Emotion & Effect in Religious Music
Overview
Over the course of this semester we have taken a look into some pretty big topics under the heading of religion, today I’ll be revisiting some of these topics under the lens of early Christian music. Specifically looking at ways that early Christian music evoked an emotional response and how that response was then utilized to promote the teachings of the church and how that has evolved and continued in religious music today.
Daniel J. Levitin
Daniel Levitin is an “award-winning neuroscientist, [cognitive psychologist], musician, and bestselling author” whose “research encompasses music, the brain, health, productivity, and creativity” (daniellevitin.com). He is currently the “Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities [at] The Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute [in] San Francisco, [a d]istinguished Faculty Fellow [at] Haas School of Business [at the] University of California at Berkeley, [and the] James McGill Professor Emeritus [at] McGill University (Levitin). With a CV that spans 72 pages he can certainly be considered an expert in his various fields, but for today’s interest we will be focusing on his work on music, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology.
The connection between emotion and music is a mystery. Humans hear a variety of sounds and either distinguish them as a singular sound or group them together connecting the amalgamation of sound becoming translated into an emotion, thought, experience, belief, etc.
Our brain connects a secondary association with the initial emotion and the context in which the music is performed and received.
Music in religion has had a long and storied past. As music was first believed to be from the devil it held pagan and hedonistic qualities within it and led the human mind and body towards a life of pleasure rather than to the holy; music only making its way into the church through the removal of actual instruments being used and being replaced by vocal music. Sung music that began as monophonic melodies evolved into more intricate and melismatic polyphonic interwoven melodies as the church grew in influence and authority over daily life. But before looking at that, it must be understood on at least a basic level of how music affects the brain in inducing emotional responses and makes connections.
To put it very simply, what we perceive as sound is actually vibrations that vary in pitch and frequency and our brain interprets those vibrations and connects them to a wide network of receptors that ‘ping’ when receive sound and elicit a response from the body. Music is manipulation of those bodily responses through aspects like tone and rhythm. An example of this manipulation explained can be seen in the 2015 movie “WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS”.
Of course this is not the most scientific explanation and takes some large leaps in the portrayal of how music affects the body, but it lays things out pretty soundly on a basic level. It also points to the authority that a DJ has when choosing music in a club that can be reimagined to the church, but more on that later.
How music evokes emotional response
The “[p]ower of music lay in its power to influence the ethos of listeners (Burkholder et all 2014, 25) therefore, if you control the music, you can control the response people have to it and the connections they make with it. Music has the ability to affect the listener by sound alone mainly by its tone and the manipulation of said tones. “People experience universal emotional responses to certain forms of melody but at the same time more specific responses can be generated at a cultural level when participant is already familiar with the melodic forms” (Weimer 2016, 96). From a purely musical perspective if you are asking trained musicians, especially those with a Western musical background, one of the basic ways to teach rudimentary theory like major and minor keys or dissonant and non-dissonant sounds is to explain them in terms of happiness and sadness. On a larger scale, modern music as a whole- like any art form- is meant to express emotions in a way that the music evokes a response for good or for bad in the listener. The Church was very controlling as to what could and could not be performed as certain aspects of music theory had the ability to invoke demons or incite unholy pleasure within the populous. One example of this is dissonance where it was “…not considered to be pleasurable by [listeners]” (Weimer 2016, 86). An example of this in music theory would be the ‘Satanic’ tritone made from an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth- this would be going from middle c on the piano to an f sharp moving chromatically up six half steps. This musical leap would often find itself banned in early religious music as the two minor thirds that make up the distance are considered to invoke the devil. That being said there is plenty of religious music that contains the tritone, especially as music evolved. One such example would be Hildegard von Bingen’s liturgical drama the Ordo as it uses tritones when invoking the Devil’s character or speaking of him. This is a use of creating a melody of cacophony of sound to create an emotional experience of the listener, a similar idea to the modern phrase “emotional rollercoaster” within the music.
Hildegard
Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) was an abbess and later Saint of the High Middle Ages. As a prolific writer of music, medicine, and philosophy to name a few of her talents. But one thing that made Hildegard stand out was the fact that she claimed that her abilities and ideas came through visions from God which gave her a solid position as an authoritative voice on daily goings on in the religious sphere around her abbey and her music stands as a testament of time on the influential power that she held. Claiming that music was means of communication to the divine, Hildegard encompasses the idea of the purpose of music- albeit on a less propagandizing scale. “Most of Hildegard’s surviving music grew out of her visionary response to the liturgy, which allowed her to conceptualize her new songs as an authentic vision of the symphonia that brings heavenly and earthly worship together in harmonia.” (Fassler et all 2014, 171)
Now the “origin and role of the music drama in the liturgical life of Hildegard’s community is contested. Whether it be for dedications, consecrations, or fully integrated into monastic life” (Fassler et all 2014, 185) but it shows that music played a particularly important role in religious life. But it is known that it was very influential on the way she ran her abbey.
Her nuns served as conduits of divine grace and power channelling veriditas, the continual energy of God, to reclaim lost divinity within the soul of music. For the invisible divine is seen through creation and for Hildegard that creation is her music- as a material embodiment of immaterial ideas and voices of the divine. “Music [was] to bridge their earthly exile [and] to introduce a bit of heaven on earth, embody the praise of angels, and place her reader-singers in the company of the celestial symphony… [as] to sing the liturgy… was to unite soul and body in emulation and adoration of Christ” (Fassler et all 2014, 192). Reclaiming some of the lost divine on Earth, the direct connection to God is established for when performing the melody with its intricate ornamentation one feels the connection through their body which allows those listening to feel the effects as well and have the ability to ruminate on the feelings expressed in the emotion of the song.
And Hildegard is similar to earlier and contemporary music of her time such as chant music or other ceremonial music as it was assumed that “[Gregorian] chants were dictated to [St.] Gregory by the Holy Spirit in [the] form of a dove” (Burkholder et all 2014, 30) which is similar to how Hildegard expressed the nature of her music and plays as holy visions communicated to her from the divine. Although the words carry importance in Hildegard’s music, it is the musicality or tone painting, that holds primacy for partakers of her music as it is the sound that affects an individual most. “[Her] music serves to prolong the words, encouraging contemplation of their meaning through sung prayer” (Burkholder et all 2014, 64) much like the rest of early church music as it stems from an off-shoot of Gregorian chant.
Emotion and experience in music
The performance of music is utilized to convey teachings of the church to manipulate the listener. We can only guess why they chose music, but along with appropriating other aspects of various religious cultures, music was a way of ‘following the crowd’ as “music has advantages over many other ways of heightening human experience, because of the special relationships between people…” and the divine “… and the kind of coordination of the body that are often required for performance” (Sylvan 2002, 27).
Religious music creates meaning-making through religious themes, symbols, and general religious iconography (Moberg 2012, 125) to invoke a sense of the holy. Theophany is a manifestation or appearance of God or a god to humans and it is achieved through religious music as “[it] transforms experience… its presence creates an atmosphere of the special… [it] may heighten excitement or it may soothe tensions but in either case [music] takes one away into another state of being… it is an actualization of the mystical experience for everybody” (Sylvan 2002, 20).
Being used as a sort of propaganda by the church music would instill religious ideas in the heads of the listeners and then use the music to associate the idea of being in church with positive experiences known as intrinsic referring and secondary associations respectively. Intrinsic referring being when a “signifier is referring to something within the piece of music” that gives power to create virtual realities [within music] (Sylvan 2002, 30) and secondary associations or significations are specific and personal attributions to a song from an event, emotions, meanings (Sylvan 2002, 31). The human mind and its ways of processing are critical aspects in the connection between music and the mind. “Music affects the same neurological systems in the brain that other reward stimuli do… [as] there [is] a significant increase of neural activity in the structures that [deem music] to be pleasurable” (Weimer 2016, 85) and the church associated that pleasure with divine communication and religious ecstasy that promoted and encouraged followers to deepen their faith.
“For early Christian leaders, music was the servant of religion, and only music that opened the mind to Christian teaching and holy thoughts was worthy of hearing in the church” (Burkholder et. all 2014, 25). Which aided in its ascension to and occupying of a higher place in creation as it illustrates the fluidity between divinity and creation characteristic of the intellectual thought of this period. “Music is one of the most powerful tools for conveying religious meaning known to humankind. Music and religion are intimately linked in almost every culture and in almost every historical period.” (Sylvan 2002, 6) The “role of [the] church was to teach Christianity and to aid in the saving of souls… and the role of music was to carry those words, accompany those rituals, and inspire the faithful” (Burkholder et all 2014, 47) and they still do so today.
Christian rationality is perpetuated into the mundane life through the listening to and participating with Christian music that expounds the same morals and values as it “provide[s] a powerful, almost visceral link to the spiritual world not only in formal religious ceremonies, but at simple informal musical gatherings as well” (Sylvan 2002, 16). Over the span of centuries music in the church has not transitioned from divine communication and rather Christian music has split from the church through genre- adapting a secular sound and structure than the traditional one. There is an homogenization of modern religious music where the intricacies and musical interest that evoked strong emotions are now gone. There is a new emphasis on the “collective quality” in popular music that is seen quite heavily in newer religious music that “offer[s] their followers a basis on which to build friendships, a focus of community, belonging, and important resources for the construction of identities” (Moberg 2012, 113).
Especially with modern religious music, Christian mostly, “to get a sense of how music is a preferred medium for conveying religious meaning by virtue of its ability to operate simultaneously at several different levels” (Sylvan 2002, 32) within the psyche. “Meaning systems are constructed through… process of symbolization, or signification, in which structured musical patterns come to be associated with particular resonant meanings” (Sylvan 2002, 29) where followers are making meaning through the lyrics, melodic phrases, and timbre. Which can be seen in the repetitive lyrics and simple instrumentation that is meant to be easily remembered to be an easy way of reconnecting with the divine and affirming one’s own beliefs. For music is an experience that defies conceptualization and verbalization as a transformational and informational encounter.
Works cited
Burkholder, Peter; Grout, Donald; Palisca, Claude. A History of Music 9th Ed. New York: W. W.
Norton Company Inc, 2014. Print.
daniellevitin.com
Kienzle, Beverly; Stoudt, Debra; Ferzoco, George. A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen.
Boston:Brill, 2014. Online
Levitin, Daniel. This Is Your Brain On Music. New Yok: Penguin Random House LLC. 2006. Print
Moberg, Marcus. Religion in Popular Music or Popular Music as Religion? A Critical Review of
Scholarly Writing on the Place of Religion in Metal Music and Culture. 2012. Online.
Sylvan, Robin. Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music. New York: New
York UP, 2002. Print.
Weimer, Jade. Musical Assemblies: How Early Christian music functioned as a Rhetorical Topos,
a Mechanism of Recruitment, and a Fundamental Marker of an Emerging Christian
Identity. Toronto: ProQuest LLC, 2016. Online.
Further reading
Materializing Religion: Expression, Performance and Ritual edited by Elisabeth Arweck, William
J. F. Keenan
The Re-enchantment of the West, Vol. 2, Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture
and Occulture by Christopher Partridge.
Popular Culture Fandoms, the Boundaries of Religious Studies, and the Project of the Self by
Sean McLoud
Lynch, Gordon. “What is this ‘Religion’ in the Study of Religion and Popular Culture?” in
Between Sacred and Profane: Researching Religion and Popular Culture.
Cultures of Popular Music by Andy Bennett
Morent, Stefan. “Ordo virtutum. Vom Spiel der Kräfte,” in Klang des Himmels, pp. 214– 52.
Hildegard von Bingen’s Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum : an analysis of musical
process, modality, and text-music relations by Marianne Pfau
“‘The Soul is Symphonic’: Meditation on Luke 15:25 and Hildegard of Bingen’s Letter 23,” by
William T. Flynn
Church Music: Musical and Hymnological Developments in Western Christianity by Russel N.
Squire.
Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Resounding transcendence : transitions in music, religion, and ritual edited by Jeffers Engelhardt
and Philip V. Bohlman.
Music and transcendence edited by Férdia J. Stone-Davis.
