My eighty-eight year old mother and I talk for a few minutes every night on the telephone, just to touch base. Often we talk about music (she is a lifelong musician, and I have her to thank for raising me in the classical musical tradition, a heritage for which I am daily grateful). The other night I played her a recording of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus over the telephone.  

Afterward we pondered together how such masterpieces emerge from their creators. My mother said, "I think God placed them on Earth just so that they would create this great music." I wondered aloud at how it sometimes seems as if the music comes directly from the Divine, as though the composers were able to somehow channel the Holy Spirit. Mozart once said that he was able to conceive a work, like a symphony or a sonata, all at once, already complete. All that remained was for him to write it out, as though rotely transcribing what he could already perceive. It is as if it already existed existed on some mysterious plane, and was given to him by the Universe.  

My mother and I consider such wonders of life often. I feel so blessed to be able to connect with her nightly, and doubly appreciative when we dwell on the beauties of the music of Bach and Mozart and other great composers.

The liner notes, by the way, have this to say about Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus: "Ave Verum Corpus could almost be described as a four-minute Requiem, one which conceals some pitiless questions beneath its serene and melodious charm" (Jean-Luc Macia).

AVE VERUM CORPUS, K. 618

Hail, true body of Christ,

born of the Virgin Mary, that truly sacrificed

upon the Cross for humankind;

from whose pierced side

flow water and blood,

that unto us a foretaste of our death we may behold.

 Helena Marie, CHS