6
I have been immersed in music since I was born. But I claim no special distinction. Almost all humans throughout history have been immersed in music. In all traditional societies, singing and dancing are part of the group’s collective life. Music plays a part in all religious traditions. Even in modern, secular societies, music pervades most homes through radios, televisions, and sound systems, and is present in many public spaces, even if only as background sound in shopping centers and hotels.
My mother played the piano, my father the flute, and my paternal grandfather was a church organist and choirmaster, as was one of his sons, my father’s younger brother. At the age of five, I began learning the piano, and the organ at age fifteen. I sang and chanted in the choir at my Anglican preparatory school and later at my Anglican secondary school. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, I sang in a madrigal choir. By that time I was an atheist and did not attend church services regularly. Nevertheless, I enjoyed going to choral evensong. I also played the college organ.
Meanwhile, when I was an undergraduate, I stayed during a vacation with a friend who lived near Liverpool, where we first encountered the Beatles in the Cavern Club, just before they rocketed to stardom. They opened a new dimension of musical experience for me. The Rolling Stones came soon after.
When I was working and living in Hyderabad, India, I often heard groups of Hindus in villages and temples singing bhajans, devotional songs to goddesses and gods, and ecstatic music at Sufi shrines. I also lived in a Christian ashram in Tamil Nadu, where I sang and chanted five times a day.
I first met my wife, Jill Purce, in India in 1982. Jill was then leading, and still leads, chanting and sound-healing workshops. She is a pioneer of the revival of group chanting, drawing on many different cultural traditions, including Mongolian and Tuvan overtone chanting. In her workshops, she offers a powerful and direct experience of the fundamental principles of chanting shared by traditions all around the world.1
We all have our own musical biographies, and they are all different. As the neurologist Oliver Sacks put it, “For virtually all of us music has great power, whether or not we seek it out or think of ourselves as particularly ‘musical.’ This propensity to music shows itself in infancy, is manifest and central in every culture, and probably goes back to the very beginnings of our species. Such ‘musicophilia’ is a given in human nature.”2
In this chapter, I discuss the evolutionary origins of singing, chanting, and dancing, their effects on people’s well-being, the physiology of participants, and the cohesion of groups. Then I look at music in the context of physics and consciousness, and end by asking why most cultures assume that gods, goddesses, angels, spirits, and God like music. Is this purely a human projection? Or is it an insight into the nature of ultimate reality?
The Evolution of Singing and Music
Songs do not leave fossils, so we have no concrete evidence of the vocal activities of our remote ancestors. But we can learn a lot by looking at other animal species, at fossils and archaeological remains, and by comparing human musical traditions.
Charles Darwin led the way in thinking about the evolution of music. In his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, he discussed “the capacity and love for singing or music” in a wide range of animals. He pointed out that some species of insects and spiders produce rhythmic sounds, usually by rubbing together special structures on their legs. In most species, only males make these sounds. He thought that their chief purpose was “to call or charm the opposite sex.” In some species of fish, males make sounds in the breeding season. Air-breathing vertebrates have a pipe for inhaling and expelling air, and hence have the potential for making sounds by modifying the flow of air through a vibrating organ. In amphibia, most notably in frogs and toads, males croak and sing during the breeding season, sometimes in chorus. Some reptiles make sounds, as do many species of bird.
As Darwin put it, “The male alone of the tortoise utters a noise, and this only during the season of love. Male alligators roar or bellow during the same season. Everyone knows how much birds use their vocal organs as a means of courtship; and some species likewise perform what may be called instrumental music.”3 One example is the drumming sound produced mechanically by snipe through the vibration of their outer tail feathers when they dive through the air as part of their courtship display. And woodpeckers drum rather than sing to attract mates, pecking rapidly on resonant objects to create a characteristic pattern of sounds. Darwin also drew attention to species of mammals that make musical sounds, including singing mice and gibbons.
Not only do many species make sounds themselves, but they also seem to be attracted to music. Why? Darwin had no answer:
But if it be further asked why musical tones in a certain order and rhythm give man and other animals pleasure, we can no more give the reason than for the pleasantness of certain tastes and smells. That they do give pleasure of some kind to animals, we may infer from their being produced during the season of courtship by many insects, spiders, fishes, amphibians, and birds; for unless the females were able to appreciate such sounds and were excited or charmed by them, the persevering efforts of the males, and the complex structures often possessed by them alone, would be useless; and this is impossible to believe.4
In most animal species, only males sing. But in some monkey and ape species, most notably gibbons, both sexes sing. And so do male and female humans.
Darwin thought that music had a very ancient origin, which would help to explain its presence in all human cultures. He pointed out that flutes made from reindeer bones and horns had been found in caves along with flint tools and the remains of extinct animals, suggesting that they had been made and used a very long time ago. The recent radiocarbon dating of bone pipes and flutes from caves in France and Germany has shown that the oldest were made about forty thousand years ago, soon after our species, Homo sapiens, arrived in Europe.5 Ian Cross, a modern researcher on the evolution of music, thinks their sophisticated design suggests that “music was likely to have been of considerable importance to a people who had just come to inhabit a new and potentially threatening environment.”6 Music may have helped these new settlers in Europe adapt to this unfamiliar and uncertain world by promoting bonding and greater group cohesion. And the use of musical instruments probably came long after the development of singing and dancing.
Darwin also drew attention to the importance of music in inducing emotions. He pointed out that in oratory, musical elements are used to stir feelings in the audience. “Even monkeys express strong feelings in different tones—anger and impatience by low, fear and pain by high notes.”7 He also argued that the long evolutionary history of responses to music would help to account for its effect on the emotions:
We may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by the strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph. From the deeply laid principle of inherited associations, musical tones in this case would be likely to call up vaguely and indefinitely the strong emotions of a long-past age.
In this context, as Darwin observed, it is surely relevant that “love is still the commonest theme of our songs.”8
Darwin also suggested that the evolution of singing and that of language were closely related. He thought that singing came first and that speech evolved from music. In this regard, he anticipated much modern evolutionary thinking about the origin of language. However, rather than music preceding language, the musicologist Steven Brown has proposed that they both arose from a common communicative system, “musilanguage.” When they diverged, language became more important for exact communication, and music came to play a predominantly social role, to do with the bonding and unity of the group.9
Social Entrainment
The fossil evidence suggests that the capacity for making protomusical sounds could have evolved as long as 1.8 million years ago in Homo ergaster and Homo erectus, who both walked upright and had brain sizes of around 1,000 cubic centimeters (∼61 cubic inches), not much less than the modern average of 1,400 cc. Their barrel-shaped chests and enhanced vocal capacities, together with ear canals similar to those in modern humans, suggest that the sounds of voices were already of great importance for their social lives. By 700,000 years ago, with the emergence of Homo heidelbergensis, a fully modern vocal tract appeared, together with ears that were maximally sensitive to sounds in the range of speech and song.10
No one knows when human societies first discovered the power of synchronized movement and sound making. Nonhuman primates do not have the ability to sing together with a steady beat, although chimpanzees and bonobos sometimes make short bursts of synchronized calls.11 As soon as protohumans developed this ability, singing and dancing probably arose together. Through coordinating their sounds and movements, protohumans discovered a power whereby the whole was more than the sum of its parts. This synchronized activity would have had huge effects on the members of the group itself, and also on other species. Predators would have been impressed by a display of united group power.12
Even today, hikers in Canada and the United States are taught to respond to bears, cougars, and other threatening predators by trying to make themselves look bigger than they are, by raising their hands and making loud noises. If this works with one person, it must work better with ten people stamping, moving their arms, and chanting in synchrony. It would also have impressed other human groups. Many tribal societies used war chants, which still exist in a domesticated form in football chants, such as the Maori haka, or war chant, performed by the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team before they begin a match.
Humans have a very long history of mutual entrainment. Even in modern cities this tendency emerges spontaneously and unconsciously. When people are walking together and chatting, they often entrain each other without thinking about it and come into step.13 Our natural tendency to walk in step is formalized in military marching. When troops march, they move more cohesively and efficiently than if they just strolled along in random groups. This principle played an important part in military discipline two thousand years ago in the Roman army, and modern armies still put on impressive displays of group power through marching columns of soldiers, accompanied by drumming and martial music.
The most widespread forms of mutual entrainment take place through chanting, singing, and dancing. People breathe together, make sounds together, and move in synchrony. They come into a resonant, rhythmical relationship with the other members of the group. Even when people are not participating in making music or dancing to it but are sitting down as part of an audience, they are still entrained in a suppressed way; many move or beat time with the music.
Although Darwin was surely right about the competitive role of music in courtship, he neglected the cooperative role of music in human societies, which is now the dominant theme in discussions of musical evolution.14 In traditional societies, music is primarily participatory. Everyone takes part through singing, dancing, or both. Through musical participation, people take on a group identity and experience and express emotions together.15 In most cultures, music is an essential component of rituals, including rites of passage, weddings, funerary rites, and seasonal festivals.16 Music both helps to maintain group cohesion and is an expression of it.
Thus, from an evolutionary perspective, music probably emerged both in the context of courtship and sexual competition, as Darwin suggested, and also as an expression of group solidarity, connectedness, and unity. Through taking part in the same songs, dances, and chants, people often feel themselves to be part of a greater whole. In traditional dances, they are linked to all those who have done the same dances before them, and sung the same chants.17 According to the hypothesis of morphic resonance (discussed in chapter 5), they resonate with ancestral dancers and singers, bringing the past into the present.
Chanting
All scholars of the evolution of music agree that vocal music preceded instrumental music, as it does in our own lives. Many mothers sing to their babies or talk to them in a cooing way, sometimes called “motherese,” and many young children learn to sing nursery rhymes. If they learn musical instruments, they usually do so after they have already learned to sing.
Chanting differs from singing primarily in that it is more repetitive. A short phrase can be sung to a simple tune over and over again, as in the chanting of Hindu and Buddhist mantras. Or else a simple melody can be sung repeatedly with different words, as in the chanting of prayers and psalms in Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican liturgies. In chants, unlike songs, there is usually no fixed rhythmic beat; the chants often follow the rhythm of the words.
Much of what I know about chanting comes from my wife, Jill Purce,18 who, as I say, has been giving voice workshops and teaching chanting for over forty years. She pioneered a way of teaching how to experience the power of the voice that is common to all spiritual traditions. In her workshops, she shows how chanting, especially repetitive chanting, brings groups of people into literal resonance with each other. Through chanting mantras, the whole group can enter into a kind of resonance with those who have chanted the same chants before (discussed below). Here are some of the basic principles of vowels and mantras that she teaches.
Vowels
Compared with speaking, chanting and singing both involve a lengthening of vowel sounds. Vowels are produced with the mouth open and a continuous flow of air from the lungs. Consonants interrupt the flow of air; they are articulated by blocking it (p, b, t, d, k, g), diverting it through the nose (n, m), or obstructing it (f, v, s, z).
Even when chanted on the same note, different vowels sound different. This is because they have different patterns of harmonics or overtones, caused by different shapes within the throat and mouth, and modulated by the position of the tongue. These vowel sounds set up specific patterns of vibration, not only in the vocal organs, but also within other parts of the body.
You can experience this for yourself. Block your ears by putting your fingertips in them. Then try chanting on a single note the vowels ee (as in sheet), eh (as in bed), ah (as in car), oh (as in goat), and oo (as in boot). The more effectively you block your ears, the more you will experience the vibrations internally, located in different parts of your body. For example, when you do this, you will find that the ah sound is located primarily in your chest and the ee sound in your head, vibrating your skull, so that this literally vibrates your brain within it.
The m and n consonants also have vibratory effects that you can experience by blocking your ears and humming mm and nn.
Mantras
Mantras are sacred sounds, often in ancient languages like Sanskrit. There are certain sounds or particular strings of sounds for specific illnesses or other circumstances, some for entering a state of clarity and emptiness, and some for tuning into a lineage of teachers.19
Mantra-like chants are used in many traditions, including among the Sufi mystics of Islam, who combine forms of chanting with rhythmic movement of the body and rhythmic breathing, helping to bring the chanters into a state of ecstasy or bliss.20 Through chanting together, breathing, and making the same sounds, people come into synchrony with each other.21
Some mantras are exoteric, widely known and an essential part of regular prayer and ritual practice. Others are esoteric, transmitted from teacher to student in private.
The best-known and most fundamental mantra in the Indian tradition is ?, “om,” or “aum.” The sounds are spread out roughly like this: aa-oo-mm. You can explore its immediate physical effects by blocking your ears and chanting it on a single note. When I do this, I feel the aa sound mainly vibrating in my chest. If I then move towards the oo sound via a short o (as in or), the vibrations move upward toward my throat. Then, as I move to the oo, they sound in the lower part of my head, and the mm sound sets up vibrations spreading out from my nose.
The most fundamental mantra in the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions is “amen,” rather similar to om. Although it is spelled amen in the Latin transliteration, its original pronunciation in the Jewish tradition, in the Eastern Orthodox churches, and in Islam is ameen. In the Greek New Testament, it is written aµ??, where the second vowel, ?, or eta, is a long e, as opposed to e, epsilon, a short e. Latin has only one letter for e.
The original form, aµ??, is more powerful mantrically than the Latin transliteration. Try both versions for yourself. When I do it, in the Latin form, both the aa and the eh vowels are in my chest, and the vibration leaps to my nose region on the m and the n. Chanting aa-mee-nn has a very different effect. After the nasal vibration of the mm, the ee sound resonates with the outer part of my skull, before the resonant center shifts back to the nasal region with nn.
Exoteric mantras are widely known and used, but esoteric mantras are more specialized and have been passed down over many generations from teacher to student, transmitted orally. Tibetans travel great distances for the transmission of a mantra from a teacher. When people use these mantras in Hindu and Tibetan traditions, they believe, as I say, that they are tuning in to the whole lineage of teachers. This connects them with those teachers’ attainments, their states of spiritual connection with ultimate consciousness.
This is a point where the traditional understanding of mantras and my own ideas about morphic resonance converge. When people are chanting a mantra together in a group, they are simultaneously resonating in at least three ways: First, with physical resonances within their vocal tracts and bones, as discussed above; second, through the resonant entrainment of the members of the group with each other, chanting the same sounds in synchrony to a shared pulse; and third, through morphic resonance between those chanting in the present and all the people who have chanted the same mantra in the past, tuning in across time.22
Effects of Singing Together
One advantage of repetitive chanting, or of singing simple songs in unison, is that everyone can join in, even if they think that they do not have a good voice or cannot sing in tune. No doubt this experience of connection and unity is a major reason for the use of chanting and singing in practically all traditional societies, communities, and religions. And it is probably one of the main reasons why so many people join church or community choirs in the modern world. These are voluntary activities, and people would not take part unless they derived some benefit. Indeed, scientific surveys of people who sang in choirs found that most said singing together made them feel better and contributed to their mental and emotional well-being.23
These subjective impressions are also accompanied by measurable physiological changes. Saliva samples taken from participants before and after singing showed significant increases in immunoglobulin A (SIgA), pointing to enhanced activity of the immune system.24 This form of immunoglobulin is secreted externally into bodily fluids, including mucus in the bronchial, genital, and digestive tracts, and is a first line of defense against microbial infections. In one study with a classical choir, SIgA levels increased on average by 150 percent during rehearsals and 240 percent during the performance.25
Studies with residents of nursing homes who sang together showed significant reductions in standardized measures of stress and depression, compared with those who did not sing. In one yearlong study, independent elderly people who sang in a community choir showed significant improvements in physical and mental health.26 In patients with dementia, both singing and listening to music alleviated some of their troubling symptoms, including depression and agitated and aggressive behavior.27
After an extensive review of research on the effects of choral singing, one group of researchers summarized their conclusions as follows:
The beneficial effects of music are so well established that they form the basis of a profession, music therapy, which can be used to help adults or children with behavioral or emotional disorders, as well as for pain management, relaxation, and in many other contexts, including therapy with pregnant women and their unborn babies.29
From the age of about three months, the fetus can hear sounds and respond to music in the womb, as shown by movements revealed by scans. And babies and infants are often calmed by music, which is why mothers in many cultures have always sung lullabies to them.
Not surprisingly, stimulating music has stimulating physiological effects and tends to increase heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure, partly by activating the release of adrenaline; slow music is associated with decreases in these measures. These physiological changes are controlled by activity within the brain stem, the part of the brain that connects to the spinal cord, and through which motor and sensory nerves pass from the main part of the brain to the rest of the body. The musical tempo affects the firing of nerve cells in the brain stem, bringing them into synchrony with the music.30 A similar synchronization occurs in the cerebellum, which is concerned with the coordination of movements and balance.31 Both the brain stem and the cerebellum are evolutionarily ancient parts of the brain, situated within the so-called reptilian brain.
The effects of different kinds of sounds may be related to ancient evolutionary instincts, as neuroscientists have pointed out:
[M]usic commonly classified as “stimulating” mimics sounds in nature, such as the alarm calls of many species, that signal potentially important events (e.g., loud sounds with sudden onset and a repeating short motif). Interestingly, positive affect and reward anticipation have also been associated with high frequency, short motif calls. This, in turn, heightens sympathetic arousal (heart rate, pulse, skin conductance, and breathing). By contrast, “relaxing” music mimics soothing natural sounds such as maternal vocalizations, purring and cooing (soft, low-pitched sounds with a gradual amplitude envelope), which decrease sympathetic arousal.32
Whereas rhythms are primarily linked to the brain stem and cerebellum, melodies are primarily processed in the right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex, the opposite side of the brain from the primary language-processing areas.33 And not surprisingly, pleasurable music activates regions of the brain (in the mesolimbic system) that are involved in arousal and the experience of pleasure.34
Another aspect of music rooted in ancient evolutionary history is its effect on levels of the hormone oxytocin, the so-called love hormone, which is found in many invertebrates and in all vertebrates, where it is produced in the brain and secreted from the pituitary gland. (Chemically, oxytocin is a peptide, made up of a string of nine amino acids.) This hormone is involved in reproductive behavior and egg laying even in earthworms, and in the courtship and sexual activity of frogs, toads, reptiles, and birds, in which it stimulates bonding behavior and singing.35 The same is true of mammals, including singing mice and hamsters.36
Likewise, in humans, oxytocin plays a role in social bonding, sexual activity, and during childbirth. In breast-feeding mothers, the release of oxytocin into the bloodstream is part of the milk letdown reflex, which usually occurs when mothers hear their babies cry. Oxytocin levels within the brain cannot be measured directly, but its concentration in the blood increased in babies who heard their mothers singing to them in motherese. In other studies, oxytocin levels increased when people sang,37 and patients in the hospital after an operation who heard soothing music were more relaxed and had higher oxytocin levels than those who did not hear music.38 Oxytocin facilitates trusting behavior and reduces fear and anxiety.
Musical Deprivation
As we have just seen, music has many positive effects on health, well-being, social bonding, and group cohesion. The corollary must be that lack of music has negative effects on health, well-being, social bonding, and group cohesion.
In her book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that musical deprivation is linked to an increase in the incidence of depression in modern, secular societies, where few people sing together.39
In many tribal societies and hunter-gatherer communities, practically everyone sang and danced together. But as agricultural societies developed with the growth of cities and social hierarchies, there was a conflict between ecstatic dancing and the preservation of social order. People in states of ecstasy have a reduced awareness of their surroundings and of normal social constraints. They are more open to altered states of consciousness, which can include a sense of spiritual connectedness and great joy. In hierarchical societies, the preservation of the dignity and authority of the higher-ups conflicts with their participation in dances with their social inferiors. In some societies, festivals have relieved this tension by allowing a reversal of the social order, as in the festival of Saturnalia in ancient Rome, on December 17, when servants became masters and masters, servants.
I experienced this reversal of roles myself when I lived in India. While working at ICRISAT, I lived in the wing of a crumbling palace. The palace was owned by a young raja whose family was part of the traditional nobility of Hyderabad State. The raja and his wife, the rani, were devout Hindus and normally led a sedate life. On the eve of the festival of Holi, soon before the vernal equinox, they invited me to join them for a bonfire in the palace courtyard.
During my first year in India, I had no idea what to expect, and I was amazed by what happened. I found myself in a gathering that included all the servants and their families. The dancing around the bonfire was wild. The young mali, or gardener, a lively young man, was now the master and hurled insults at the raja, speaking to him in the most disrespectful and familiar forms of address, amid peals of laughter. The next morning, the rani gave me a glass of a special Holi drink, which turned out to be bhang, a powerful cannabis concoction. With everyone high and in a fully festive mood, we ran around squirting colored water at each other. Again, there were no distinctions of class or caste. Everyone had fun. The next day normal life began again, but it felt very different.
In the Old Testament, dancing is celebrated in the psalms, and it was, of course, normal at wedding feasts and other celebrations. But there was an inevitable conflict with hierarchy and dignity. King David took part, nearly naked, in a dance through the streets of Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6:14), but his wife Michal strongly disapproved. She told him he had dishonored himself by uncovering himself “in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself!” (2 Samuel 6:20). And the Hebrew prophets disapproved of the ecstatic dances that the Jews shared with the other inhabitants of Palestine. Prophet after prophet condemned their dances in sacred groves dedicated to Canaanite goddesses that could turn into orgies.40
There was a similar conflict in ancient Greece between the ecstatic rituals associated with the wine god Dionysus and the forces of military discipline, as highlighted in Euripides’s play The Bacchae. The warrior king Pentheus tries to crack down on the wildly dancing Maenads, women followers of Dionysus. But in the end, he cannot resist; he disguises himself in women’s clothes and goes to dance, only to meet a terrible death when he is torn apart, limb from limb, by his own mother.
Likewise, in imperial Rome, wealthy and important people were not supposed to indulge in undignified dancing in public. Nevertheless, the cult of Bacchus (the Roman equivalent of Dionysus) became increasingly popular, until it was seen as a threat. It was savagely repressed in 186 BC, when about seven thousand men and women were arrested for taking part in Bacchic rites, and most were executed.41 The old gods and goddesses were accessible through dancing and ritually induced ecstasy. The newer sky gods, like Yahweh and Zeus, spoke through prophets and priests instead.
With the arrival of Jesus, the situation changed again. Jesus had a Dionysian aspect, and he is commemorated in the Holy Communion through the drinking of wine. His first miracle was the transformation of 180 gallons of water into wine at a wedding feast, after the original supply had been drunk (John 2: 1-11). Early Christian gatherings often involved feasting, drinking, and probably dancing, too,42 and a tension between joyful celebration and distrust of disorderly behavior has run throughout all Christian history.
In the Middle Ages, festivals and carnivals were widely tolerated by the Roman Catholic Church. But with the Protestant Reformation, these popular celebrations were denounced by some of the Reformers, especially by Calvinists. In the seventeenth century, the Puritans in England tried to suppress dancing altogether, and they cut down the maypoles that were the focus of dances in towns and villages. But there were gains as well as losses. Before the Reformation, church congregations played little part in the service, but afterward, especially in Lutheran Germany, they were encouraged to sing. And Luther himself liked dancing.
Although depression probably existed in the ancient world, Ehrenreich points out that from the seventeenth century onward, it became an ever-more-prevalent feature of European culture. Melancholy was on the rise, especially in Protestant countries. A new emphasis on the autonomy of the self gave a greater sense of individual freedom, but it was also isolating. Together with the social disruption experienced by many people as a result of moving from villages into towns and cities, this new individualism was accompanied by increased anxiety and depression.43
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European explorers and missionaries were often appalled by the ecstatic dances of native peoples, especially when they went into trances, sometimes foaming at the mouth, not feeling pain, seeing visions, and believing themselves to be possessed by spirits or deities. In the introduction to a book on tribal dancing published in 1926, author W.D. Hambly asks his readers for their sympathy for the subject:
The student of primitive music and dancing will have to cultivate a habit of broad-minded consideration for the activities of backward races . . . Music and dancing performed wildly by firelight in a tropical forest have not seldom provoked the censure and disgust of European visitors, who have seen only what is grotesque or sensual.44
Educated Westerners had more sedate dances, although their less-educated compatriots still danced wildly at carnival and in other festivities.
In the Caribbean and the Americas in the early nineteenth century, music making by slaves of African ancestry was not only emotionally disturbing to some white slave owners, it was also politically threatening. Revolts often broke out at times of festival or celebration, including Christmas, when dancing gave the oppressed people a greater sense of solidarity, community, and cooperation. This historical background is one reason why the rock-and-roll revolution that began in the late 1950s had such a profound effect on white society. There was a return of the repressed. The music of white musicians from Elvis Presley onward was inspired by African American music, which was itself deeply rooted in black church music. Black performers of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Ray Charles, Little Richard, and Aretha Franklin, acknowledged their obvious debt to black church music, and many of them sang both religious and secular songs.
The rock-and-roll revolution transferred something of an African American sense of rhythm to people of European descent. And from the 1960s onward, through music festivals like the Glastonbury Festival in England, something of the old sense of carnival returned. But apart from the fact that these are secular, rather than religious, events, there is a big difference from the older kinds of celebration. People dance at festivals, clubs, and parties, but most do not sing or make music themselves. They are consumers rather than creators. If listening to music alone were enough to counteract depression, then depression would have decreased in recent decades, because music has become all-pervasive through radio, recordings, background music, film soundtracks, commercials, portable music players, and the internet. But rates of depression have increased rather than diminished.45
People who go to church still sing together, as do people who belong to choirs. But the majority of the population in Europe, and now even a majority in the United States, sings neither in a church nor in a choir. This may help to explain the popularity of karaoke, which enables many people to start singing again. Probably any kind of singing is better than none. But singing with a spiritual purpose may be more effective than purely secular singing, because it can lead to a sense of connection not only with other people, but also with more-than-human consciousness, going beyond the human realm to the divine. At least this was the experience of the black gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who said, “I sing God’s music because it makes me feel free. It gives me hope. With the blues, when you finish, you still have the blues.”46
Musical Goddesses, Gods, and Spirits
Goddesses, gods, angels, spirits, and God are music lovers. Their devotees sing to them, chant to them, invoke them through songs, and praise them through psalms and hymns. The angels themselves are musical beings, as expressed in a well-known Christmas carol: “Sing choirs of angels, sing in exultation.”
The ancient Greeks thought that goddesses, the muses, inspired the arts. That is why music is called music: It is inspired by muses. In Greek mythology, Orpheus, the legendary musician and archetype of inspired singers, was the son of a muse. Likewise, in India, music is believed to be inspired by a goddess, Saraswati, who is usually portrayed playing a veena, a stringed instrument. In South India, concerts of classical Indian music usually begin by invoking this goddess.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims all believe that God loves music. All three traditions acknowledge the psalms as holy songs, and in the Koran, God is identified as their source: “and to David We gave the psalms” (Surah 4:163). Many of the psalms are about making music, in some cases by humans and by nonhumans, too, as in Psalm 98:5–9: “Sing unto the Lord with the harp; with the harp, and with the voice of a psalm. With the trumpet and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the Lord, the King . . . Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills be joyful together before the Lord.”
No fewer than three of the psalms (96, 98, and 149) begin with the words, “Sing unto the Lord a new song.” The Western church music tradition, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, from the sixteenth century right up until the present day, has produced an amazing variety of new songs, some of very great beauty. And God not only likes new songs, but also, as in other religious traditions, old songs, traditional chants, and chanted prayers.
Why do spiritual beings like music? Atheists and secular humanists have a ready answer: Spiritual beings cannot like music because they do not exist. Humans like music and they then project this human activity onto imaginary gods, goddesses, and angels. In sacred music and chanting, humans are not connecting with higher forms of consciousness, but only with electrochemical events in their own brains.
By contrast, most, if not all, religious traditions assume without question that the ultimate reality of the universe is vibratory or sonic and at the same time conscious. In several Hindu accounts, the universe was formed by primal sounds, first and foremost the mantra om. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God creates by speaking. God’s Word, or Logos, to use the Greek term, is the second person of the Christian Holy Trinity. God the Father is the speaker of the Word. The Holy Spirit is the breath by which he speaks it.
In Plato’s (427–347 BC) “Myth of Er,” at the end of The Republic, he describes the soul’s journey through the whirling circles of the heavens, which carry the planets, with each planetary level emitting its own note, thus creating a cosmic harmony.47 Partly inspired by Plato, the Roman poet Cicero (106–43 BC) wrote a book called On the Republic, which also includes a heavenly journey, called the “Dream of Scipio,” in which Scipio’s dead grandfather guides him. He visits the place where departed souls dwell in the Milky Way, enabling him to look back on the planetary spheres as if from outside, rather like a superastronaut. In his vision of the cosmos, the earth is at the center, circled by the moon and then the spheres of the other planets, and he hears a “great and pleasing sound” caused by the motion of the spheres themselves. His grandfather explains, “Gifted men, imitating this harmony on string instruments and in singing, have gained for themselves a return to this region, as have those of exceptional abilities who have studied divine matters even in earthly life. The ears of mortals are filled with this sound, but they are unable to hear it.”48
Of course, we now have a very different cosmology, and the earth is no longer at its center. The studies of planetary motion by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) showed that planets move around the sun not in circles but in ellipses. In 1619 he gave an account of the planets’ songs that described their real music as polyphonic and not a static scale of notes, as in previous visions of the harmony of the spheres. Kepler said that as the planets moved in their elliptical orbits, they sped up and slowed down, creating an interweaving of tones. Significantly, Kepler published his findings in a book called Harmonices Mundi (The Harmony of the World).
It is, of course, still the case that the planets have elliptical orbits of particular periods or frequencies; the sun also has an orbital movement within the galaxy, as do the other stars. These frequencies are much too slow to be registered as tones by human hearing, but if there were a galactic mind, then it might well hear the repetitive rhythms of all these celestial movements as tones or qualities, as a kind of planetary, stellar, and galactic music.
In the background of all these musical theories of the cosmos were the seminal teachings of the school of Pythagoras in ancient Greece. The Pythagoreans believed that numbers, ratios, and proportions underlaid the entire cosmos. They also showed that music provided a bridge between quantity and quality, between mathematics—measurable aspects of music—and subjective experience. Musical intervals could be both heard consciously and expressed mathematically. For example, if one flute is twice as long as another, the note it sounds is an octave lower. If it is half as long, the note is an octave higher. The same is true for the length of strings in a string instrument (if the thickness and tension are constant). These principles apply to our own vocal cords, too, which are stringlike.49
Contemporary science follows the same principles, but gives us more detail about the relationship of quantity and quality. If we beat out a rhythm once a second, we hear a series of beats that we can count. As the beats become faster and faster, by about 20 beats per second (20 hertz, or Hz for short), we can no longer count them but hear low notes instead, qualities rather than quantities. As the frequency increases, the notes get higher and higher. Within a range from about 20 to 20,000 Hz, we hear vibrations as tones, as qualities. Yet they are also measurable quantitatively as frequencies. In the conventional tuning system, the note A above middle C is defined with a frequency of 440 Hz. The note A an octave below has a frequency of 220 Hz, and the A an octave above, 880 Hz.
Quantum mechanics has extended these Pythagorean principles down to the fundamental particles of matter, which are not made of solid stuff but are patterns of vibration, as is light. Atoms, molecules, and crystals are all vibratory structures. Indeed, everything in nature is rhythmic or vibratory, including our own physiology, with our brain waves, heartbeats, breathing patterns, daily cycles of waking and sleeping, monthly cycles in women, and annual cycles for all of us.
For panpsychists, there may well be many forms of mind or consciousness in nature, each of them experiencing qualities and feelings at its own level. What if wave patterns at many different levels become conscious, from the smallest, in subatomic particles, to the largest, in galactic clusters and indeed the entire cosmos? What if quality, namely sounds, and quantity, namely frequencies and amplitudes, go together in minds at all levels of complexity, not just in animal minds? What if all nature can be experienced as music?
The Indian musician and Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) expressed this possibility as follows:
Music as we know it in our everyday language is only a miniature: that which our intelligence has grasped from that music or harmony of the entire universe that is working behind us. The harmony of the universe is the background of the little picture that we call music. Our sense of music, our attraction to music, shows that music is in the depth of our being. Music is behind the working of the whole universe. Music is not only life’s great object, but music is life itself.50
Something of the same insight underlies the first part of The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion tells the creation myth of the universe Eä, which contains Middle-earth. The story begins with the creation of angel-like beings:
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Ilúvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony.51
Tolkien’s poetic imagining of creation through music helps deepen our imaginations. Cosmic music is far beyond our normal range of experience, but creation myths and storytellers help us to glimpse something of a conscious world far beyond our limited minds, yet to which we are related through the shared experience of music.
For people who believe that consciousness exists only inside brains, the appreciation of music must be brain bound; everything else is unconscious, and the vast majority of the nonhuman world is deaf to our chants, songs, and music. On the other hand, if the entire cosmos is conscious, and if it contains many levels of consciousness within it, then music can link us to musical minds far greater than our own, and ultimately to the source of life itself.
Two Musical Practices
SINGING
Make a practice of singing with other people. The simplest way to do so is to join a community choir or a church choir, or simply go to church on Sunday. In most churches, you will be able to participate in the singing of hymns and psalms at a morning or evening service. This is what I do myself, wherever I am. It is much simpler than trying to get together a group of friends to sing. If you feel uncomfortable going to a Christian service, then try the Sunday Assembly or some other secular group that meets and sings regularly. If you are Jewish, go to a synagogue with participatory singing. If you are Hindu, go to a bhajan or other singing group.
CHANTING
I asked my wife Jill to summarize some simple practices that all of us can try. Here are her suggestions:
Most spiritual practices are ways of allowing us to be in the present moment, to be here now. We can only chant in the present, and if we listen to the sound we are making as we make it, we create a circuit of attention. This allows us to integrate with the unfolding duration of the now, where joy is to be found. When people talk of being disenchanted, I take this literally and tell them the remedy for disenchantment is to chant. To enchant is to make, and to be made, magical through sound.
All traditions have sacred sounds that are repeated as meditations to rescue us from our exile in the delusion of past and future, from our endless loop of regrets and dreads and bring us back into the now. In the East, there are countless mantras. Perhaps the best known is om, while in the West—in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—many have chanted “ameen”; indeed, some speculate these may have a common origin.
I suggest you try the following practice.
Close your eyes and focus on your breath; let every in-breath bring light into your body, and with every out-breath release tension and let go. With every out-breath let go further, and with every in-breath feel inside yourself, until all of you is light. Then continue, but introduce sound: Start to hum and let the sound be like a beam of light, exploring the inner recesses of your being. Most importantly, listen, keeping focused on the sound you are making, so that nothing escapes your hearing. As you continue, begin to change the shape of your mouth, exploring different vowel sounds and moving your tongue around until the sound you are listening to begins to modulate and change.
Choose whichever mantra you feel drawn to and sit quietly while you chant it. Maybe chant the mantra “ah,” the Tibetan mantra of primordial space, and at the same time listen to yourself, so you integrate with the sound you are chanting. Gradually allow the sound to become quieter until you are present, listening to the absence of sound. The gift of sound is silence.