
If you want to come down (far!) from the heights of Chick and Herbie, you can watch me play Taylor Swift or Dua Lipa on my Akai EWI, a 13-key wind synthesizer with 7-octave range (which means that, with its 13 keys, it has basically the range of a piano).
If we want to have a lot of fun, we can watch Roland Kirk playing a saxophone and a clarinet at the same time, meaning he’s basically using four keys per instrument to create transcendent blues lines.
Or we can think about a bass guitar with its four strings. A trumpet, with its three valves. A trombone with its single slide.
My Point
My point is this: even if we take seriously that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the piano, and the people outside of the church don’t have a piano, that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that outside is inferior to inside. Outside of the confines of the piano, people may have access to more keys and more tones than are available on pianos.
And fewer keys doesn’t implicate less musicality. You can do stunning things with 36 keys, with 13 keys, with three valves or four strings or a slide.
Do I want to give up piano? Absolutely not. I love playing the piano. But do I want everybody playing piano? Also no. When we bring more instruments together, we get something that transcends what any individual instrument does.[fn2]
Do I think the LDS church has special claims on truth? I do. But I also take Pres. Hinckley seriously. We can’t do this on our own. We need the timbres and ranges and skills of musicians who differ from us. Partly that means inviting people to bring their instruments with them when they join us. But partly it means performing with people who don’t want to join us, who have no interest in piano and, instead, want to stay with their keytar or guitar or sitar or gamelan.
But it also means we shouldn’t threaten people who decide the piano is not for them with the loss of beauty in their lives. We should definitely do everything in our power to help people stay if they want. But if they cannot stay, for whatever reason, we need to inculcate their love of (metaphorical) music. Maybe they leave the piano behind. But that doesn’t mean they can’t play the violin. It doesn’t mean they have to put all music behind them.
And it doesn’t mean we can’t continue to make music with people who choose to leave.
And that’s, I think, the logical endpoint of Wilcox’s piano metaphor: not that those who leave will lose everything (except “Chopsticks”), but that we can help everybody we touch learn to love and perform music, in whatever way works for them. Then together we can make the world more beautiful.
[fn1] I hope you click on at least several of the links in this post. Most of them are to videos of truly spectacular music. Given my interests, the music is by and large jazz or jazz-adjacent though it could equally be almost any other type of music. But at the very least, check out the keytar stuff (and maybe my TikToks).
[fn2] If you get nothing else out of this post, at the very least, you need to watch Live at Emmet’s Place. Every Monday for the last 84 weeks (and counting), jazz pianist Emmet Cohen has streamed a live performance with his trio and guest musicians from his apartment in Washington Heights. Since we’re talking pianos here, I’ll confess that he has become one of my favorite pianists and the performances are always pure joy.
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash