Harmony - The Lowland Hum House Show by Allison Wolf

On a drizzly Friday night, the Bonhoeffer House opened its doors to let a breeze pass through the small crowd of students, faculty, and community gathered together around chocolate, grapes, cheese, and cider. Charlottesville’s newly-local duo, Lowland Hum, was preparing the stage to sing to us, and I grabbed a seat right in the front, which was brilliant since half the show’s beauty was in watching the two interact. Daniel and Lauren are so truly harmonious and lovely, it wasn’t a surprise when Daniel let us all in on the secret that their music has changed for the better since the marriage of their lives and (luckily for us) the marriage of their voices. They opened up their lives to us – a crowd of strangers – in courage, honesty, and love. Sharing stories of their marriage, their tour, their struggles, their losses, Lowland Hum invited us to see the beauty of a pair of human hearts struggling to live and to use their voice in love.

Stomping on their self-designed tambourine stage, they sang to us about jealousy, loss, hope, and aching. From the honesty of the questions we ask God and ourselves, to the moments of loneliness that can sometimes only be said in the sounds of a harmonica, they sang to us in the beautiful tension of waiting for a God who already lives inside of us. The words of their songs are bound together in little booklets placed on every chair so that we, the no longer strangers, are invited to follow along. They asked us questions, ranging from silly to provoking, and led a time of thoughtful music and open communication.

Allison Wolf is a 4th year studying English at the University of Virginia. She is currently writing her major thesis on Virginia Woolf and aspires to be a Professor of English. Over the summer, she participated in a course at the UVa Rare Books School where she studied the technical and cultural contexts of typography and printing.