Earth Tones: Why Music Feels so Divine

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by Genevieve Williams

You might remember the article that circulated through the major news outlets a couple of months ago, wherein a professor of marketing claimed to have discovered why certain tunes stick in our heads. Personally I'm more likely to ask a cognitive psychologist, but I did like the term mentioned in the article for this kind of song or tune: "earworm," from the German ohrwurm. I think about that article a lot, especially every time I've walked into a store this month and heard "Jingle Bells" or "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Religious incompatibilities aside, I wouldn't find the Christmas season nearly so annoying if stores and restaurants didn't pick the most godsawfully aggravating tunes to screw holiday shoppers' nerves -- already frayed by the day after Thanksgiving (which retail workers everywhere call Black Friday) -- to the breaking point. Why not "The Holly and the Ivy"? It's practically a pagan song, and anyway I happen to like it.

There's something about sacred music, though. Not just Christian music -- though that's what most of us in the Western world end up being most familiar with -- and not just Christmas music, either. For that matter, there's something about music.

Music is one of those uniquely human endeavors, at least until we discover intelligent life on other planets. It has antecedents in the natural world. Jared Diamond, in The Third Chimpanzee, his study of animal precursors to human behaviors, pointed out the oft-cited examples of whalesong, not to mention birds. There are many sounds in nature that are pleasing to the ear, and some that our minds may even interpret as musical. But the treeful of birds I passed on my way home from the bus stop last night weren't going to spontaneously burst into an oratorio any more than a basement full of monkeys are likely to produce Shakespeare.

Robert Jourdain's Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy goes a long way toward explaining why. While our brains, like those of most creatures, are capable of processing sound, a great deal of what goes into our interpretation of music takes place at the level of the cerebral cortex, at times interfacing with those areas of the brain that deal with language. (Among the many interesting things discussed in this book is the fact that perfect pitch is probably not, as is often thought, inherent -- it appears to develop among people who begin learning music before the age of four, not coincidentally the prime time for language acquisition.) Listening to music, like reading a story, is all about interpreting the relationships between discrete events so that they form a pattern.

Listening to music out of a sense of pleasure or entertainment, though, is relatively new, and it should surprise no one that the origin of music is commonly thought to be found in religion. No one's entirely sure, of course, because music's beginnings predate recorded history (though, as with so much else, it seems to have begun in the Fertile Crescent, that region of the Middle East generally considered to be the birthplace of civilization), but you can really make a case for it, especially considering how music was thought of and within what contexts it was performed after the historical record begins.

The study of Western music necessarily begins with the Church. While other forms of music were certainly around at the time (we'll get to the Greeks in a bit), documentation of them ranges from spotty to nonexistent. The Church also had an enormous impact on how music was composed in the West. The until-recent emphasis on vocal music is mostly due to the fact that music was meant to accompany sung sacred text. Music is around us in so many forms these days that it's sometimes hard to remember that music recording is only a little over a century old. We can make a lot of educated guesses about music of earlier eras -- changes in tunings, structures of songs, and the like -- but we can't know with absolute certainty what it sounded like.

I mention church music for a reason, though. Not only because liturgical music was instrumental -- no pun intended, especially since it was mostly vocal -- to the development of Western music, but because there are certain things about the music of the Church that are universal to music in general, and some things that are very common to sacred music of any religion or culture. Consider, just for instance, a Gregorian chant and the chants of Tibetan Buddhist monks. They don't sound that much alike, but you can pick out some similarities; among them, that the singers are chanting. ("Chant" is an interesting word, being, in fact, the French word for the verb "to sing" -- but I digress.) The long, sustained notes and fairly narrow range of pitches are two major common elements, and you find these qualities in other sacred music as well, ancient and modern, East and West.

In addition to church music, however -- which had its roots in Jewish temple ceremonies -- there are other, older influences on Western music that also have their roots in the sacred. While every culture of the time indubitably had its own musical tradition, we owe a great deal of our musical sensibility to the ancient Greeks. It's just lucky for us that the Greeks were fanatical theoreticians when it came to music, and that to them, music wound through every aspect of human existence. What, one wonders, would Plato and Pythagoras have made of the modern recording industry, with its thousands of releases a year, or the ubiquity of music in movies, cars, shopping malls, homes, restaurants and virtually every other public and private space in which we live? So, although we don't know that much about what ancient Greek music actually sounded like, we know a lot about how the ancient Greeks thought about music. In some ways, that's almost as good.

This is particularly evident in a dichotomy that persisted in music throughout the Christian era, but had its origins in ancient Greek thought and religion. The deity most directly connected with music in the ancient Greek pantheon is Apollo, which in itself says a great deal about how the Greeks thought about music. Apollo, with his emphasis on light, structure, order and civilization, embodies a set of ideals about music that were expressed by Plato. Music, in this view, should be structured, orderly and simple. The idea of the "music of the spheres," music to which the heavens moved and that reflected that movement, originated with him. This conception of music is very much in line with what Apollo represents: it's intellectual, orderly and rational. There's an idea of purity tied up with this, one that certainly appealed to the Church, and this idea permeated Western music and influenced its composition for several centuries. You can hear it in the symphonies of Mozart and the organ works of Bach, and even in the stately progression of Gregorian chant: a sense of order and regularity, an almost mathematical conception of the divine.

As it turns out, music isn't as mathematically orderly as Pythagoras and other Greek theorists hoped. Hardly anyone outside of the realms of music scholarship and theory cares about this, but it mattered enormously to composers and philosophers. Alongside this stringent conception of music -- which presupposed an orderly universe -- was another conception of music, one found across cultures: the connection between music and ecstasy. Where you have Apollo, you also have Dionysos; and the Dionysian conception of music is altogether less orderly, more emotionally charged, more dramatic and more subjective. It's also been perceived as dangerous in just about every culture, but this dichotomy is nowhere more evident than in the Western world.

We're far past the days when certain intervals of pitch (basically, the difference between two notes) and even certain rhythms were forbidden by the Church (look up the history of the tritone for an interesting footnote to musical history), but it ain't called the Romantic era for nothing: in the 1800s, music, as well as literature, bloomed in a surprising direction. Poetry and literature reached to the pagan roots of antiquity for inspiration -- and so did music, in conception if not in act. As previously mentioned, we don't know a lot about how ancient music actually sounded. But composers had a pretty good idea about how to appeal to an audience's emotional side. Roughly from Beethoven onward, Western music appealed increasingly to the subjective and the emotional. It did not abandon order, but it was no longer simple. There's a reason that beginning pianists start off with Bach and Mozart, not with Schumann and Liszt. Western music achieved a towering complexity perhaps best exemplified by the long, complicated musical structures of Wagnerian opera, and a raw sensuality that had audiences at the première of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring rioting in the aisles.

It's certainly no accident that this change occurred as music moved out of the Church and into the secular world, but an interesting thing has happened as a result of this movement of music to the popular sphere -- and I don't just mean rock and roll, though that's one obvious result. Its Dionysian aspect, freed from the confines of the Church, has resurfaced. Much of the music that I've recommended in this column over the last few years has not been intended for religious use, but a great deal of it suits our religion very well.

On the other hand, the simple and the orderly hasn't been abandoned. Most of the chants you commonly hear at rituals and festivals have one thing in common with early Church music: they're very easy to sing. (And a good thing, too; not many of us are blessed with exceptional voices, your humble scribe included, and not many of us have the time, inclination or money to train them!) A simple drumbeat might be more effective than an entire symphony orchestra at achieving the effect you want; music, like so much else, depends enormously on context. We also have more choices of music than ever before, thanks to recording technology. Before recording existed, the amount of music that one could be exposed to was limited, although it's likely that more people played music for their own enjoyment; the convenience and selection of recorded music has its price. On the other hand, it's the means by which I can bring all of you recommendations from Finland, Russia, India, Morocco, Java, Cape Verde, and more eight times a year. The growing popularity of music from around the world is leading to new ideas and genres in music, which is all to the good. In addition, much of this music springs from sacred roots, many of them very different from the Judeo-Christian roots of our own culture -- and of its music. That we can listen to this music, and at times identify within it that spark of divine inspiration, speaks to the universality of the musical experience.

Plato believed that music reflected the divine -- but he had a very particular idea of what was meant by "divine," and equally particular ideas about music that were positively Apollonian. As pagans, we tend to be bound by common practice rather than by common belief (though there are some broad commonalities to our beliefs), and our music varies as wildly as our conceptions of the divine.

Nonetheless, Jourdain and other musical scholars make an important point -- and so does Plato. Everywhere around the world, music has been related to the sacred; this may even have been its first purpose. It's worth remembering that as the umpteenth rendition of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" follows you through the malls this holiday season, or as you observe people going through their days apparently permanently attached to their headphones. There's a reason for singing and chanting to accompany our ritual activities as well as our everyday ones, and if music has an ecstatic effect (and one need only point to a wildly popular band performing to a sold-out crowd at Key Arena to demonstrate that it does), the only caveat is that it should be handled with care. Dionysos, as well as Apollo, lives in all musical endeavors.