[2/3/02] Why Music Matters
by Rev. Joan Montagnes
February 3, 2002
Some months ago, Dan Schmidt came up to this pulpit and stared at us for what seemed a good long time...and then he began to speak. Dan said he was illustrating one of the experiences of addiction: withdrawal. He called our discomfort, when he stood in the pulpit and said nothing, "speaker withdrawal." This morning we are experiencing "music withdrawal." You have come to church and all you are receiving is words.
Each year at the Service Auction, I offer the "Sermon Topic of Your Choice" to the highest bidder - a chance to put your words in my mouth. Last year, Sandra Haarsager, our Music Director, purchased the sermon and asked me to speak on "Why Music Matters." We figured the best way to give her her money's worth was to a) give her the day off, and b) make the initial point that when there is no music, we experience a very uncomfortable music withdrawal.
Why does music matter? Why are we addicted?
It is believed in many cultures that the cosmos was created with the first sound. In our own Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Secular culture, some say that it all began with God's voice saying, "Let there be light!" -- or even before creation there was the "Word" - and some say it all began with a Big Bang. As our opening words and meditation suggest, there is a sound, a pulse at the heart of the universe. All is in motion from the humming vibrations of atoms to the slower beats of equally repeated seasons, cycles of days and nights, growth and decay, the migrations of birds, moon and tides, and our own hearts beating in our chests. Though the universe is full of myriad multiplicity, it sings in a unity of music.
In the seventeenth century, physicist Christian Huygens developed the Law of Entrainment. The Law of Entrainment states that if two rhythms are nearly the same, and their sources are in close proximity, the two rhythms will lock up. Why do rhythms entrain? Who knows? Perhaps because nature is efficient and it takes less energy to pulse together than in opposition. Perhaps because music matters right down to the ground of being.
Maybe music matters to us because this dance of the universe is as much a part of us as is our blood, our sense of humor, our tears. We instinctively react to music. The most primitive part of our brains, the reptilian cortex, responds to music by noticing the noise and giving the body a hit of adrenaline. The reptilian cortex says, "Uh oh music! Pay attention!".
The mammalian cortex builds on information given by the primitive brain. The mammalian cortex hears the music, pays attention, gets the hit of adrenaline, and notices the rhythm. The mammalian cortex says, "Hey this music has a groove! Let's entrain, let's tap our toes, dance and snap our fingers!"
The cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that makes us human and makes us self-reflective, not only notices the music, gets the adrenaline hit, and gets into the groove; the cerebral cortex is also aware of the music's larger meaning. The cerebral cortex says, "Hey, this music matters."
Music has always mattered. As early hominids we listened to the songs of the birds, the wind in the trees, waves on ocean, trickling brooks, beat of rain, crashing thunder, and the cries of animals. We listened to gorilla-like beasts pounding on their chests. Maybe music began to matter when we began to make tools with percussive strikes of stone on stone. And music really began to matter when we started to understand the ways of Heaven and Earth; when we began to understand that if we wanted good weather, successful hunts, to celebrate life, or to appease the gods, we had to make music. We had to clap our hands, stamp our feet, sway our bodies, and make new and repetitive sounds with our voices. Singing may have been our first attempt at expressing our feelings.
Around the fire we gave birth to music, poetry, dance, painting, and drama woven together in a tangle of symbols and meanings. At first we probably just used our bodies to shape our art. But soon we began using instruments to make music - banging a couple of sticks together or on a hollow log. Logs became drums, drums became rattles, and soon we discovered that even the stalactites of our holy caves rang like long-echoing gongs when struck.
Thirty thousand years ago, about the time we began making tools, we also began painting religious icons on rocks and cave walls. By 15,000 years ago, those painted figures were clearly dancing to a tune that yoked religion and art in a way that only mystics understand today. The word "religion" comes from the Latin re and ligio, meaning to bind again, to entrain one rhythm to another, to entrain our rhythms to the rhythms of the cosmos. Maybe that's why music matters.
Religion is historically a font of great art. Almost all historic art from anywhere in the world was dedicated to religious expression. In our religious pursuits we crave not only Truth and Goodness, but also Beauty; that is, we crave aesthetics as much as understanding and ethics. We crave these three: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, because, with their opposites, they paint the entire picture of human experience. Music, at the heart of the arts, permeates religion today as it did before we could even speak.
There is something transformational about music. From the earliest days we sat in drumming circles and other symphonies, listening to our inner selves and our outer instruments join, entrain, and enter into dialogue with the music of the spheres - intoxicating rhythms suspending normal experience, urging dancers to focus on the Transcendent, whirling dervishes into mystical trances, coaxing monks as they chant their sutras and psalms. Music is transformative.
Even in our little Friday night Vespers Services, we get a taste of the transformative by singing repetitively until we are both centered and humming with the vibrations of our own voices and our own harmonies. It can be very calming and dare I say, prayerful, and at the very least, like a full internal body massage.
Music is transformational. Depending on the pitch, rhythm, harmony, and tone, music can be rousing and exciting or soothing and calming. It can be joyous and celebratory or poignant and pained. Music can alter our state of being. Music tells us to notice and to be a lover of this moment of the Universal; and by noticing this moment, to become a lover of the Universal in its entirety. Music tells us to entrain, to bind ourselves again to the Transcendent.
In beautiful music we realize the hope of mysticism. We lose ourselves in perfect satisfaction. Time vanishes and we are transported, while living very much in the temporal, to the Eternal. Music surges through us and becomes part of us and we it.
And when all is sung and done, when the skins of the drums are stilled, when the electric guitar strings stop vibrating, when the opera house echoes with its last note, we reflect on the world anew and bow our heads in awe.
Music matters because it is part of the existence we are. It is the singing of all nature, the stars, and the humming of the molecules in our skin. Music is part of what we have become. We all come from musical families, as far back as our prehistoric grandparents. Music matters because it links us to the Eternal, the Divine, the Transcendent, something larger than our narrow selves, and in so doing, music transforms us certainly momentarily and sometimes permanently.
So let's end this dreadful withdrawal beginning with one note, hummmm, change it to a phrase and sing with me now...
"There is more love Somewhere..."
February 3, 2002
Some months ago, Dan Schmidt came up to this pulpit and stared at us for what seemed a good long time...and then he began to speak. Dan said he was illustrating one of the experiences of addiction: withdrawal. He called our discomfort, when he stood in the pulpit and said nothing, "speaker withdrawal." This morning we are experiencing "music withdrawal." You have come to church and all you are receiving is words.
Each year at the Service Auction, I offer the "Sermon Topic of Your Choice" to the highest bidder - a chance to put your words in my mouth. Last year, Sandra Haarsager, our Music Director, purchased the sermon and asked me to speak on "Why Music Matters." We figured the best way to give her her money's worth was to a) give her the day off, and b) make the initial point that when there is no music, we experience a very uncomfortable music withdrawal.
Why does music matter? Why are we addicted?
It is believed in many cultures that the cosmos was created with the first sound. In our own Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Secular culture, some say that it all began with God's voice saying, "Let there be light!" -- or even before creation there was the "Word" - and some say it all began with a Big Bang. As our opening words and meditation suggest, there is a sound, a pulse at the heart of the universe. All is in motion from the humming vibrations of atoms to the slower beats of equally repeated seasons, cycles of days and nights, growth and decay, the migrations of birds, moon and tides, and our own hearts beating in our chests. Though the universe is full of myriad multiplicity, it sings in a unity of music.
In the seventeenth century, physicist Christian Huygens developed the Law of Entrainment. The Law of Entrainment states that if two rhythms are nearly the same, and their sources are in close proximity, the two rhythms will lock up. Why do rhythms entrain? Who knows? Perhaps because nature is efficient and it takes less energy to pulse together than in opposition. Perhaps because music matters right down to the ground of being.
Maybe music matters to us because this dance of the universe is as much a part of us as is our blood, our sense of humor, our tears. We instinctively react to music. The most primitive part of our brains, the reptilian cortex, responds to music by noticing the noise and giving the body a hit of adrenaline. The reptilian cortex says, "Uh oh music! Pay attention!".
The mammalian cortex builds on information given by the primitive brain. The mammalian cortex hears the music, pays attention, gets the hit of adrenaline, and notices the rhythm. The mammalian cortex says, "Hey this music has a groove! Let's entrain, let's tap our toes, dance and snap our fingers!"
The cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that makes us human and makes us self-reflective, not only notices the music, gets the adrenaline hit, and gets into the groove; the cerebral cortex is also aware of the music's larger meaning. The cerebral cortex says, "Hey, this music matters."
Music has always mattered. As early hominids we listened to the songs of the birds, the wind in the trees, waves on ocean, trickling brooks, beat of rain, crashing thunder, and the cries of animals. We listened to gorilla-like beasts pounding on their chests. Maybe music began to matter when we began to make tools with percussive strikes of stone on stone. And music really began to matter when we started to understand the ways of Heaven and Earth; when we began to understand that if we wanted good weather, successful hunts, to celebrate life, or to appease the gods, we had to make music. We had to clap our hands, stamp our feet, sway our bodies, and make new and repetitive sounds with our voices. Singing may have been our first attempt at expressing our feelings.
Around the fire we gave birth to music, poetry, dance, painting, and drama woven together in a tangle of symbols and meanings. At first we probably just used our bodies to shape our art. But soon we began using instruments to make music - banging a couple of sticks together or on a hollow log. Logs became drums, drums became rattles, and soon we discovered that even the stalactites of our holy caves rang like long-echoing gongs when struck.
Thirty thousand years ago, about the time we began making tools, we also began painting religious icons on rocks and cave walls. By 15,000 years ago, those painted figures were clearly dancing to a tune that yoked religion and art in a way that only mystics understand today. The word "religion" comes from the Latin re and ligio, meaning to bind again, to entrain one rhythm to another, to entrain our rhythms to the rhythms of the cosmos. Maybe that's why music matters.
Religion is historically a font of great art. Almost all historic art from anywhere in the world was dedicated to religious expression. In our religious pursuits we crave not only Truth and Goodness, but also Beauty; that is, we crave aesthetics as much as understanding and ethics. We crave these three: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, because, with their opposites, they paint the entire picture of human experience. Music, at the heart of the arts, permeates religion today as it did before we could even speak.
There is something transformational about music. From the earliest days we sat in drumming circles and other symphonies, listening to our inner selves and our outer instruments join, entrain, and enter into dialogue with the music of the spheres - intoxicating rhythms suspending normal experience, urging dancers to focus on the Transcendent, whirling dervishes into mystical trances, coaxing monks as they chant their sutras and psalms. Music is transformative.
Even in our little Friday night Vespers Services, we get a taste of the transformative by singing repetitively until we are both centered and humming with the vibrations of our own voices and our own harmonies. It can be very calming and dare I say, prayerful, and at the very least, like a full internal body massage.
Music is transformational. Depending on the pitch, rhythm, harmony, and tone, music can be rousing and exciting or soothing and calming. It can be joyous and celebratory or poignant and pained. Music can alter our state of being. Music tells us to notice and to be a lover of this moment of the Universal; and by noticing this moment, to become a lover of the Universal in its entirety. Music tells us to entrain, to bind ourselves again to the Transcendent.
In beautiful music we realize the hope of mysticism. We lose ourselves in perfect satisfaction. Time vanishes and we are transported, while living very much in the temporal, to the Eternal. Music surges through us and becomes part of us and we it.
And when all is sung and done, when the skins of the drums are stilled, when the electric guitar strings stop vibrating, when the opera house echoes with its last note, we reflect on the world anew and bow our heads in awe.
Music matters because it is part of the existence we are. It is the singing of all nature, the stars, and the humming of the molecules in our skin. Music is part of what we have become. We all come from musical families, as far back as our prehistoric grandparents. Music matters because it links us to the Eternal, the Divine, the Transcendent, something larger than our narrow selves, and in so doing, music transforms us certainly momentarily and sometimes permanently.
So let's end this dreadful withdrawal beginning with one note, hummmm, change it to a phrase and sing with me now...
"There is more love Somewhere..."
posted by UUCP Sermons at 7:49 AM
