When I was four years old, my grandfather took me to Kearny Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. My “cousins” Ping and Mae—the technicians who developed the X-rays in his radiology office—met us there. As he usually did, Ping lifted me up onto his shoulders and walked me around as I held onto his forehead, my hands sometimes excitedly slipping over his eyes and blocking his view. And what there was to see! Dancers in pink and purple costumes ran up and down the street, firecrackers exploded, floats decked out in fresh and plastic flowers carried waving local dignitaries, and traditional Chinese music came bursting out of loudspeakers, bullhorns, instruments, and mouths everywhere we went. The whole crowd was smiling, laughing, jumping, celebrating as free-spirited, barely coordinated parts of a single organism. I had never seen so many happy people in one place at one time. And it was infectious. When Ping lowered me to the ground, Grandpa and I danced in place, and he swung me around in circles, my feet lifted off the ground by the swirling centrifugal force. Mae gave me a whistle to blow and a pin to wear on my T-shirt. At home and at synagogue, we sang songs on Friday nights and we had even sung something a couple of months earlier at Jewish New Year, but those songs were solemn affairs, slow and tedious, nothing like the Chinese songs. Ceremonies didn’t have to be somber!
Human rituals around the world have many elements in common, suggesting either a common origin to them all or a common biological heritage. Some are joyful and some serious, some disciplined and others performed with structured abandon. When we break down these activities into their elements, we see a remarkable continuity with activities in the animal kingdom, strongly suggesting that evolution had a hand in guiding us toward the particular ways in which we express ourselves through movement and sound. The common conception that humans possess abilities that make us uniquely human—language is often trotted out as a crowning achievement, with religion and music not far behind—is sharply contradicted by some of the newest research in neurobiology. Animals are indeed capable of many of the things that only ten years ago we thought were our species’ sole inheritance, the abilities falling along a continuum rather than appearing abruptly in Homo sapiens. What is different is our species’ ability to discuss and plan these activities with self-conscious awareness of them, and to bind them in time and location to particular beliefs. Animals may perform rituals, even quite elaborate ones, but only humans commemorate and celebrate, and only humans tie these to a belief system. When the Edwin Hawkins Singers sing “Oh Happy Day,” they celebrate the day Jesus “washed away sin” with some of the most joyful and uplifting emotion ever recorded. No animals celebrate a particular date, a birth, or commemorate a decisive battle—to do so requires brain structures that they may possess but do not use the way we do.
The continuity of behaviors from animals to us bears scrutiny. Ants and elephants bury their dead. Humans mourn theirs, and typically with elaborate ritual—sometimes solemnly, sometimes joyfully, almost always accompanied by music. Neanderthals were burying their dead long before Homo sapiens walked the earth, but the archaeological record suggests that their burials were an accidentally adopted behavior for hygienic reasons—like cats covering their feces; no traces of ornaments, jewelry, or other accoutrements accompany Neanderthal burial sites, whereas these are almost always present in human graves.1 Humans built on this existing physical action of burial to imbue it with a cultural and spiritual component. Ceremony, as a uniquely human invention, commemorates important events. These can be events of our human life cycle such as birth, marriage, and death, or events in our environmental life cycle such as the seasons, the rains, daybreak, and nightfall. Rituals tie us to the event itself, and to the cycle of history in which many similar events have previously occurred and will continue to occur. They are a form of externalized, social memory, and when marked by music, they become even more firmly instantiated in both our personal and collective memory. The songs, sung at the same time and place every year (in the case of seasonal or holiday songs), or at gatherings commemorating similar events (funerals, weddings, births), bind these events together in a common theme, in a common set of beliefs about the nature of life. The music acts as a powerful retrieval cue for these memories precisely because it is associated with these and only these times and places.
The evolutionary changes that furnished humans with the musical brain—an enlarged prefrontal cortex, and all the myriad bilateral connections with cortical and subcortical areas—formed a crucial step in social development of our species. With these evolutionary changes came self-consciousness (an aspect of perspective taking), which brought with it spiritual yearnings and the ability to consider that there might be things more important than one’s own life. I believe a particular kind of music—songs associated with religion, ritual, and belief—served a necessary function in creating early human social systems and societies. Music helped to infuse ritual practices with meaning, to make them memorable, and to share them with our friends, family, and living groups, facilitating a social order. This yearning for meaning lies at the foundation of what makes us human.
Like music, religion is found in all human societies (and for both, people disagree as to whether they have an evolutionary or a supernatural basis). In spite of great differences in beliefs and practices and in geo graphical location, no known human culture lacks religion.2 This strongly suggests that religion is more than a meme—information transmitted to people through culture—and may have an evolutionary basis.3 Émile Durkheim, one of the fathers of sociology, taught us a century ago that anything that is universal to human culture is likely to contribute to human survival.4 Modern biologists extend this notion to animal behavior, looking for links across species as a way of understanding the evolution of the brain. Behaviors that we consider quintessentially human don’t just fall out of the sky from nowhere, but are distributed along a continuum of behaviors that are remarkably similar to those we see in animals (and so presumably contributed to animal survival). It may not be possible to cleanly distinguish ritual from religion, and perhaps the distinction is not as important as understanding the continuous nature of how they relate to one another, of how rituals became bound up into religion in the first place.
Rituals involve repetitive movement. Many animals show ritualized behavior, such as dogs circling a few times before lying down, birds swaying from one leg to another, or raccoons washing their faces after a meal. What separates these from human rituals is a cognitive component, human self-consciousness: We are aware (most of the time) of our behaviors, and we assign them a higher purpose and sense of meaning. We wash our hands because of germs. We light candles to mark an event. We talk about our rituals and sing about them. What sets religious practices apart is that they are sets of rituals, bound to a common narrative or worldview. That is, rituals exist in a part-whole relationship to religious practice.
The anthropologist Roy Rappaport defined ritual as “acts of display through which one or more participants transmit information concerning their physiological, psychological, or sociological states either to themselves or to one or more of their [fellow] participants.”6
The display aspect is critical—rituals serve as a form of communication. Also critical is the inclusive nature of his definition, which explicitly allows for the display to be self-reflexive, to serve only the person engaged in the ritual. Thus, an individual washing her hands prior to preparing ceremonial food, or laying sticks at a fire altar, or even musicians executing a set of scales as a pre-concert warm-up—all signify to the doer that she is becoming ready (through this preparatory ritual) to advance to the next stage of a plan or operation.
Rappaport defined religion as “sets of sacred beliefs held in common by groups of people and … the more or less standard actions (rituals) that are undertaken with respect to these beliefs.” He defines sacred as those beliefs that are unverifiable through normal physical means or through the normal five senses—the belief or faith in things that are not corporeal but that can influence the course of our lives.
Religious ceremonies and practices almost always incorporate ritual behavior—repetitive motor actions: bowing seven times, making the sign of the cross, folding and unfolding your hands in a particular way. Anthropologists have identified certain features of human religious practices, believed to be universal, applying across disparate cultures, times, and places:
These features are found in the religious ceremonies of Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Taoists, Buddhists, and Native Americans, as well as hundreds of ceremonies of preliterate and preindustrialized societies. And the story of ritual is intimately bound up with music—which almost always accompanies it—and with human nature. Whether you believe that man invented religion or received it from God is not the issue, and I don’t want to get distracted by that question here. The remarkable similarity of human religious rites to one another, and to certain animal rituals, can be invoked as evidence for either view. Several recent scientific studies have shown that there exist neural regions that might be called “God centers”: When they are electrically stimulated, people report having intense feelings of spirituality and communication with God. Some scientists argued overconfidently from these findings that religious belief must be “merely” a product of the brain, and that therefore humans must have invented God.
I told all this to my good friend, Hayyim Kassorla, a learned and respected Orthodox rabbi, and without missing a beat he snapped back, “So what if there’s a center in the brain that makes people think of God? Why wouldn’t there be? Maybe God put it there to help us to understand and communicate with him.” My mother, an observant Jew, added, “The similarity of human religious practice across cultures is because God found that these practices work and so he gave them—with some variation—to all peoples.” The point is that we can consider the biological, evolutionary, and neural evidence for ritual behaviors without necessarily impinging on anyone’s personal beliefs about the origin of the universe or spirituality. We don’t need to resolve the physical/metaphysical question before proceeding with the evolutionary one.
Ritual behavior is evidently innate and hardwired in humans. Most children enter a stage of development around age two, peaking around eight, in which they show phases of ritual behaviors: perfectionism, collecting, attachment to favorite objects, repetition of actions, and even a preoccupation with the ordering of things—a stage of “it has to be done this way” in which children may line up their toys or organize their environment in particular ways.7 Young girls hold tea parties for their real and imaginary friends. The table is set just so. The guests have to sit in assigned places. The hostess can become agitated when things are not organized or consistent with her own internal notion of the proper ritual order: “You sit here, he sits here. No! Mr. Rabbit gets his tea first!”
Spontaneously—without explicit instruction and without ever having heard of it from someone else—many children connect their ad hoc rituals to the supernatural or to magic, and they imagine effects the rituals might have on a variety of outcomes, from the weather to telekinesis to getting their way.8
Of course I didn’t engage in tea party rituals as a child since I was a boy—my ritual phase was more automotive and involved seat belts and the seat belt song. In 1961, when I was three, the Ad Council of America launched a program of public service messages on television about the importance of “buckling up for safety” with car seat belts. A catchy jingle exhorted us to tell our parents that there was a correct order, a sequence of events that must be respected: Before driving, buckle up your safety belt. I remember hearing that jingle and singing it all around the house. Seat belts were new in 1961 and most cars didn’t have them; my parents had learned to drive without them. Although our family car, a Simca, was equipped with them, my parents hadn’t gotten used to using them, and probably weren’t convinced of their effectiveness. (There hadn’t been any crash test dummy experiments done yet.) My mother tells me that whenever she and my father got in the car, I would sing the little jingle and get furious if they drove even a few feet without having buckled up. I was deep in my “correct order of things” phase.
In children, rituals tend to be associated with anxiety states—fear of strangers, the unknown, attack by strangers or animals, and possible contamination. This leads to bedtime rituals such as checking for monsters, wanting to hear bedtime stories, or holding your special fuzzy blue blanket. The ritual adds a sense of order, constancy, and familiarity that psychologists believe counteracts the uncertainty and fear of the unknown dangers.9 Oxytocin—the trust-inducing hormone that is released during orgasm and communal singing—has been found to be connected to the performance of ritual, suggesting a neurochemical basis for why rituals have a comforting effect.10
These behaviors are so widespread, and occur so regularly in childhood, that they no doubt have an evolutionary and genetic origin. A drive toward creating symmetry, toward lining up and ordering one’s environment, is present even in birds and some mammals. From an adaptation perspective, this order makes any intrusion by an outsider immediately and clearly visible.11 Those of our ancestors who found plea sure in hand washing or in creating symmetrical protective borders around their encampments may have been more successful at fending off both micro-and macroscopic threats to their health and safety, and passed on a desire to do so to us through the oxytocin system. Richard Dawkins’s observation is compelling: No one of us alive today had an ancestor who died in infancy. Every one of our ancestors lived long enough to pass on his or her genes to us. While we can’t say that every minute behavior of our ancestors was adaptive, none of them could have been grossly maladaptive, to the point of causing early death, or of making them fatally unattractive to a member of the opposite sex. The ubiquity of ritual behaviors does suggest they served, in some form, an important survival function.
Some ritual behaviors become uncontrollable, and when that happens nowadays we diagnose it as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Some researchers have speculated that impaired dopamine and GABA regulation—and the consequent abnormal control of the brain’s “habit circuits” in the basal ganglia—lead to OCD in both humans and animals. The basal ganglia store chunks or summaries of motor behavior, and when they are inadequately regulated, one only finds emotional satisfaction when they are allowed to run in a loop of repeated activity, over and over again.12
Rituals in animals and adult humans tend to be born from many of the same concerns as children’s rituals—purity, contamination, safety, but also mating. To claim that human rituals, even when encased within sacred religious systems, are uniquely human, is to ignore the rich repertoire of animal rituals that resemble them. As just one of many possible examples, consider the mating ritual of the Australian bowerbird (of the family Ptilonorhynchidae). While it may strike us as elaborate and complex, it is in fact no more so than the mating rituals of hundreds of other species of birds, mammals, amphibians, and fish. Once a year, the male birds spend several days gathering brightly colored objects such as feathers, shells, and berries to create bowers, elaborately decorated structures, usually shaped like a pathway, a hut, or a small pole. After the bowers are completed, the males sing and dance, concluding a successful ritual by selecting a female to mate with (and the female typically chooses the male based on the quality of his bower and his singing and dancing).
Compare this with an annual ritual of the villagers on Pentecost Island in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. Each year young males take part in the ritual of nagahol, as part of a plea to the gods to ensure, among other things, a good yam crop. Young males construct tall, colorful, elaborately decorated poles up to seventy-five feet high and as all the villagers sing and dance, the males climb the poles and then jump off, held by a thin vine. If he concludes his dive successfully, a male is then considered an adult and can take a wife from among the spectators. As far as we know, there are no bowerbirds on Pentecost Island and never have been. Either a common neurobiological imperative underlies the ceremony, or it is a coincidence. Is nagahol part of a religion or is it an isolated ritual? At what point does ritual become religion? Sulawesi villagers engage in a rain dance that includes stylized imitation of the sound of rain, meant to induce it. Their dance and music and actions have a clear goal and intended effect. I leave the distinction between religion and ritual in the mind of the beholder (and the question of whether this belief constitutes a belief system or not is inessential to a discussion of the evolution of religious song).
Religion—whether God-given, man-made, or a gift of natural selection—can be seen as an important part of inclusive fitness. All higher animals have a “security-motivation” system that monitors environmental conditions and motivates them to act via emotional states if danger is imminent.13 The system monitors both external events in the world and internal states such as pain, fever, and nausea. The brain mechanisms underlying this can be broken down into three parts: (1) an appraisal system compares events being monitored to a list of things known to be dangerous (either known by experience, or innately); (2) an evaluation system determines the magnitude of the hazard; and (3) an action system causes the human or animal to execute a response that will reduce the danger, by moving, running, fighting, or any number of other strategies innate or learned.
The display aspect of single rituals, or those sets of rituals that become bound into religious acts, allows common human fears and concerns to be given a broad social context in which they can be shared with the community and make better sense.14 Religion further lets us partition our fears into those that we and our community are going to worry about and those that we are not, and to take collective action toward addressing the former and systemically, in a formally sanctioned way, ignoring the latter. Depending on our belief system, we might decide as a community to pray for the health of a loved one, but not for dead relatives to come back to life; modern Christian rituals focus on Jesus not on Zeus or Thor, and we have society’s permission to ignore the latter two gods and any demands we fear they may have.
When we pray for the health of a dying loved one, the termination of the prayer confers a great psychological advantage: It allows us to stop worrying. We breathe a sigh of relief and affirm that “it’s in God’s hands; her fate is decided.” This is clearly adaptive, because it propels us to get on with our lives and to stop ruminating about things that we can’t change, and to worry about those we can. Interestingly, however, the fear-security-motivation system was “built” thousands or tens of thousands of years ago and it is not responsive to those current threats that are most dangerous: This is why so many of us are afraid of spiders and snakes, which cause far fewer deaths than cars or cigarettes, which most of us are not afraid of.15
Another function of rituals is to change the state-of-the-world, thereby reducing ambiguity. Consider male puberty rites, which are part of most cultures. Unlike the onset of menses, which unambiguously signals the transition from girlhood to womanhood in females, no such biological marker exists for males. Male puberty rites remove the ambiguity about the young male’s role in society, whether he should act as a boy or a man. The rite turns more-or-less information into yes/no information: Before the rite he is a boy, after he is a man.
A marriage ceremony turns a man and a woman into husband and wife. This parallels a prominent theory in psycholinguistics about human speech acts. Most of the time our utterances are simply speech acts that express opinions, make requests, provide information, or share our emotional state. There is a small class of utterances, however, that hold a special status as being able to change the state-of-the-world. This happens when a duly recognized official makes a declaration that has either legal or definitional consequences. An example is a minister saying “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” If he is officially recognized by the church or state, this simple sentence changes the status of the couple. Similar state-changing utterances include a judge announcing a verdict (the guilty or innocent proclamation dramatically changes the legal and practical state of the defendant), a government official deputizing a law enforcement officer, the chief justice inaugurating the President, or even a coroner pronouncing someone dead. (Note that in the latter case, even if the person isn’t dead at all, the proclamation by a duly authorized coroner changes the legal status of the victim, allowing for autopsy, burial, and other actions not otherwise allowed.)
When people come together and want to inaugurate or celebrate a change of social status, such as a wedding or the installation of a leader, music is virtually always there. Music is also there at harvest celebrations and anniversaries of a birth, death, or important battle. Commemoration seems to require music. The specificity of time and place is an interesting aspect of religion songs (and the subset of ritual songs I’m including) that sets them apart from the other five categories in this book. Everyone knows ritual songs can only be sung at the right time and place. But songs of joy, for example, can be sung anytime that songs can be sung; not in a library or in the middle of a play, for example, but if songs are otherwise permitted, there is no reason that you couldn’t sing a joy song, or a friendship song, or a knowledge song. Religion/ritual songs, on the other hand, and their associated religious/ritual events, carry very strict restrictions on time and place.
Take for example, the Elgar composition “Pomp and Circumstance,” also known as “The Graduation March,” played at high school and college graduation ceremonies all across North America, as students file up to receive their diplomas (it is also New Zealand’s national anthem). The song has interesting musical qualities. It begins with a legato line of notes in close proximity to one another: The first fifteen notes are all stepwise and then the sixteenth note of the piece takes a large ascending leap of a perfect fourth immediately followed by a falling perfect fifth—a move that grabs our attention. “Pomp and Circumstance” is played with a stately pace, and the instrumentation gives it a sense of majesty, seriousness, and procession. So well known and uniquely associated with commencement, it is even used at some nursery school and kindergarten graduation ceremonies. But no one plays this piece at sporting events, or on a dinner date, or at a wedding.
Even the most insensitive clod would recognize its misuse at the wrong time or place. If there was a high school assembly being conducted, an informational session perhaps, for students who were being held back a year in school due to poor academic performance, and the principal played “Pomp and Circumstance,” it would seem cruel. Or consider a Ph.D. oral exam. It would be unusual, but not unacceptable, for a student to start playing a tape recording of “Pomp and Circumstance” once the exam was over and the committee told him he had passed. But if the student played the same song before the exam, the committee would find it so presumptuous as to be offensive.
The criticality of time and place is a hallmark of ritual songs, and it is so important that if it is violated, jobs can be lost and even—in the extreme—so can lives. Consider songs that accompany a country’s ruler, such as “Hail to the Chief” or “God Save the Queen,” played respectively when the President of the United States or the British queen enters a room. If a scheming, conniving underling were to instruct the military band to play the song every time he walked in a room, it would be seen as a direct and aggressive challenge to the reigning ruler’s authority. In a dictatorship, playing the leadership song for the wrong person could easily result in a death sentence. Such is the importance of time and place in ritual and religion songs.
Ritual and religion songs are therefore, to my way of thinking, bound to particular times and events, and for the explicit purpose of accompanying, guiding, or sanctifying a specific spiritual act. Under this definition “Jingle Bells” or “Deck the Halls” are not religion songs, although they spring from the celebration of a religious holiday. Rather, I see them as friendship songs, binding us to friends and family who hold similar beliefs. Christmas carols can be sung during a broad range of occasions surrounding the season of the holiday; as I conceive ritual and religion songs, they are far more restricted. Similarly, national anthems and football fight songs, although ritualistic (being played at the beginning of a competition, for example), are really serving a social bonding function more than a religious or spiritual one. “The Wedding March,” “The Funeral March,” the Mass, the Song of Atonement, on the other hand, are religion songs in that they must be performed at a certain time and place and they cannot be performed whenever one pleases. To do so would seem improper. I could sing “Jingle Bells” or “Over the River and Through the Woods” in the middle of July. It might seem odd, but it would not seem improper, sacrilegious, or disrespectful.
Some form of music accompanies every behavior that even remotely resembles a religious practice worldwide, from the Pentecost Islanders’ male puberty ritual, to ancient Egyptian funeral services, to a contemporary Catholic Mass. In a great many ceremonies, there is a clear goal to perform the act as a community. Part of music’s role then involves the social bonding function of bringing together members of a community in this moment of making the request (for food, rain, health, etc.), the feeling of “strength in numbers” at appearing before the gods (invoking a feature of friendship songs), and part of music’s involvement is because it is effective at encoding the particular formula of a request that has worked in the past (invoking a feature of knowledge songs). But songs used in a religious context, while they have these elements of the friendship and knowledge songs described earlier, are a radically different type of song because of their connection to a belief system, and their being tethered to a particular time and place. Also crucial is music’s power to encode the details of the ritual—remember that by definition, rituals involve repetitive movements, and music exerts its power here to encode the proper conduct of the movements, synchronously with the music.5
Consider the ancient Devr ritual of the Kotas, a group of two thousand people who live in the Nilgiri Hills, a region bordering the South Indian states of Tamilnadu, Kerala, and Karnataka.16 Although unique in its details, it highlights common themes among belief, ritual, movement, and music that exist across all cultures and times.
Devr begins on the first Monday after the waxing of the first crescent moon of winter. Villagers gather wood, prepare special ceremonial clothing, eat only a vegetarian diet, reduce their alcohol consumption, and walk barefoot. They clean and purify their homes using special plants (including branches from the tak tree, which contains a purple ellipsoidal berry that grows on a thorny stem). Designated individuals create and transfer a series of special fires that are conduits for divinity. The village deities (who are said to be present in these fires) inhabit stick bundles in a back room of a mundkanon’s (leader in all village god rituals) house called a kakuy. When the bundles are put in the fire, the deities can express themselves to the community.
The beginning of the ceremony, omayn, is signaled by the unison blasts of the kob (a brass instrument) along with flutes and drums. The word omayn means “sounding as one” and is similar, of course, to the Jewish and Christian amen and the Sanskrit aum meaning “it is true” or “we all agree.” The gods hear these forceful blasts as an attention-getting invitation to enter the village. Much ceremonial music throughout the world has this attention-getting quality, from the rising perfect fourth of “Pomp and Circumstance” to the sudden appearance of the fifth in Kyrie of the Catholic Mass (on the word Christe).17
For the next ten to twelve days, Kotas perform instrumental music, dance, and sing to express their joy, unity, and respect for the gods, and to entertain them. Par tic u lar songs are used during ritual bathing and food offering, as individuals synchronize their movements to the music. A highlight of the Devr celebration occurs when villagers join together to re-thatch the temple roof. As the music plays, they throw sanctified materials onto the roof. To perform the ritual properly, the throwing must be synchronized with the horn blasts from the kob players so that the upward motion of the throwing arm is simultaneous with the playing of a piercing tremolo on the highest note on the instrument. Other notes give emphasis to changes in orientation and motion, both horizontal and vertical.
In this and other rituals, music performs a critical, synthetic, and catalytic function. Music synthesizes disparate parts of the motor activities under a single melodic/temporal scheme. It catalyzes the actions by its alternation of tension and release: When rituals are synchronized with music specially designed for the undertaking of the ritual, the music reaches an emotional peak when the activity does, and reaches a resolution and release of harmonic tension as the activity draws to a close. Music guides participants to the proper, rigid, accurate performance of the ritual because motor action sequences can be learned in synchrony to the music: During this part of the song we raise our arms; during that part of the song we fold them.
Children’s songs in which participants move parts of their body selectively, and in particular ways, are found in every culture. These constitute practice for coordinating music and movement. In my own childhood, a favorite was “The Hokey Pokey”:
You put your right foot in
You put your right foot out
You put your right foot in
And you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around
That’s what it’s all about!
Subsequent verses find us putting in our left foot, our arms, our head, our “whole self,” and so on. (In a recent dream, I’m climbing a steep mountain to reach a seer at the top. He emerges from his cave, his long white beard and long hair waving in the breeze. I ask him “What is the meaning of life? What is it all about?” He responds by quoting me the verse above, with a pregnant pause just before the last line, and then beams, “That’s what it’s all about!”)
A song many Americans of all faiths learn in Sunday school about Noah and the flood has similar motor synchronization:
The Lord said to Noah, “There’s gonna be a floody floody,”
Lord said to Noah, “There’s gonna be a floody floody,”
Get those children out of the muddy muddy
Children of the Lord
Chorus:
So rise and shine and give God your glory glory
So rise and shine and give God your glory glory
Rise and shine and give God your glory glory
Children of the Lord
During the chorus, children stand at the word “rise,” hold their open palms next to their face during “shine,” and shake their palms to emulate a glittering action on the words “glory” (“jazz hands”). I have Muslim and Baptist friends who learned the same patterns. “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and myriad other hand-eye-sound coordination songs train children to move with music, train us for rituals.
Recent research has confirmed that music is a powerful way of encoding motor action sequences—specific movements that must be done in a particular way. Down syndrome children who are otherwise unable to tie their shoes can learn to do so if the movements are set to song. Military units learn to assemble and disassemble guns, engines, and other tasks using song. Rigidity in the performance of the ritual is enhanced by the music: Notes and words unfold in a precise sequence and at a precise time, and motor actions are learned to synchronize with them. The music also helps to set the emotional tone, to serve as a memory aid for practice, and to synchronize multiple participants.
Most ritual music has a quality of unison rhythm for this reason, but exceptions exist, the most notable and fascinating being pygmy music, which (to my ear) is a conceptual pre de ces sor of the ebullient, enthusiastic singing in many religious ceremonies, which is perhaps best known in black churches in America. I attended synagogue as a child and even sang in the choir, but as I mentioned above, this was a stern, reserved affair: We always sang in rhythmic unison, and only occasionally strayed into three-part harmony. This was in stark contrast to the Cornerstone Baptist Church Choir (singing “Down By the Riverside”) and St. Paul’s Disciple Choir (“Jesus Paid It All”) that I saw on Sunday morning television. Within such choirs, an ever-changing core group of people sing the nominal melody as others sing, improvise, shout, chant, and rejoin whenever they feel moved to do so. The result is a thrilling and exhilarating musical force that could sow doubt in the most ardently confirmed atheist. In gospel music, as sung in thousands of churches, both the community and the individual are celebrated. The unison and harmony lines of the core melody strengthen the sense of solidarity and community, of shared goals (as stated in the song) and shared history (as evidenced by the singing of a song that everyone knows). The ecstatic interjections, some planned and some spontaneous, affirm the individual as an artistic and meaningful entity, created in God’s image—leading to feelings of self-acceptance and self-confidence. As India.Arie sings in “Video,” her own merging of hip-hop, funk, gospel, and pop:
I’m not the average girl from your video
and I ain’t built like a supermodel
But, I learned to love myself unconditionally
Because I am a queen
When I look in the mirror and the only one there is me
Every freckle on my face is where it’s supposed to be
And I know my creator didn’t make no mistakes on me
My feet, my thighs, my lips, my eyes; I’m lovin’ what I see
In the African pygmy music I’m listening to right now, enthusiastic shouting, wailing, and counterpoint run through the song. Rhythms are kept on shaker sticks and drums, often speeding up and slowing down. For the Mbuti people, the forest is benevolent and powerful, and their music is the language with which they communicate with the spirit of the forest, in order to request food, peace, and health.18 The aim is to communicate intense joy to the forest, which will return it to them. Good music is seen as the embodiment of social cooperation, as is good hunting and feasting. Bad music embraces laziness, aggressiveness, and disputatiousness and is associated with ill humor, shouting, crying, anger, bad hunting, and death. An ultimate goal of pygmy singing is to oppose the destructive force of death.
Although traces of its asynchronous polyphony are found in modern gospel music, in its pure form it is without peer. Pygmy music is so utterly distinctive as to have earned its own entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:
Its most striking features, apparently common to all groups, are an almost unique wordless yodeling, resulting in disjunct melodies, usually with descending contours; and a varied and densely textured multipart singing ….19 This choral music is built up from continuously varied repetitions of a short basic pattern, which takes shape as different voices enter, often with apparent informality …. The frequently clear division of the total cyclic pattern between leader and chorus … is absent … or obscured by … the passing round of what might be regarded as soloistic parts from one to another. Some scholars see in this a reflection of the essentially demo cratic, non-hierarchical structure of pygmy social units.
In describing the music, rituals, and practices of other cultures as I’ve done here, my intention is to show the great diversity of religious and ritual customs, and the enormous variety of forms of musical expression. I do not mean to draw attention to practices in a way that is disrespectful to them or to their adherents. Obviously, it is important to remind ourselves that preliterate and preindustrial peoples are not childlike or necessarily less intelligent than we—they live a different lifestyle, hold different beliefs, and have a different education. The pygmies famously resisted efforts by a few unwittingly condescending anthropologists to render them as “primitives.”20 (One pygmy man was tragically captured and put in a circus.) A true story attests to their sophistication and attempts to defend their dignity. When asked by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull to play the oldest song they knew for his tape recorder, a group of rain-forest pygmies sang an impromptu version of “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” complete with polyrhythmic drumming, stick-beating, and vocal harmony.
Forms of nonsynchronous singing and chanting exist in much of the world’s religious music, from Sephardic Jewish liturgy, to Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu chanting. Children typically have difficulty with nonsynchronous music, and rounds are all but impossible for young children, who become distracted by the other parts, until they reach a developmental stage in which they have more volitional control over their own attentional mechanisms (and a more highly developed cingulate gyrus in the frontal cortex), sometime around age six to eight. Complex, nonsynchronous music can thus serve as a marker of intellectual maturity.
In more structured forms of music—especially religious music—a leader sings a line and the choir or congregation echoes it, or answers with a prescribed musical reply. We see this in songs like “Oh Happy Day.” In such “call-and-response” music, the response may either be a literal musical and textual repeat (as it is here on the first and second replies) or a melodic variation (as on the third reply):
LEADER: Oh happy day!
CHOIR: Oh happy day!
LEADER: Oh happy day!
CHOIR: Oh happy day!
LEADER: When Jesus washed …
CHOIR: When Jesus washed …
The folk music and work songs that grew out of the enslavement of African-Americans in the rural south incorporated elements of African music and gospel, and many of them featured a call-and-response form. It was these songs that subsequently formed the bedrock of twentieth-century folk and eventually popular music, where the call-and-response became a staple of sixties and seventies rock, as in “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers:
LEADER: Well shake it up baby
BACKGROUND: (Shake it up baby)
LEADER: Twist and shout
BACKGROUND: (Twist and shout)
LEADER: Well come on baby now
BACKGROUND: (Come on baby)
LEADER: Come on and work it on out
BACKGROUND: (Work it on out)
The call-and-response technique became so famous in pop music that it could even be implied, instrumentally, and evoke the same emotional drama and impact as the literal response. The roots of this are in the jump ’n’ jive music of the 1940s, for example in Big Joe Turner’s “Flip Flop and Fly,” where each vocal line is answered by a saxophone line. In Leon Russell’s “Superstar,” as performed by the Carpenters (with Richard Carpenter’s brilliant arrangement), Karen sings “Long ago” and the orchestral instruments echo her vocal melody, and keep up a vocal call and instrumental response throughout the song. McCartney does the same thing with his piano lines responding to the vocal lines in “Let It Be.”
Call-and-response, as a specialized form of nonsynchronous singing, is partly predictable, in that we know when the next musical event is going to occur, although we may not know exactly what it will be. This balance of predictability and unpredictability gives the performance (as distinct from the underlying composition) a palpable excitement. In less structured forms, such as pygmy music or the religious and spiritual music of many indigenous and preliterate peoples, the unpredictability is increased and along with it the excitement. In musics like this, the rhythmic elements—played on drums, rain sticks, shakers, shells, stones, sticks, and hand claps—typically take on a more regular, hypnotic quality that can induce trance states. Just how music induces trance is not known, but it seems to be related to the relentless rhythmic momentum, coupled with a solid, predictable beat (or tactus). When the beat is predictable, neural circuits in the basal ganglia (the habit and motor ritual circuits), as well as regions of the cerebellum that connect to the basal ganglia, can become entrained by the music, with neurons firing synchronously with the beat. This in turn can cause shifts in brain-wave patterns, easing us into an altered state of consciousness that may resemble the onset of sleep, or the netherworld between sleep and wakefulness, or even a druglike state of heightened concentration coupled with increased relaxation of the muscles and a loss of awareness of time and place. When we’re engaged in the music making ourselves, and creating elaborate motor movements, we reach the flow state mentioned in Chapter 2, similar to an athlete being “in the zone.” When we’re not explicitly moving (or merely swaying with the beat), the state is different, more like a state of hypnosis, and differences in brain waves are also observed between the two states.
Like many Americans, I was entirely unfamiliar with these types of music and my own childhood experiences with religious music—in a Reform Jewish synagogue that tried to emulate and assimilate aspects of American suburban Protestantism—exposed me to slow, serious, and joyless music. “Whites are afraid to show their emotions, particularly joy,” Joni Mitchell told me. “I think it goes back to the original sin and the biblical accounts of Adam and Eve being embarrassed—that has negatively impacted white social interactions for centuries. Most white singers don’t have anywhere near the emotion that black singers do—Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith—every single note is invested with all the feeling of human existence. In my younger days, I had my little white girl folk voice, and I didn’t know how to put emotion in it, and I also hadn’t experienced enough of the world to really express life’s emotions fully. Black culture is much more balanced, they put a value on emotion and spirituality. White culture wants to keep all of that stuff quiet and tucked away.
“Some of our deepest feelings come through the spirit,” Joni continued. “To the extent that religion is a manifestation of spirit, it really ought to reflect the full range of feelings, especially joy. The ballet I wrote (Shine) is Gnostic, because Gnosticism rides the cusp, in a way, of all spiritual thought. It absorbed just about every religion, and put the goddess back in, it was earth-friendly, woman-friendly, and all the things that religion isn’t at this time. It saddens me so deeply what we, the Woodstock generation, have done to our planet. And nobody listens! We keep trashing it, ruining it, there won’t be anyone left fifty years from now and its purely our Tower of Babel arrogance that has brought us to this. Only humans have the stupidity to destroy their own planet. You talk a lot about ‘evolution’ in The World in Six Songs, but maybe it would be more accurate to talk about humans as the products of devolution, of a relentless pursuit of perfection in stupidity and arrogance. Even religion today has lost its ability to pull us out—now it’s all warrior gods.21 My song ‘Strong in the Wrong’ is a direct attack on these subversions of religion. On the other hand, the Gnostic God is a thing within you whereby you lose your self-consciousness and transcend. It’s more like Buddhism, in that way. So the Buddhists in the dance troupe kind of lit up because, it’s not like the Buddhists are afraid to do a Catholic dance, but man! the Catholics are sure afraid to do a Buddhist dance.”
A highlight of the ballet, which Joni choreographed, produced, and wrote the music for, is a dance to one of her favorite poems, “If” by Rudyard Kipling (“If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …”)
I always considered Kipling’s “If” to be a religious poem, not about what it is to be “a Man” (or a Woman, or an Adult), but how to be more Godlike, more spiritually enlightened. Joni re-wrote the text slightly, changing the word “knaves,” for example. “And I changed the ending,” she explains, “because I wanted the ballet to emphasize wonder and delight; the ability to re-charge your innocence is what makes you inherit the Earth. I changed the ending to ‘If you could have sixty seconds’ worth of wonder and delight’—which are those glimpses of the waking mind, they put you there right in the moment—‘then the Earth is yours.’ In other words, if you can perceive it; if you can wake up for a minute or a second and seize the damned thing, at that moment you own it. It doesn’t matter whose property you’re on. You could be walking with the own er of a huge parcel of land, but if you see it and he doesn’t, at that minute, who owns it, perceptually, spiritually? There’s a lot of meat on the bone of that idea.”
Whereas Joni looked back to Kipling for spiritual inspiration, David Byrne mentioned “My Body Is a Cage” by the Montreal-based band Arcade Fire.
My body is a cage
That keeps me from dancing with the one I love
But my mind holds the key
“To me,” David says, “it’s religious and at the same time anthemic. It gets really big at the end, but it’s still very personal. This song’s not calling for spiritual or political revolution or, ‘we must march and fight’ or ‘we shall overcome,’ or whatever. ‘My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love, but my mind holds the key.’ It’s beautiful, but to me it’s a little bit backwards; usually it’s the other way. Usually it’s the mind that’s keeping the heart from acting. So it’s the mind telling the heart ‘No! I’m gonna stop you from indulging in your passions.’ And then it goes on: ‘I’m living in an age that calls darkness light …’ It’s biblical language, but they apply it a little bit to the personal and the po litical. It’s not one of the social bonding or friendship songs from The World in Six Songs, a kind of rousing ‘hey, we’re all in this together.’ It’s more like one person’s torment, one person’s inner experience, which is what makes it such a powerful religion song to me.”
“My Body Is a Cage” showcases religion as a struggle not just against immorality—its usual sphere—but against immortality. The conviction that there is something beyond this corporeal existence—a life, a future, beyond what we know and see here. But my body is a cage preventing me from seeing it. My body is a cage preventing my essence from being able to reach out and merge with that of my lover or my creator.
David Byrne spends much of his time listening to music of other cultures, and they have infused and informed his own compositions, as they have for Paul Simon and Michael Brook. A favorite religious song of David’s is “Roble” by the Argentinean singing group Los Fabulosos Cadillacs.
Ya cayeron ojas secas
El frio del invierno va a venir
“It has the sort of sweeping melody you find in national anthems,” David explains. “The melody begins with a slow build and then just climbs up; it has some really peculiar stops and hesitations where it lets the note just kind of hang over so that you know that there’s probably an extra bar or something in there, which has this big emotional crest. And then it comes down. Lyrically, roble is Spanish for ‘oak,’ and the words are basically about how it loses its leaves and then they come back.”
Sin resistir, sin dormir
Roble sin fin vos sabes lo que es morir
Solo soñar con la lluvia lo lleva a revivir
The anthemic nature of the melody and the long, slow rhythms transform the lyrics from a literal story about an oak tree to a metaphor—a spiritual lesson about change, growth, perseverance, and renewal. “Without resisting, without sleeping, the oak tree knows what it is to die,” David says.
“I can’t help but apply it to the Argentine political situation, because these guys are from a generation that grew up in the era where people disappeared for their political views. In Spain, Argentina, Romania, citizens have lived through a period as children, and they remember this repressive situation; that was just the way things were. And then, things open up. I can’t help but read that the song is a little bit expressive of that as well.”
The Big Idea of most religions is that even if things aren’t so good now, they’ll get better. We see this powerfully rendered in the so-called black spirituals of the South, in “We Shall Overcome,” and “People Get Ready (There’s a Train A-Coming)” by Curtis Mayfield:
All you need is faith to hear the diesels humming
You don’t need no ticket, no you just thank the Lord
Psychologists and anthropologists have found that after a certain minimal level is attained, increased material wealth and comfort do not make people happier. An oft-quoted adage is accurate: The secret of being happy is to be happy with what you have. Too often in Western society—a society built on consumption—we don’t stop to enjoy what we have, but rather work to obtain more and more. In contrast, hunter-gatherers and people who live in subsistence cultures work to acquire only what they need, and do seem, by many measures, to be happier. David noticed this in traveling around the world with his band Talking Heads. “We would go to the outskirts of towns where we were playing in Latin America, or Africa, or Eastern Europe and see people who—compared to us—have very little in the way of material goods. Obviously no Wi-Fi, no air-conditioning, no electricity or refrigeration, but they live as they have lived for thousands of years, and they’re happy. Even more noticeable is that there is a cohesion. Westerners like us feel like they don’t have much, but they have something that I will probably never have: their social networks, their family, and their centeredness and rootedness.”
Anthropologists note that all human societies look for God and for meaning, but the specific ways they do so vary enormously. What is recognizable from one age to another, and one culture to another, is the drive; what can be fascinating is the different ways that this uniquely human drive becomes channeled. We don’t know if any animals have spiritual thoughts. Chimpanzees, dogs, and African gray parrots certainly behave differently when separated from those they love, something we might label despondency or depression. But if they have the ability to reflect on why they are experiencing the emotions they are—to realize “I sure would feel better if my own er Irene was here”—there is no evidence of that. They may well live in a world of the ever-advancing present, with no ability to plan, contemplate future or past, mourn, or look forward. A psychological study of dogs some years ago addressed the common experience of dog own ers that their dog was there to greet them when they arrived home, suggesting to many (hopeful) dog lovers that their beloved anticipated their arrival, waiting by the door with a mental image of their imminent return. In fact, under controlled experimental conditions using hidden cameras, the dogs did not wait by the door, they simply were able to hear the car or footsteps of their own er a half block away and went to the door in what may have simply been an act of Pavlovian conditioning (hear car, go to door, own er comes in and makes a big fuss over me).
A wide range of animals use song across a diverse array of instances, but no animal has been observed composing or singing a song of longing, or love, or spiritual yearning. And yet all human groups do. The musical brain brought a new hum of neural activity between the brain’s rational and emotional centers, along with all the billions of new connections possible with the enlarged prefrontal cortex. Self-consciousness and perspective-taking emerged and as far as we know are unique to humans. They lead most of us at some point in our lives to think about our place in the world, to think about the nature of thoughts, to pose questions and to look for answers.
Religion grew out of this desire to make sense of the world. Even without explicit training, most children reach a point where they ask: “Where did I come from?” “What was I before I was born?” “What happens when you die?” And, looking around at the world, “Who created all this?” Every human society that historians and anthropologists have uncovered has had some form of religion, and a belief system under which these questions are addressed.22 Some have even claimed that science is a religion, with its own rules of behavior and its own explanations about the origins of the world and of life, many of which rest on unobservables.
Much of what we know about the thoughts and beliefs of early humans is necessarily speculative, because they were not literate and did not leave us detailed explanations. Anthropologists make inferences, however, by visiting contemporary humans who live in societies that both lack written language and have been cut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years or more. These cultures tend to be composed of hunter-gatherer, pre-agricultural humans living in small groups. Their dominant belief is not that the world functions according to predictable, logical principles, but rather that events unfold at the whim of capricious gods who require various rituals or sacrifices in order to provide water, food, cure illness, and allow women to bear children. These beliefs are often based on a combination of superstition and lore handed down from generation to generation. A baby becomes very sick, a village elder sacrifices a wild boar, and the baby is cured. The next time a baby becomes sick, a wild boar can’t be found and so the elder sacrifices a possum. The baby dies, and the elders come to believe that only boars can appease the gods. Hundreds of coincidences like this lead to rituals that form the basis of an early religion, based (typically) on pantheism, sacrifice, pleas, prayer, and appeasement.
One can argue that among the most significant events in all of human history was the invention of mono the ism. Mono the ism transformed the dominant worldview from one in which events happened for no apparent reason (at the whim of capricious gods) to one in which there existed a logic and order in things (according to the plan of the one true God). The laws of nature and natural processes were seen as the product of a rational, intelligent being. The advent of mono the ism put an end to child sacrifice (which was ubiquitous in the pre-monotheistic world) and ushered in an era of logic. This swiftly led us to the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, and science.
The cognitive capacity and drive toward holding religious/ spiritual beliefs (though not necessarily the beliefs themselves) underlie the foundation of society, according to Rappaport. Human organization could not have come into existence in the absence of religious beliefs. Societies, by necessity, are built upon orderliness, organization, and cooperation. In many cooperative undertakings, such as building granaries, fending off invaders, plowing fields, providing irrigation, and establishing a social hierarchy, members of society must accept certain propositions as true, even if they are not directly verifiable. Preparing food in a certain way allows us to escape toxins in the food. A leader asserts that a neighboring tribe is planning to attack and we need to either prepare a defense or launch a preemptive strike. A wait-and-see approach is potentially calamitous—we need to act on faith.
Religions trained us and taught us to accept society-building, interpersonally bonding propositions. (Whether we still need religion in an age of science is a separate matter, and one that I don’t want to get distracted by here.) Ceremonies with music reaffirm the propositions, and the music sticks in our heads, reminding us of what we believe and what we have agreed to. Music during ritual is designed, in most cases, to evoke a “religious experience,” a peak experience, intensely emotional, the effects of which can last the rest of a person’s life. Trance states can occur during these experiences, resulting in feelings of ecstasy and connectedness. Because the sacred belief is associated with the ecstatic state, it becomes reconfirmed in the experiencer’s mind, with the music acting as an agent for reconformation every time it is played, ad infinitum. The emotion marks the belief. Three emotions in particular are associated with religious ecstasy: dependence, surrender, and love.23, 24 These same three emotions are believed innately present in animals and human infants and were no doubt present in humans before religion gave them a system for expression and indeed for uplifting thoughts in self-conscious adults.
It is especially true that a cornerstone of contemporary society is trust and the ability to believe in things that are not readily apparent, such as abstract notions of justice, cooperation, and the sharing of resources implied by civilization. Indeed, modern technological civilization requires that we trust millions of things we cannot see. We have to trust that airline mechanics did their jobs in tightening all the bolts, that drivers on the road will keep a safe distance and stay within the lines, that food-processing plants observe health and hygiene codes. We simply cannot verify all these propositions directly—any more than the religious can verify the existence of God. The fundamental human ability to form societies based on trust, and to feel good about doing so (via judicious bursts of oxytocin and dopamine), is intimately linked to our religious past and spiritual present.
And music has been there to imprint these thoughts on our memory, sometimes long after a ritual or ceremony has ended, and long after an epiphany or revelation has passed. Music is able to do this because of its internal structure. Like human languages, human music is highly structured, organized, and hierarchical. Although the details of musical syntax remain to be worked out, there exist multiple redundant cues in music that constrain the possible notes that can occur in a well-formed melody.25 The human brain is an exquisitely sensitive change detector, and to be such, it has to register minute details of the physical environment in order to notice any violations of sameness, any deviations from the ordinary. The newest evidence, from the laboratories of Dick Aslin and Elissa Newport at the University of Rochester, and of Jenny Saffran at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, shows that even human infants are sensitive to patterns and structure, detecting even minute changes in a musical sequence, and noticing when a sequence or chord progression is atypical.
The most surprising conclusion from this work is the way in which human infants accomplish this: Their brains (as do those of adults) compile statistical information about which notes are most likely to follow other notes (an ability afforded by the rearrangement or computational abilities of the musical brain). They do the same for language, learning a complex calculation of probabilistic regularities as to which speech sounds are most likely to follow which others. It is in this way that infants “bootstrap” a working knowledge of speech and music and a sophisticated awareness of what combinations are typical and which are atypical in the language and music to which they’ve been exposed.
What’s exciting about this research is that it offers a parsimonious explanation for how both language and music are acquired. It also offers a compelling account of why music is so memorable, why we can still sing along with a song on the radio we haven’t heard since we were fourteen years old, and why songs serve as such effective mnemonic devices for the knowledge of civilizations and the following of rituals and religious practice. The reason is because of the multiply embedded cues of melody and rhythm, constrained by form and style, as encoded in a series of statistical maps and, ultimately, statistical inferences.
The musical brain doesn’t have to remember every note or every chord sequence; rather, it learns the rules by which notes and chord sequences are (typically, in a given culture) created. Violations of those rules are encoded as surprising events and so remembered as schema-breaking exceptions. We don’t have to relearn every time a friend gives us his phone number that there are going to be seven digits plus an area code—this information is schematized. We don’t need to learn that the candle-lighting song for a particular ceremony uses only certain notes in a certain pattern, because the choice of notes is constrained by the form (the scales) of our culture’s music; we learn the exceptions and the rules, not every single note.
Music is therefore a highly efficient memory and information transmission system. We don’t like it because it is beautiful, we find it beautiful because those early humans who made good use of it were those who were most likely to be successful at living and reproduction. We are all descended from ancestors who loved music and dance, storytelling, and spirituality. We are descended from ancestors who sealed mating rituals and wedding ceremonies with song, as we do now (or at least boomers like me) with “The Wedding Song (There Is Love),” the Carpenters’ “Close to You,” Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable,” and Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” Songs like these remind us during life cycle events that we are part of a chain of continuing ceremony and ritual, participating as our ancestors did, binding our collective past to our personal future.
The Psalms of the Old Testament—reportedly written by King David—were all written as songs to commemorate, uphold, and celebrate the world’s first mono the istic religion. The Catholic Mass, Handel’s Messiah, the liturgical chants drawn from the Qur’an, and thousands upon thousands of other songs are intended to do the same. (Dan Dennett has suggested that atheists would do well to have some rousing pro-science gospel-like songs.) Some of the most beautiful music ever written has been songs of religion, songs of praise to God. Religious thoughts takes us outside ourselves, lift us up higher, elevate us from the mundane and day-to-day to consider our role in the world, the future of the world, the very nature of existence. The power of music to challenge the prediction centers in our prefrontal cortex, to simultaneously stimulate emotional centers in the limbic system and activate motor systems in our basal ganglia and cerebellum serves to tie an aesthetic knot around these different neurochemical states of our being, to unite our reptilian brain with our primate and human brain, to bind our thoughts to movement, memory, hopes, and desires.
Two final and important ways in which religious music has functioned in the formation of human nature are its ability to motivate repetitive action, and to bring what psychologists call closure. Obtaining closure ameliorates the very human tendency to obsess, to “stress out” over the unknown, to dwell on things that are beyond our immediate control. We pray for a sick child and then move on. We pass through a rite of passage and become in the eyes of society an adult. Rituals, religion, and music unite memory, motion, emotion, control over our environment, and ultimately feelings of personal security and safety, and agency. Some form of ritual is an integral part of the daily lives of children and adults in every culture. The sheer diversity of it is surprising, from people gathering sticks and bundling them in a certain way, to brushing one’s hair one hundred times before going to sleep, to singing songs of praise upon arising in the morning, or whispering “I love you” to your partner before closing your eyes.
My mother’s mother—the piano-playing grandma—followed a daily ritual of her own making after we bought her that electronic keyboard for her eightieth birthday. Every morning she woke up with a sense of purpose, a goal, and that was to sing her song, “God Bless America.” Who said you can’t teach an old grandmother new tricks? Learning the sequence of finger movements kept her mind active and challenged, especially as she began to add chords when she was eighty-nine. It gave her a sense of mastery, of accomplishment. And the particular song she chose to sing gave her pride in being alive and living in a free society. She played that on-awakening song every morning until she was ninety-six, adding in a personal prayer of thanks for her health, her family, her home, and her dog. Then one day she passed away.
I flew to Los Angeles for the funeral. She had a plot next to my grandfather Max’s, way outside of town to the north. It was cold that morning and we could see our breath in puffs of steam rising toward the sky as the rabbi spoke the ancient prayers, the familiar cadences we had all known since childhood, the guttural sounds of Hebrew and Aramaic that reminded me of her own throaty German accent. I helped to carry her casket to the grave site, along with my father, uncles, and cousin Steven. The casket seemed too light to hold my grandmother, a woman of such determination, such strength and power that she had saved her entire family from the hands of the Nazis through the sheer force of her will. After the casket was lowered into the ground, we each picked up a fistful of dirt and, in the Jewish tradition, threw the damp earth into her grave. We sang from the Bible, Psalm 131, according to the ancient Aramaic tune that Jews have been singing some version of for two thousand years. The tune’s Middle Eastern, minorish sound, with odd, exotic intervals, evokes stone buildings and walled cities:
Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty;
neither do I exercise myself in things too great,
or in things too wonderful for me.
Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
my soul is with me like a weaned child.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forever.26
It was not the memorial speeches that brought us to tears, not the lowering of her casket into the ground, but the haunting strains of that hymn that broke through our stoic veneer and tapped those trapped feelings, pushed down deep beneath the surface of our daily lives; by the end of the song there wasn’t a dry cheek among our group. It was this event that helped all of us accept the death of my grandmother, to mourn appropriately, and, ultimately, to replace rumination with resolution. Without music as a catalyst, as the Trojan horse that allowed access to our most private thoughts—and perhaps fears of our own mortality—the mourning would have been incomplete, the feelings would have stayed locked inside us, where they might have fermented and built up tension, finally exploding out of us at some distant time in the future and for no apparent reason. Grandma was gone; we had shared the realization and etched it in our minds, sealed with a song.
Many of the greatest music of all time has been religious—from the Song of Solomon to Handel’s Messiah, to “Amazing Grace.” Scientists and other religious skeptics often deride the religious by posing the following question: If God is so great that he created the entire universe, why would he care whether we praise him or not—why would such a powerful being be so psychologically needy that he wants us to sing to him?” But modern religious thinkers who believe in the existence of God indisputably suggest that the primary reason for this is to benefit the singer, not God. “God doesn’t need our praise,” Rabbi Hayyim Kassorla says. “He is not vain, he doesn’t need us to tell Him He is great. But because He designed us, He knows what we need.27 He dictated that we should sing songs of religion and belief because He knows they help us to remember, they motivate us, and they bring us closer to Him; He knows that they are what we need.”