CHAPTER 8

Comfort and Joy

Music . . . it’s a form of communication and reassurance of feelings . . . what I get out of music is a feeling that I’m not alone.

ERIC CLAPTON, Official Tour Program 1998

ONTOLOGICAL SECURITY

Let us return for a moment to the musical mission of the Voyager project. In packing a selection of the world’s music and the means to play it on the Voyager spacecraft, the United States’ space program expressed openness to the possibility of encountering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. This gesture says to any beings with the ingenuity to use these devices, “If you have minds like ours, we want you to know it. You are not alone—and neither are we.”

What does it mean to be alone in the world? Most often, people use this expression to describe someone bereft of family. Our very concern for such people indicates that they are not alone in the most extreme sense. But we recognize that a person experiencing new loss or multiple losses often feels that isolated. What such individuals feel is the lack of sharing on intimate terms the texture of the world they experience. Their sense of “we” as a supportive awareness has been undercut. They no longer feel connected because of the absence of others they belong with and to. To be alone in the world is to be devastated.

Although healthy individuals can come to feel separate from the world as a consequence of major losses, mental health generally involves confidence in having a place within the larger world. R. D. Laing describes individuals who have a basic sense of belonging to the same world as others as being “ontologically secure.”

A basically ontologically secure person will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological, from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity. It is often difficult for a person with such a sense of his integral selfhood and personal identity, of the permanency of things, of the reliability of natural processes, of the substantiality of natural processes, of the substantiality of others, to transpose himself into the world of an individual whose experiences may be utterly lacking in any unquestionable self-validating certainties.¹

According to Laing, the lack of ontological security is a form of profound psychological disturbance. He describes schizoid and schizophrenic individuals as lacking this basic sense. “There is a loss of ‘vital contact’ with the world.” ² Interestingly, Laing describes one of his psychotic patients as being at ease only in musical circumstances. “There was only one situation as far as I could judge in which he could let himself go without anxiety at not recovering himself again, and that was in listening to jazz.” Laing describes music (as well as quasi-mystical experience of God) as a special case in which some schizoid and schizophrenic patients can do what they are otherwise almost completely incapable of doing—overcoming a sense of deep isolation and a desperate need for protection.³

Provisionally, I submit that one of music’s most basic emotional functions is to help to establish a sense of ontological security in the participant and to reinforce feelings of security more generally. What this implies is that music does not just serve as entertainment or replenishment in our leisure time. Music makes important contributions to psychological health.

At this point I am shifting from a consideration of features of music as it is structured and experienced by human beings to some of the functions it serves. I think this is a warranted shift for two reasons. First, features of our musical capacities and the ubiquitous tendencies for structuring music enable some of its functions. The rhythmic entrainment that music with regular rhythm brings about, for instance, enables the use of music to coordinate activities as well as to promote feelings of solidarity with others who are perceived to be part of the musical company (however broadly this extends). Second, in that such functions are elaborations on our natural musical capacities, they reveal something about the universal aspects of music, even if it is important to keep in mind that music can be used in a variety of ways, some of which are far from humanizing. Indeed, one of my reasons for raising the question of how far the universal aspects of human musicality go is to prompt further consideration of how we might use it in more beneficial ways.

I will offer a number of prima facie arguments to show that music is implicated in participants’ feelings of security (whether the participant is a performer or a listener), and that it functions to affect these feelings in human societies across the world. I will begin by considering some reasons for thinking that music helps to establish a sense of ontological security, and then discuss other grounds for thinking that music reinforces feelings of security in other respects.

In arguing that an important function of music is to promote feelings of security, I am challenging the view, advocated by Theodor Adorno, that we should be dubious of music that promotes a sense of comfort and security. According to Adorno, music supports a politically undesirable attitude of passive contentment with the status quo. I think that Adorno fails to acknowledge the important role that music plays in promoting a more basic kind of comfort, specifically a basic comfort as being a participant within the social world. Thus I think there is a vital sociopolitical role to be played by music that listeners find comforting. I agree with Adorno that music, like all art, can help people to push beyond their usual ways of seeing things, and that it can inspire them to reenvision possibilities in the social sphere. But if music accomplishes these things, these accomplishments are premised upon the support it offers for listeners’ basic sense of security, not upon the lack of this sense. In other words, those who can be persuaded to move beyond their comfort zone are individuals who are already deeply secure, and music has the virtue of instilling the security as well as providing the persuasion.

If one accepts this view, then Adorno’s objection to music encouraging contentment appears wrongheaded. Music can get through people’s defenses, but it can only do so because music—that is, music in a style with which one has developed a sense of familiarity—promotes a sense of basic security. One of the effects of music’s conservatism—that tendency to repetition that is so typical of music but would be distressing in most other arts—is to engender or reinforce a sense of background stability as well as confidence that humanity and one’s own society will continue into the future. Music can shake people up and encourage change, but this only works effectively, I am convinced, when music supports the belief that one is ultimately safe.

I will defend the claim that music serves to help establish and reinforce feelings of security, including ontological security. I will defend this claim by drawing attention to a number of features of music that produce feelings of security. Some are particularly related to a sense of sharing the world with other beings like ourselves; others encourage feelings of being at home in and supported by the world; still others draw attention to the participant’s specific network of relationships in a particular culture and life story. Although such feelings of security are not in practice sharply divided, I will organize my discussion in terms of these three categories. The first category links music to ontological security; the second to existential security (the sense of being at home in the world); and the third to a sense of belonging (in relation to some particular social membership).

I will begin by discussing aspects of music in the first category: the physiology of hearing and the previously noted connection of musical sensitivities to the establishment of security in infancy. In the second category I will consider the conservatism of music, music’s attainment of form, and music’s intimation of continuity into the future, features of musical experience that promote a sense that the larger world is supportive and is our home. This category also reinforces a sense of ontological security in that the world that one securely inhabits is also a world shared with other people. The third group includes the role of music in developing a sense membership within one’s society and its role as a means of intergenerational communication. I will consider some objections to the view that music is conducive to the participant’s deep-seated sense of security and conclude with a consideration of how the feelings of security afforded by music impact our sense of connection with the human world beyond our society.

In preview: obviously, if foreign music that clashes with a listener’s expectations can be experienced as jarring, not all music will impart a sense of repose to any given listener. The claims I will make about music promoting feelings of security presuppose that the music is in a style that is familiar (or becoming so). Thus in this chapter I am not addressing the ease of acquiring comfort in an unfamiliar musical style or system; instead, I am considering an emotional aspect of music that I think typifies experience with music to which one is accustomed, an aspect that I think holds for individuals across cultures, so long as we are talking about their experiences with familiar (preferably deeply familiar) music.

Music’s relationship to our sense of psychological security cuts two ways in connection with the notion of universality. Music that is in a familiar style may be profoundly comforting. So may music in a style that is akin to what we are used to (a lullaby from almost anywhere is likely to sound familiar enough). However, this does not imply every kind of foreign music will have similar effects. In fact, the reassurance that music in a familiar idiom offers may reinforce the disturbance caused by music that is radically unlike what one is expecting. My discussion in this chapter is not aimed at demonstrating that one will gain psychological support from music that is startlingly foreign. Instead, my purpose is to indicate that musical experience encourages feelings of comfort in the social world, which one may consider to be open-ended or, alternatively, take to be confined to one’s own social group. Music hooks into our feelings of being secure members of our social world, and this, I submit, is one of the reasons that music can so powerfully impress us with our mutual affinity. What is unsettled here is who the “us” is in this formulation. Music can forge bonds across usual cultural boundaries. It can also reinforce the sense that those boundaries are barriers. What seems one of music’s universal roles in human experience—its promotion of feelings of security—can, ironically, serve highly divisive ends.

MUSICAL BASES FOR ONTOLOGICAl SECURITY

A Modified Definition of Ontological Security

I will begin my account of the ways music impinges on our feelings of security with a consideration of music’s relationship to ontological security. Before doing so, however, I must deal with a problematic feature of Laing’s account of ontological security, which renders it unserviceable for cross-cultural discussion. I will then suggest a modified definition that retains the spirit of Laing’s notion while being more versatile.

The problem is that Laing describes ontological security and its lack in terms endemic to the Western worldview. He speaks in the passage characterizing ontological security, cited above, of “his own and other people’s reality,” “the permanency of things,” “the substantiality of natural processes,” and “the substantiality of others.” Some cultures, or religious traditions within these cultures, particularly in Asia, would reject all of these formulations. Buddhism, for example, sees the world as fluid, not substantial. It also denies the reality and substantiality of the self and the permanence of anything. According to the Buddhist view, suffering arises because of the false belief that each of us is a substantial self, distinct from other selves. Buddhism teaches that nothing has independent existence. We are not separate beings, but temporary configurations, aggregates of causes and effects, within an ever-changing flux. Accordingly, there is no self. Neither apparent entities nor their conditions are permanent. The contents of flux that we experience are not ultimately real; the only reality is the metaphysical substrate (and, according to some Buddhists, the causal chains that produce the appearances of “things”). We and all other temporary configurations are interdependent moments within the whole. This has a direct consequence for Buddhist ethics. We cannot harm another sentient being without harming ourselves, for we are not distinct from one another. The only attitude that is consistent with the proper understanding of reality is compassion for all that lives and feels.

The Buddhist account is coherent and accepted by millions of people throughout the world, many of whom seem psychologically healthy and supported in their health by Buddhism. This being the case, Laing’s description of ontological security is inadequate for a cross-cultural description of psychological and spiritual well-being. I will use the expression “ontological security” in this discussion with a somewhat different meaning from that indicated by Laing. Instead of claiming that an ontologically secure person has “a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity,” I will claim that such a person has “a centrally firm sense” that he or she has the same ontological status as other people. In other words, the person senses that he or she occupies the same order of being as other people and shares the encountered world with them (whether that world is ultimately “real” or “unreal”). On the basis of this conviction, the person feels confident of living in a shared world, whatever his or her articulate views about the nature of that world or that sharing might be. I will also include as part of my understanding of ontological security a basic confidence that the world—both the world of nature and the social world—provides support for one’s being (whether or not one considers that being to be real or only relative to a larger reality).

This account is, I think, compatible with the Buddhist view that human beings occupy the same ontological status with one another—the status of nonselves that are continuously changing and are interdependent with one another and the entire texture of reality—and that they share phenomenal “reality” with one another, even though it is not real in an ultimate sense. I think my modified definition is compatible with other worldviews that deny substantial reality and/or permanence to the self as well.

With this modified definition of ontological security in mind, then, let us consider two aspects of musical experience that promote it, the physiology of hearing and music’s relationship to the vitality affects.

The Physiology of Hearing

The physiology of hearing as utilized in music has a number of features that support a sense of securely being in the world with others like ourselves. In the first place, our auditory system is conjoined with our vestibular system, the system for balance, which provides a sense of security in our movement through the environment. Hearing thus implicates our sense of balance, which is crucial to our feeling of being able to make stable movements through the world.

Second, hearing brings us into connection with the living world around us. We feel ensconced by music; it surrounds us. The same music that we internalize through our ears pervades the environment outside us. Furthermore, we use hearing to recognize other agents, their locations, and their activities. Our auditory system alerts us to the presence, number, and movements of other entities within the environment. Albert Bregman indicates the variety of cues and the regularities with which the auditory system organizes them. For instance, “Unrelated sounds seldom start or stop at exactly the same time,” and “many changes that take place in an acoustic event will affect all the components of the resulting sound in the same way and at the same time.”⁴ Hence the detection of unsynchronized auditory cues suggests the presence of multiple agents and/or events. Changes of sounds from the same source tend to be gradual, so a sudden change suggests the beginning of a new event. The auditory system also tracks the frequency components of sound emerging from the same source. If the frequency components are multiples of the same fundamental, they are likely to originate with the same source.⁵

The perceptual mechanism for alerting the brain to the presence of another agent is considerably faster than that of the visual system. Within the inner ear, hair cells, which operate in bundles, receive sound vibrations mechanically. This tightens the filaments that connect the channels of adjacent hairs, which result in the openings of these channels. This enables the entry of the ions that initiate the transmission of sound signals to the brain. This process happens within five to ten microseconds of the vibrations hitting the hairs within the inner ear. This is up to one thousand times as fast as the eye opens its channel to allow transmission of light signals to the brain.⁶ This suggests that the auditory sense is primary for recognizing the presence of other animated beings.

Hearing also produces coordinated activity with others through rhythmic entrainment, the synchronization of our actions with externally produced rhythms, such as those of a metronome or another person. Human beings can deliberately choose to synchronize with a particular external rhythm (as we noted in chapter 3), but we also tend to join in with others’ rhythms subliminally. In both cases, entrainment enhances a sense of mutuality, whether or not one is consciously focusing on this sense. According to Judith Becker, “Bodies and brains synchronize gestures, muscle actions, breathing, and brain waves while enveloped in music.”⁷ Newborns already engage in rhythmic entrainment. This means that from the beginning of our lives, our physiology inclines us to mutual experience through sound.

The physiology of hearing discloses our connection to the larger environment, our sharing that world with other agents, and our capacity for attuning the dynamics of our behavior with them. By conveying these aspects of our relationship to a world and beings beyond ourselves, music helps to develop a sense of securely sharing a world with other people.

Vitality Affects

We have already considered the early development of awareness of other people by means of vitality affects.⁸ We observed in chapter 6 that the vitality affects are “amodal,” kinetic characteristics that infants recognize in their caregivers before they recognize them as definite individuals. We also noted that vitality affects are crucial to the process by which mother and infant adjust the timing and contour of their expressive acts and movements to each other to achieve what Daniel Stern calls “attunement.”⁹

Stern distinguishes the vitality effects from traditionally named emotions, such as anger, joy, sadness, which he calls “categorical affects” and which seem to correspond to Kivy’s “garden-variety emotions.” Unlike these labeled affects, vitality affects are “those dynamic, kinetic qualities of feeling that distinguish animate from inanimate and that correspond to the momentary changes in feeling states involved in the organic process of being alive.”¹⁰ The vitality affects do not lend themselves to our usual emotional lexicon but

are better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as “surging,” “fading away,” “fleeting,” “explosive,” “crescendo,” “decrescendo,” “bursting,” “drawn out,” and so on. These qualities of experience are most certainly sensible to infants and of great daily, even momentary, importance. It is these feelings that will be elicited by changes in motivational states, appetites, and tensions.¹¹

Through the vitality affects, an infant develops a sense of its mother as a unified being (as opposed to sensing her breasts, arms, and such, as separate entities). Stern points out that because mothers engage in specific affect displays toward their infants only discontinuously (“perhaps every thirty to ninety seconds”), “affective tracking or attuning with another could not occur as a continuous process if it were limited to categorical affects. . . . Attunement feels more like an unbroken process.”¹² Vitality affects can accomplish attunement because “they are manifest in all behavior and can thus be an almost omnipresent subject of attunement.”¹³ Because they attend all behavior, besides enabling the infant to bond and synchronize with its caregiver, the vitality affects are also the means by which we gain a sense of being “with” another person at any stage of life.

The vitality affects are involved in the experience of listening to music, which according to Stern revives the state of the infant attuning itself to its caregiver. He suggests that “an unmeasurable wave of feeling evoked by music” can feel like a “rush” even in the absence of a sense that a particular categorical emotional label would be appropriate. Music is an example “par excellence of the expressiveness of the vitality affects.”¹⁴ The listener’s experience is akin to that of the infant perceiving its mother, which involves the direct perception of vitality affects rather than specific acts.¹⁵ Adults relating to music are effectively doing what they did as infants when they attuned to vitality affects. They are experiencing themselves in secure rapport with others. By enabling people to attune the timing and contour of their behavior with each other’s, music draws attention to their shared sphere of activity.

POTENTIAL OBJECTIONS

Before considering other ways in which music promotes feelings of security, I should consider some possible objections that might be made to my suggestion that music encourages a sense of ontological security. One potential counter is that ontological security is not itself an emotion. In fact, I have no problem with describing ontological security as a mood or an affective background, although I am inclined to accept the view mentioned in the previous chapter that emotions and moods are not sharply differentiated. Ontological security does have an object, namely, the world, including its many inhabitants. However, I think one can be ontologically secure without any conscious attention to this fact, and in such cases it might be reasonable to deny that the person is experiencing an episodic emotion. One is more likely to be conscious of one’s insecurity than of one’s security. It may be worthwhile to distinguish a background sense of ontological security and a conscious or quasi-conscious appreciation of this condition. For the fortunately contented person, music may arouse this sense of appreciation. But the state of feeling ontologically secure is not episodic in the case of the fortunate person for whom ontological security is a way of life.

There are, however, several further challenges to the idea that music instills and supports ontological security that deserve further comment. One is the question of how this view is compatible with the fact that music can suggest or arouse so-called negative emotions, such as sadness. This is particularly obvious in one of the cross-cultural ritual functions of music: to express grief. A second problem is the fact that music is often used to make one more open and vulnerable, particular to transformed conceptions of oneself. If this is so, it may be difficult to see how music encourages a sense of secure participation in the order of being in which one finds oneself.

In response to the challenge that the negative emotions aroused by music do not seem compatible with ontological security, I would suggest that this charge reflects a misunderstanding of what this sense of security amounts to. Recall Laing’s characterization of ontological security as enabling a person to “encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological,” on the basis of “a centrally firm sense,” which I describe as the sense that he or she occupies the same order of being as other people and shares the encountered world with them. Ontological security is the presupposition of being able to confront disturbing emotions without being devastated by them. A person who is ontologically secure is not immune to disturbing emotional experiences. Ontological security, the sense of being securely situated in the same order of being that others inhabit, is vital to the background confidence one needs to cope with disturbing emotions, but it isn’t a panacea that prevents experiencing such emotions in the first place.

Nevertheless, the experience of supposedly “negative” (i.e., unpleasant) emotions in connection with music contrasts with the experience of these emotions in everyday life. We take satisfaction in musical reflections of fear, sadness, and such, although we do not particularly enjoy these emotions in relation to ordinary events.¹⁶ Freud’s account of mastery in Beyond the Pleasure Principle suggests a reason why music can be enjoyable despite the range of emotions it expresses. Freud describes his small grandson’s game of hiding objects and then “finding” them and raises the question of why he found this game enjoyable. Freud sees a connection between the game of hiding objects and another game, a game of peek-a-boo in which the child found another person whom he was initially unable to see. The moment of being unable to see the other person in the game, an older person who helped care for the child, was reminiscent of situations in which his mother left him alone, Freud suggests, and he argues that this similarity is not accidental but indeed crucial to the enjoyment of the game. In the circumstance of being left alone by his mother, the small child was frightened, and he was greatly relieved when she returned. Freud argues that his grandson, in making a game out of what had been an upsetting situation, has taken control of the situation. He has made a game of the whole cycle of losing sight of his mother but then seeing her again. The game reflects his discovery that the disappearance of his mother is something he can expect to be temporary.¹⁷

In many cases, the experience through music of emotions that would usually be distressing represents a similar scenario. By deliberately exposing oneself to emotions that might be disturbing, but savoring their progress and ultimate resolution, one expresses one’s sense of mastery. In this respect, one asserts a sense of deep security in the face of challenges to one’s repose.¹⁸

Let us now turn to the second challenge to my suggestion that music instills and reinforces a sense of ontological security: that posed by the use of music to transcend or undermine one’s usual sense of self. Certainly, the use of music to achieve ecstatic experience is cross-culturally widespread. Although Gilbert Rouget indicates that music is not essential to induce trance, a state in which one is “outside” one’s usual self, most deliberate efforts to provoke trance do involve music.¹⁹ Becker takes the potential for trance to be universal, and she suggests that most of us have had “near trance” experiences in connection with music.²⁰ She suggests that a transformed sense of self is typical in trance and trancelike states, such that an expanded sense of self replaces the ordinary one.

Becker points out that some cultures expect music to result in a transformed conception of self while others expect the dissolution of any sense of self. Comparing the perspectives of listeners from Western cultures and the audiences for Hindustani classical music, she suggests, “In one case, the listener may be exploring the emotional nuances of his or her inner self or identifying with the emotional interiors presented by the music. In the other, the listener is trying to bring about a kind of ‘sea’ change, a different self altogether, one that comes closer to divinity.”²¹

Sometimes the latter sort of experience involves a sense of dissociating from the body. David Henderson describes the devotional songs (bhajans) of Nepalese musicians in the Kathmandu Valley, which he claims can sometimes yield experiences of oneness with the divine that transcend emotion.²² In this condition, the participants become dissociated from their bodies.²³ The understanding that the bhajan participants have of their experience reflects a particular religious interpretation of the nature of consciousness, which holds that the true Self is the same for all individuals.²⁴ Recognition that all are ultimately the same Self enables one to dissociate from one’s illusory sense of holding a definite position in relation to the rest of the net of worldly entities and to become a pure witness of reality. Understood in this way the experience of the bhajan participants certainly includes the sense of sharing one’s ontological status with others, even while interpreting one’s usual sense of one’s own and others’ reality as deficient. This interpretation holds that one not only shares one’s status with others, but also that one is actually the same being as they are.

Most Western individuals do not hold the same view of either musical experience or the nature of God, but they too experience transformations in the sense of self and the world in connection with music, sometimes involving a loss of self-awareness. On the basis of an empirical study of 103 subjects, Robert Panzarella analyzes the ecstatic state they experienced in connection with works of art. These include altered perception, in which the world is considered “better, more beautiful than had been thought before”; ecstatic physical and quasi-physical responses (including sensations of floating); loss of connection with the environment; and a sense of merging with the artistic object.²⁵

Marcia Herndon and Norma McLeod consider the “shifting [of] personal awareness” to be a basic capacity of music.²⁶ They contrast two kinds of powerful experiences available through music: “flash,” which involves heightened awareness of being present in an event, sometimes to the exclusion of awareness of anything else in the environment, and “flow,” in which one loses self-awareness and any sense of separation from the object.²⁷

Whether or not loss of self-awareness is involved, such ecstatic states typically involve the elimination of a sense of division between one’s own ego and other people. This effect is an aspect of hāl,²⁸ the ecstatic emotional state to which Persian performers aspire, described here by Dariouche Safvate:

Hāl is an intense state of the soul, it is the interior fire, which must animate the artist like the mystic. . . . When he attains the high point of this state, the artist plays with an extraordinary facility of execution. His sound changes. The musical phrase liberates its secret. The creativity gushes forth. It seems that the very essence of the music manifests itself delivered from the usual interferences of the human personality. The world becomes transfigured, unveiling its marvelous visages, and across an ineffable transparency which abolishes the actual barriers between the musician and his auditor, offers itself to the direct comprehension of every being capable of sensing. Hāl is the fruit of authenticity. The authentic musician is he who plays or sings under the force of an irresistible interior impulse.²⁹

Ravi Shankar similarly describes his experiences performing music in terms of transcending a narrow sense of self in favor of an expanded, affiliative awareness of connection.

When with control and concentration, I have cut myself off from the outside world, I step on to the threshold of the raga with feelings of humility, reverence, and awe. To me, a raga is like a living person, and to establish that intimate oneness is achieved, it is the most ecstatic and exhilarating moment, like the supreme heights of the act of love or worship. In these miraculous moments, when I am so much aware of the great powers surging within me and all around me, sympathetic and sensitive listeners are feeling the same vibrations. It is a strange mixture of all the intense emotions—pathos, joy, peace, spirituality, eroticism, all flowing together. It is like feeling God . . . The miracle of our music is in the beautiful rapport that occurs when a deeply spiritual musician performs for a receptive and sympathetic group of listeners.³⁰

Once again, to interpret such ecstatic experiences as offering counterexamples to the claim that music establishes and reinforces a sense of ontological security is to misunderstand the nature of ontological security. Ontological security is, as defined above, a firm sense that one occupies the same order of being as other people and shares the encountered world with them. This sense enables one to cope with distress of various sorts; it also obviates the need for a fundamentally defensive approach to reality. Ecstatic experiences of music presuppose sufficient lack of defensiveness that one can allow the boundaries between oneself and others to be less rigid, or to subside altogether. A sense of ontological security might make one more, not less, prone to experiences of self-transcendence.

Music offers altered states within everyday life. In the “near-trance” experiences that Becker describes, we experience our bodies as offering no resistance to consciousness, as empowered in extraordinary ways. We transcend our everyday impressions of ourselves and the world. This does not remove us from the secure sense of occupying the same order of being as others, but it does transform our sense of that order.

Shankar’s description of his ecstatic experience through music, even while it obliterates the sense of distinction between self and others, nevertheless emphasizes the sense of shared being with them. Such descriptions do not refute the claim that music supports a sense of ontological security but instead articulate it in terms suited to the speakers’ religious traditions.

Such spiritualized accounts of transcending the small self through music suggest that Alexander Pope was mistaken to suggest disdain when he writes,

As some to church repair,

Not for the doctrine, but the music there.³¹

One would not be entirely wrong to go to church for the music if the purpose of going to church is to tune in to what is larger than one’s individual ego. While the qualitative character of the altered sense of self and the doctrinal interpretations of what is involved differ, music’s accomplishment is to attune us with what is beyond ourselves. By building and reinforcing ontological security, music facilitates secure participation in a world with other, fellow beings. What begins in an infant’s sense of being with its mother expands to open-ended spiritual rapport.

MUSICAL BASES FOR EXISTENTIAL SECURITY

The Conservatism of Music

Besides helping to construct and reinforce a sense of sharing the world with others, music also promotes a sense of being at home in that world. One of the means by which it fosters this sense is its “conservative” character. Music is conservative in the sense that it makes use of an unusual amount of repetition by comparison with other human pursuits.³² The familiar is comforting, and music characteristically presents the familiar over and over again. Thomas Turino describes that the tendency of music toward redundancy, which he notes is particularly strong in music designed to promote participation, creates “security in constancy.”³³

Repetition in music occurs on multiple levels. Musical works are often structured on the basis of repeated phrases, themselves perhaps composed of repeated motives or patterns. Musical forms commonly involve repetition of whole passages or sections. This is obvious in any song with a refrain, or in any Western work with the indication “da capo,” which means that a whole section should be repeated verbatim.

People also enjoy the repetition of entire musical works. The very notion of a work of music implies that an extended musical structure is preserved for repeated performance, and such preservation occurs in most musical cultures.³⁴ The history of Christian liturgical music from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries gives pride of place to preserved chant melodies. The cantus firmus (literally, fixed song, or chant) was the basis for the music of the Mass, with stylistic innovations occurring around it. The fixed tune is also basic in jazz, where improvisation commonly amounts to a meditation on a pregiven song. The phenomenon of “the old favorite” further reveals our attachment to long familiar pieces of music, and in the era of modern recording, certain performances become “old favorites” as well. Well-known rock musicians have often been annoyed at how much audiences want their live performances to sound like the record.³⁵ Symphony orchestras are sometimes similarly frustrated by the strong demand for the same popular works within the repertoire, which limits the number of less well known works they can perform in their programs if they are to satisfy the audience.

Besides the repetition of musical patterns and musical works, music is also conservative in that particular cultures’ preferred musical styles are also resistant to change. Thus in addition to promoting a sense of being at home in the world, the conservatism of music also fortifies feelings of being at home in one’s particular society. Alan Lomax contends that musical style is so tenacious because music instills a sense of security in a society’s members.

From the point of view of its social function, the primary effect of music is to give the listener a feeling of security, for it symbolizes the place where he was born, his earliest childhood satisfactions, his religious experience, his pleasure in community doings, his courtship and his work—any or all of these personality-shaping experiences. As soon as the familiar sound pattern is established, he is prepared to laugh, to weep, to dance, to fight, to worship. His heart is opened.³⁶

Lomax goes on to observe, “An art so deeply rooted in the security patterns of the community should not, in theory, be subject to rapid change, and in fact this seems to be the case.”³⁷ Jay Dowling and Dane Harwood concur that musical style is one of the most stable of cultural phenomena, surviving migrations and change in a society’s economic organization.³⁸ (Turino points out, however, that largely repetitive music also offers challenges for more experienced participants, who would lose interest if it were merely repetitive.)

Surely, though, we don’t enjoy excessive repetition. We generally want a fair amount of novelty in our experience. Why do we enjoy so much repetition in music? Why aren’t we bored instead? Many answers have been suggested. One is that in societies that encourage musical participation, where much of the enjoyment depends on mutual engagement in the music, repetition facilitates learning and enables newcomers to join in. Besides the “security in constancy” noted above, Turino observes that such music tends toward dense textures in which particular contributions do not stand out, which results in “a cloaking of individual contributions.” These two effects together “create comfort for participants,” even those who are novices.³⁹

A second explanation for the pleasure taken in musical redundancy is that given the human tendency to associate music with other concerns in living, repeated music is new each time because of the new situation in which it occurs.⁴⁰ The new situation includes both the immediate context of music-making and the particular temporal trajectory leading up to this point.

A third explanation is that we need a background of repetition in order to recognize novelty when it occurs. This is an important argument for Leonard Meyer, whose theory that music arouses affect through deviation from the expected requires that deviation be noticeable.⁴¹ The precondition for a strong sense of expectation is sufficient familiarity with musical conventions, and this depends on repetition (whether of musical motives, basic forms, or of specific works).

A fourth reason proposed for our enjoyment of musical repetition is that it enables us to enjoy the novelty that enters our musical experience through the subtle differences in performances of the same work.⁴² Fifth, we may simply enjoy the twists and turns of the musical work as we do a good story, even if we have experienced it before.⁴³

John Sloboda and Patrik Juslin propose a sixth possible explanation: there may be a module for processing music (i.e., a network of “hard-wired” responses) that is sealed off from other aspects of cognition. If so, this processor would not have conscious access to stored memory for comparison of what is presently being heard to what is remembered from previous hearings. Such a processor would always hear the piece “for the first time,” even if we are consciously aware of having heard the piece before.⁴⁴

All these answers suggest that the preference for repetition must be explained in terms of desire for novelty. This ignores the fact that human beings do experience emotional satisfaction from repetition in its own right. Robert Zajonc indicates that mere repetition makes people (and chickens and monkeys) feel better. He cites a number of experiments, both his own and those of others, that demonstrate a preference for phenomena that have been encountered previously over those that have not.⁴⁵ Among the studies he considers is one W. R. Wilson conducted, which presented pairs of sequences of musical tones to subjects and asked which in each pair they preferred and which they had heard previously. The result was that subjects preferred sequences they had in fact heard previously, and that this was independent of whether or not they consciously recognized it as familiar.⁴⁶ Experiments conducted by Zajonc and colleagues corroborate that subjects show preference on the basis of previous exposure even when the exposure is too brief for them to recognize the stimuli. Subjects also prefer stimuli that resemble those previously encountered, even when the specific stimuli are novel. Zajonc concludes, “One would suppose that the effect documented here must be well known in the advertising industry.”⁴⁷

Certainly, I have found in my own experience that mere repetition is enough to warm me up to a piece of pop music, even if my first reaction was that it was a rip-off of some other, “better” work.⁴⁸ I have also discovered that intimate familiarity with a piece of music makes me particularly eager to hear each musical event as it unfolds. When I hear a recording of a piano work that I have at one time performed, for example, my attention becomes riveted. I have difficulty attending to conversation. This is so even if the volume is low and the music is being utilized as background music (not an uncommon situation in certain restaurants).

On such occasions I feel something akin to bated expectation for the next musical event at every moment. Although I know exactly what the next chord or melodic element will be, I feel an almost magnetic desire to hear it. My only comparable experience occurred in childhood, when I wanted to hear a well-known story exactly as I had heard it every time before. At every moment during a story, I was eager to hear the very next detail. I awaited even the arrival of the Wicked Witch in “Sleeping Beauty” with something akin to desire, even though I hated and feared her, so long as she appeared at the precisely correct moment.

In his book Musical Elaborations, Edward Said also observes that prior familiarity with a work of music conditions and heightens his response upon hearing it. During a concert in Carnegie Hall, Said reports, Alfred Brendel performed a transcription of a Brahms sextet. Said found this part of the recital of particular interest, for he was well acquainted with the original sextet.

Strangely, I think the effort of correspondence held me much more rigorously to the music than is usually the case: I assimilated, I actively bound my hearing to, an earlier but still lively experience of the score with Brendel’s performance.⁴⁹

Nietzsche aptly describes the phenomenon of enjoying musical repetition. Familiarity breeds not contempt, but love.

This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.⁵⁰

Nietzsche’s comment draws attention to another way in which sufficient novelty attaches to music that we hear again and again. We develop a kind of personal relationship with it, and we enjoy the development of this experience. This suggestion combines two of the explanations for enjoying reheard music offered above. We experience novelty because we bring to each hearing the different relationship we have to it; and we enjoy reexperiencing the twists and turns of this particular work.

The familiar is comforting, and music characteristically presents the familiar over and over again. Rather than emphasizing the way repetition serves as the background for recognizing novelty, we might stress, as Nietzsche does, the way repetition enables us to learn to feel at home with what is new. And as Ibn Sina observed, the return of a familiar theme is not unlike the return of an old friend.

Continuity in Time

Perhaps the most striking ways that music encourages a sense of safety within the world is the impression it gives of the present continuing steadily into the future. Music conveys the possibility of things continuing well, a possibility that is important to us as intentional beings who project ourselves into the future. Through music we experience temporally extended courses that satisfy in their unfolding, and this draws attention to our own nature as temporal beings with trajectories that might be similarly fulfilling. Alan Merriam aptly describes the reassurance that music provides when he claims in the passage cited above that music is “a normal and solid activity which assures the members of society that the world continues in its proper path.”

Several features of musical experience serve to draw our attention to the steady continuation toward the future. These include (1) the perceptual character of music, which requires recognition of temporal continuity; (2) the cross-cultural tendency to divide the pitch continuum into discrete steps and to use tones of varying durations, ensuring the recognition of change; (3) the connection between our musical perception and a more general sense of ourselves as continuing in time; and (4) myths about music that encourage this association.

Musical perception involves the recognition of characteristics of sequences. The ability to synthesize sequentially presented groups of notes and then to be able to characterize properties of the entire group, such as the waxing or waning of frequency level, is essential to musical perception. Patients who lose or never have this ability hear music as a succession of discrete, unrelated events, described by some of them as “noise.”⁵¹

Recognition of continuity is involved in one of the basic Gestalt principles that apply to melodic organization, the principle of prägnanz, or “good continuation.” As we noted in chapter 3, this principle claims, in Meyer’s characterization, that “a shape or pattern will, other things being equal, tend to be continued in its initial mode of operation.”⁵² Our musical expectations, so vital in our recognition of musical surprises, are structured on this principle.⁵³ Charles Sanders Peirce similarly emphasizes the importance of continuity for the perception of melody: “to perceive it [melody] there must be some continuity of consciousness which makes the events of a lapse of time present to us.”⁵⁴

The tensions and resolutions, as well as the general sense of motion conveyed by music, all depend on our awareness that musical events are organized sequentially in time yet perceived as connected. Resolution tendencies, our sense that a relative dissonance needs to give way to a more consonant chord or interval, presuppose our experiencing music as projecting into the future.⁵⁵ Victor Zuckerkandl observes, “we could not hear the melody as motion if we did not hear it as continuous.”⁵⁶

The cross-cultural tendency to divide the musical gamut into distinct increments, which we considered in chapter 3, also guarantees that we have an impression of steps from one musical event to another. By dividing up the continuum of pitch possibilities into discrete intervals, a musical system ensures the recognition of movement along the continuum. The differential pitches of a given scale provide signposts, as it were, for a melody’s shifting from one level of vibrational frequency to another. Because the continuum is divided in this way, we are able to recognize the melody’s progressive “stepping” through a pattern of distinguishable frequencies. The sense of proceeding by definite steps is reinforced by the tendency to utilize tones of varying temporal durations. Because we have a sense of location in musical space, we are able to have an impression of music traversing that space. Again, a process that we engage in while listening to music presupposes at least implicit awareness of temporal continuity.

This suggestion may seem at odds with the idea that music often results in experiences of “flow,” in which time seems to drop away, being replaced by an impression of a continuous “now.”⁵⁷ In the most intense of such cases, I grant that a sense of being directed toward the future is likely to be muted, if part of one’s consciousness at all. However, the very term flow suggests a movement forward in time. Moreover, often when someone refers to having lost track of time, it is the time of everyday routine that disappears from consciousness. The continuous “now” that participants sometimes claim to experience is not a lack of temporal continuity but a lack of a resistant temporal order (of the sort we experience when we are “fighting time” or trying to keep up) that contrasts with the pace of one’s own activity.

While a listener need not be consciously aware of attending to music’s continuation through time, the fact that one must be doing so to experience music means that we at least preconsciously apprehend continuation. Zuckerkandl describes this apprehension as an experience of “futurity” in music,⁵⁸ suggesting that musical perception is integrally connected with our extramusical sense of continuity in time. Reports that music can counter the disorienting effects of dissociative disorders support this suggestion. Oliver Sacks offers a number of such cases, including the famous “man who mistook his wife for a hat.” This man, a musician who had suffered damage to the visual areas of the brain, was unable to integrate visual details into a whole, with the consequence that he had difficulty recognizing individual people or things. He oriented himself in the world by means of singing. Sacks reports the explanation given by the man’s wife.

He does everything singing to himself. But if he is interrupted and loses the thread, he comes to a complete stop, doesn’t know his clothes—or his own body. He sings all the time—eating songs, dressing songs, bathing songs, everything. He can’t do anything unless he makes it a song.⁵⁹

The continuity exhibited by music has struck some philosophers as making us particularly aware of ourselves as temporal beings. Monroe Beardsley contends, for example, that our sense of music’s profundity and its impact on us depends on its reflection of the basic patterns of our existence in time.

The idea that music exemplifies—indeed, exploits and glories in—aspects of change that are among the most fundamental and pervasive characteristics of living seems to be true. . . . Because these patterns or modes of continuation are such general features of all experience, I . . . call them metaphysical . . . the metaphysical modes of continuation that are deeply apprehended in music must account for much of its capacity to move us.⁶⁰

The numerous myths that involve music in the creation and maintenance of the world suggest that many of the world’s peoples have strongly associated the continuity of music and a sense of the world continuing well. Among these are the Aboriginal Australian myths that the creator-god made the world by beating the oceans with a reed and that a primordial crocodile drumming its stomach with its tail made the world harmonious. The Pima Indians in Arizona believe that their songs were “given in the beginning,” being sung “by the Creator and other mythical personages” and handed down since then.⁶¹ The Andaman Islanders hold that music preserves living things through the night. The Pawnee believe that the morning star sings each morning as it tosses the sun up to light the day.⁶² According to Vedic metaphysical theory, the vital energy manifest in sound is the same energy that created and sustains the world. Lewis Rowell points out that ancient Indian thought also considers music a form a sacrifice and holds that “as the direct result of. . . sacrifice, time is established and maintained in its proper course.”⁶³ Rabbi Israel Sarug’s Kabbalistic text, Commentary on Luria’s Songs, attributes to music the power to make the sun rise and move.⁶⁴

Music depends upon our implicit sense of continuity in time, and it presents perceptible patterns within this continuity. This suggests order within the flow of time, a comforting impression for those, like us, who move along with its march into the future. Many of music’s patterns, moreover, are repetitive, offering reassurance that the future need not be unprecedented, but can itself be a region where we are at home, even surrounded by friends. Merriam does not overstate the case when he claims that music offers reassurance that the world continues in its proper course. In the experience of music, we also encounter a world full of life. Pieces of music reach endings, but we sense that we have recognized something ongoing when we start another musical experience. As we experience music, we appreciate a life that flows on and on.

MUSICAL SUPPORT FOR A SENSE OF BELONGING

The Sense of Membership

The relative conservatism of music facilitates its serving as a symbol of a continuing community. Music promotes feelings of affinity with other people, as we have already suggested in discussing the vitality affects. These two potentials together make music a powerful means for promoting feelings of membership in a particular community. As Dowling and Harwood observe, “Songs are emblems of society and culture, and they form an important part of the self-image of members of society.”⁶⁵ The music of one’s society can make one aware of one’s membership and help one to feel a part of the group. This is also the case with respect to music affiliated with any other community to which one might belong, including religious sects, high schools and colleges, political parties, and such. Merriam concludes: “Music is in a sense a summatory activity for the expression of values, a means whereby the heart of the psychology of a culture is exposed without many of the protective mechanisms which surround other cultural activities.”⁶⁶

The shared physicality and pleasure of musical experience is crucial to music’s power to bond participants within a musical context, as we have observed above. The fact that music can cement feelings of group membership does not obviously suggest that it furthers a sense of connection with those outside that group, however. In fact, insofar as group membership implies the existence of an out-group, those individuals who do not belong, music can apparently aggravate a sense that the world is divided between “us” and “them.” In partisan uses of music for propagandistic purposes, this is often exactly what music does.

However, that the musical experience creates enjoyable feelings of connectedness among people is important, for the participants in a musical experience need not be part of the same community in other circumstances. This is important because music serves to create feelings of comfortable membership, and while this is clearly the case within particular societies and organizations that use music to create this feeling, the sense of membership can extend beyond one’s own society to an open-ended community of others. Contemporary recording technology enables anyone with access to it to share music with a potentially global community, and musical solidarity can extend broadly. Although much of the time participants are not attending to this widespread sharing, their attention could at any point be so directed, and sometime it is (as, for instance, when a radio announcer brings the extent of the audience to listeners’ attention). When thought of in this way, music suggests membership in the human community at large. Thus the same mechanism through which music reinforces membership in one’s community of long standing can encourage a sense of membership beyond one’s usual social group.

Transgenerational Communication

In addition to being able to create solidarity among individuals dispersed in space, music also facilitates emotional connections across time. Members of different generations who are assembled together in a musical audience come to feel connected through the kind of pleasurable sharing just described, as the Confucian thinker Xunzi observes.

When music is performed in the ancestral temple of the ruler, and the ruler and his ministers, superiors and inferiors, listen to it together, there are none who are not filled with a spirit of harmonious reverence. When it is performed within the household, and father and sons, elder and younger brothers listen to it together, there are none who are not filled with a spirit of harmonious kinship. And when it is performed in the community, and old people and young together listen to it, there are none who are not filled with a spirit of harmonious obedience.⁶⁷

Music also forges a sense of transgenerational connection through its preservation of cultural memory. This may be less apparent in the present-day industrialized world, in which generation gaps are often expressed by means of music, than it was in previous times, when musical events were relatively rare but attended by the entire community. Nevertheless, the preservation of musical works through time makes possible the communication of one generation’s musical ideas with succeeding generations.

Music even enables the living to commune with the dead. Consider the impression one sometimes has of a work from the distant past, or even from a century or two ago. We can justifiably consider ourselves to be in contact with Bach, for example, through his music. The eerie feeling provoked by hearing the recorded duet between Natalie Cole and her deceased father Nat King Cole stems from this sense of generations speaking across time and across the divide of death.⁶⁸ Although this duet depends on recently invented recording technologies, any musical culture that preserves musical works that are performed again and again has opportunities to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead.

The sense of security produced by such transgenerational communication is primarily focused on generations within a society with which one is already affiliated. Music returns us home to our societies and our now-dead ancestors. It promotes awareness of the continuity of the past to the present and a sense that further continuity is not only possible but is the route we are already on. While focused on the continuity of one’s particular society, feelings of security on this basis also reinforce the existential sense that the world has continued safely forward thus far and will continue to do so.

I have suggested several bases for feeling a sense of security in connection with music. The physiology of hearing makes us feel supported by a living world that we share. Our experience of musical dynamism outside our bodies is the original means whereby we become aware of and bond with distinct agents in the social world. Music’s conservatism—its repetitive nature—offers the comfort of the familiar as well as reassurance to participants who are non-experts. It also facilitates a sense of community membership, with the protection that involves. Our sense of having secure bearings, both personally and culturally, is facilitated by music’s support and enlivening of our memories and histories. And music offers us a secure place within historical time while still enabling us to encounter previous generations.

Besides prosodic cues, music impacts us emotionally in two other ways that permeate cultural divisions: it communicates vitality and engages our sense of connection with the larger environment and those within it. The kind of bonding that results can powerfully impress us with our shared life and relation to other people. Even though such feelings are most effectively engaged by a style with which we are quite familiar, they can link us to others who may be outside the community with which we typically associate. The music we consider most deeply our own offers us sufficient comfort with our place in the order of things that it can facilitate our explorations of the larger human world. Although my main point in this book is that we should acknowledge and get acquainted with the range of music beyond our ken, the considerations offered in this chapter show that insofar as we have assimilated the features of some musical style, making some particular musical style our own, our previous musical experience provides an emotionally secure basis for doing so.