By Douglas Todd, *If you want to understand spirituality, just listen to the music* - The Vancouver Sun - Vancouver, CanadaSaturday, December 19, 2009
It can lift you 'out of ordinary existence, into the extraordinary -- into spiritual ecstasy'
"The only proof you need that there is a God is music."
--Kurt Vonnegut
Something about music evokes the sacred in even the most irascible, self-avowed atheists.
The great satirical novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, was a Unitarian Universalist who delighted in slamming institutional religions. But when it came to the mystery of music, he melted. He strangely found himself using spiritual language.
--Kurt Vonnegut
Something about music evokes the sacred in even the most irascible, self-avowed atheists.
The great satirical novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, was a Unitarian Universalist who delighted in slamming institutional religions. But when it came to the mystery of music, he melted. He strangely found himself using spiritual language.
So did another famous atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German thinker who announced in the 19th century that "God is dead." Nietzsche admitted being transformed by music. He danced daily, saying it was his "only kind of piety...his 'divine service.'"
This dark time of year -- which is a season filled with music--is a good one for reflecting on the power of harmony and rhythm to transport all of us, whether explicitly religious or not.
This dark time of year -- which is a season filled with music--is a good one for reflecting on the power of harmony and rhythm to transport all of us, whether explicitly religious or not.
Music has a way of lifting us out of ordinary existence into the extraordinary --into spiritual ecstasy.
Every December churches are packed with people listening to O Holy Night and Handel's Messiah and Bach choirs. Eclectic school concerts perform everything from Judaism's snappy Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel to Bing Crosby's sentimental I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas.
Carolers walk door to door, or sail port to port around Burrard Inlet. The streets, radio and malls fill the air with festive music, performed by everyone from Bruce Cockburn to Nickelback to B.C.'s Ben Heppner, the Mennonite-choir-trained international opera star.
Arguably the most common gift anyone will receive this December will be musical, in the form of CDs, iPods, concert tickets and homemade song collections for family or friends.
Arguably the most common gift anyone will receive this December will be musical, in the form of CDs, iPods, concert tickets and homemade song collections for family or friends.
Dan Campbell, author of *The Mozart Effect*, says North Americans "spend more money, time and energy on music than on books, movies and sports."
Why the love affair with music? It's energizing and healing.
And, to put it mystically, as Ludwig Van Beethoven did:
"Music is the mediation between the spiritual and sensual life."
Music may be the most accessible and direct means by which humans can experience, imagine and embody the holy. A case can be made that music is the most spiritual art form and the best metaphor for God -- and that music may be even a form of divinity itself. Like God is said to be, music is invisible, powerful, intelligent, demanding, calming, ordering and emotionally moving.
Karen Armstrong holds out for the divinity of music in her bestselling new book, A Case for God.
The famed British religion writer justifiably says that to understand religion you should understand music.
Music is both rational and beyond rational, like religion. It's based on mathematics and cerebral order, but it's also highly emotional. Music, like spirituality, operates at the furthest reaches of thought, the limits of reason.
"In music, subjective and objective become one," Armstrong writes. "Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof. Hence, all art constantly aspires to the condition of music; so too, at its best, does theology."
Armstrong says humans should adopt the same attitude to divinity that they take to absorbing music and other forms of art. Religious insight, she says, is only possible "if people cultivate a receptive, listening attitude, not unlike the way we approach art, music or poetry."
*The Spirituality of Music* (published by B.C.'s Northstone Press), a new book by Canadian John Bird, takes a celebratory journey into the soul of music and dance.
Maintaining that music moves people "closer to God than words," The Spirituality of Music ventures on an eclectic trip through musical topics and forms; from hymns to reggae, Bruce Springsteen to jazz.
Bird eloquently invokes the power of music to take us out of ourselves, to spiritual heights, to what the ancient Greeks called ekstasis.
He quotes jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker's saying, "They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."
Even more than avidly listening to music, Bird emphasizes the meaning to be found in creating it. He does so with his ukelele and membership in the Iqaluit Community Choir in Nunavut, where he now lives.
I quibble with Bird, however, when he maintains it's "odious" to rank certain songs, or musical genres, as superior. He makes a point of citing Harlan Howard's saying, "Country music is three chords and the truth," which can be accurate on a good day.
But the sentiment rings a little too egalitarian. While it's worth recognizing that amateurs should not obsess over whether they are up to the standards of Chopin or Mark Knopfler, we shouldn't ignore that some commercial music feels heartless and empty.
As the Irish rock-blues-soul singer Van Morrison warns, "Music is spiritual. The music industry is not."
Beyond that, however, Bird makes an important point when he says it's not necessary to compare Mozart to his own mother rocking him in her arms as a child while singing Welsh folk songs.
When it comes to making our own music, authenticity is primary and self-consciousness should be set aside. That is especially true in regard to the physical and spiritual release of dancing, where melody and rhythm can take us into altered states, beyond judgment, beyond reason -- into connection with universal forces.
"Among all the different arts, the art of music [and dance] has been especially considered divine, because it is the exact miniature of the law working through the whole universe," said Hazrat Inayat Khan, a prominent Sufi musician from the early 20th century.
Australian microbiologist-philosopher Charles Birch takes the link further between music and the divine. The best image Birch can conjure up of the God he believes is behind evolution, which he calls the "persuasive ordering principle in the universe," is that of a composer-conductor.
"An orchestra consists of many creative players. Each player interprets the score in his or her own way. But the over-all coordination is provided by the conductor," Birch writes in A Purpose for Everything.
"God is like a composer-conductor who is writing a score a few bars ahead of the orchestra, taking into account their harmonies and disharmonies as he proposes the next movement of the music. God does not determine the outcome. The power of God is the power of persuasion to harmonize the whole."
Perhaps there is a way to put the spirituality of music more directly, though, in a way that might appeal to Vonnegut, Nietzsche and other "secular" people, as well as the host of those who at this time of year affirm the holy power of expressive sound.
As the poet Rumi wrote:
"We've come to the place where everything is music.
"Everything is music; let it play."
[Picture: Hazrat Inayat Khan playing a veena. Photo from Wiki.]
Why the love affair with music? It's energizing and healing.
And, to put it mystically, as Ludwig Van Beethoven did:
"Music is the mediation between the spiritual and sensual life."
Music may be the most accessible and direct means by which humans can experience, imagine and embody the holy. A case can be made that music is the most spiritual art form and the best metaphor for God -- and that music may be even a form of divinity itself. Like God is said to be, music is invisible, powerful, intelligent, demanding, calming, ordering and emotionally moving.
Karen Armstrong holds out for the divinity of music in her bestselling new book, A Case for God.
The famed British religion writer justifiably says that to understand religion you should understand music.
Music is both rational and beyond rational, like religion. It's based on mathematics and cerebral order, but it's also highly emotional. Music, like spirituality, operates at the furthest reaches of thought, the limits of reason.
"In music, subjective and objective become one," Armstrong writes. "Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof. Hence, all art constantly aspires to the condition of music; so too, at its best, does theology."
Armstrong says humans should adopt the same attitude to divinity that they take to absorbing music and other forms of art. Religious insight, she says, is only possible "if people cultivate a receptive, listening attitude, not unlike the way we approach art, music or poetry."
*The Spirituality of Music* (published by B.C.'s Northstone Press), a new book by Canadian John Bird, takes a celebratory journey into the soul of music and dance.
Maintaining that music moves people "closer to God than words," The Spirituality of Music ventures on an eclectic trip through musical topics and forms; from hymns to reggae, Bruce Springsteen to jazz.
Bird eloquently invokes the power of music to take us out of ourselves, to spiritual heights, to what the ancient Greeks called ekstasis.
He quotes jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker's saying, "They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."
Even more than avidly listening to music, Bird emphasizes the meaning to be found in creating it. He does so with his ukelele and membership in the Iqaluit Community Choir in Nunavut, where he now lives.
I quibble with Bird, however, when he maintains it's "odious" to rank certain songs, or musical genres, as superior. He makes a point of citing Harlan Howard's saying, "Country music is three chords and the truth," which can be accurate on a good day.
But the sentiment rings a little too egalitarian. While it's worth recognizing that amateurs should not obsess over whether they are up to the standards of Chopin or Mark Knopfler, we shouldn't ignore that some commercial music feels heartless and empty.
As the Irish rock-blues-soul singer Van Morrison warns, "Music is spiritual. The music industry is not."
Beyond that, however, Bird makes an important point when he says it's not necessary to compare Mozart to his own mother rocking him in her arms as a child while singing Welsh folk songs.
When it comes to making our own music, authenticity is primary and self-consciousness should be set aside. That is especially true in regard to the physical and spiritual release of dancing, where melody and rhythm can take us into altered states, beyond judgment, beyond reason -- into connection with universal forces.
"Among all the different arts, the art of music [and dance] has been especially considered divine, because it is the exact miniature of the law working through the whole universe," said Hazrat Inayat Khan, a prominent Sufi musician from the early 20th century.
Australian microbiologist-philosopher Charles Birch takes the link further between music and the divine. The best image Birch can conjure up of the God he believes is behind evolution, which he calls the "persuasive ordering principle in the universe," is that of a composer-conductor.
"An orchestra consists of many creative players. Each player interprets the score in his or her own way. But the over-all coordination is provided by the conductor," Birch writes in A Purpose for Everything.
"God is like a composer-conductor who is writing a score a few bars ahead of the orchestra, taking into account their harmonies and disharmonies as he proposes the next movement of the music. God does not determine the outcome. The power of God is the power of persuasion to harmonize the whole."
Perhaps there is a way to put the spirituality of music more directly, though, in a way that might appeal to Vonnegut, Nietzsche and other "secular" people, as well as the host of those who at this time of year affirm the holy power of expressive sound.
As the poet Rumi wrote:
"We've come to the place where everything is music.
"Everything is music; let it play."
[Picture: Hazrat Inayat Khan playing a veena. Photo from Wiki.]
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