This book is concerned with the ways in which music, both classical and popular, may be able to engender religious experience . What is meant by religious experience will be clarified over the course of the chapters that follow, as will the diverse forms , features, and effects of music that can help to precipitate this. It may be useful, however, to anticipate these more detailed discussions with some general reflections: first, on why music might be characterized as âextravagant,â and why, despite the protests of some musicologists, this extravagance may be conducive to experiences of transcendence ; second, on the extent to which such contentions are congruent with two historical metaphors about the power of music (associated with the figures of Pythagoras and Orpheus ); and, finally, on why musicâs âstraying beyond limitsâ may be related to what we might call the âextravagance â of the divine .
The Extravagance of Music
One thing on which it seems many critics and lovers of music agree is that music exceeds or âwanders beyondâ our customary linguistic and conceptual categories. As
Vladimir JankĂ©lĂ©vitch phrases it, there is a âscandalous disproportion between the incantatory power of music, and the fundamental inevidence of musical
beauty .â
1 Thus, even the simplest and briefest of musical phrases can move us unaccountably and mean more than we can say. In Proustâs
Ă la recherche du temps perdu, for example, Swann is haunted by five notes, from the âlily-whiteâ Sonata in F# by the imaginary composer Venteuil, which he first hears by chance at an evening party, and whose âpetite phraseâ subsequently âopened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating our nostrils.â
2 This âairy and perfumed phraseâ isnât just the cause of a momentary expansion of vision or feeling though; for according to his later reflections, it has a transformative potential, in that it opens up the possibility of âa sort of rejuvenationâ:
like a confirmed invalid who, all of a sudden [âŠ] seems to have so far recovered from his malady that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all hope, of starting to lead [âŠ] a wholly different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the phrase that he had heard [âŠ] the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe, but to which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of recreative influence, he was conscious once again of a desire, almost, indeed, of the power to consecrate his life.3
It is on account of these sorts of âexcessiveâ effects and the art-formâs unpredictable, inexhaustible generativity that we shall speak in this volume of musicâs âextravagance ,â which comes from the medieval Latin, extrÄ vagÄrÄ«, meaning âto wander or stray outside limits.â
Such âextravagantâ conceptions of music are of course by no means uncommon. For E. T. A. Hoffmann , writing in his famous 1810 review of Beethovenâs work, âmusic unlocks for mankind an unknown realm,â âjust as Orpheus â lyre opened the gates of the underworld,â and Beethovenâs music in particular âtransport[s] the listener through ever-growing climaxes into the spiritual realm of the infinite.â4 For Thomas Carlyle , in his 1840 lecture on Dante and Shakespeare , music is a âkind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that.â5 And for Richard Wagner , writing in his 1841 novella, Ein GlĂŒcklicher Abend, music expresses the âeternal, infinite and ideal [âŠ] in such infinitely varied phrases as belong uniquely to music and which are foreign and unknown to any other tongue.â6 Nor were such sentiments confined to the nineteenth century. In the words of George Steiner , music âputs our being as men and women in touch with that which transcends the sayable, which outstrips the analysable.â7 Such views are, finally, also common within a therapeutic context ; according to the neurologist Macdonald Critchley , for example: âMusic can bring about a veritable perceptual spectrum ranging from the simple reception of auditory sense -data to impressions which [âŠ] well-nigh baffle description. So evocative, overwhelming and transcendental may these be as to defy description.â8
Nevertheless, such claims about musicâs ineffability and its capacity to elicit experiences of transcendence have been vigorously challenged in recent years by a number of prominent musicologists, among them Lawrence Kramer , who is one of the most articulate and pioneering advocates of ânew,â âpostmodern,â or âcriticalâ musicology.9 Although Kramerâs influential âpostmodernâ approach purports to defend the value of âsituatedâ subjective responses to music and âcontext -related meanings,â10 he chooses to associate any talk of its âineffableâ character with reactionary claims to musicâs autonomy , thereby failing to acknowledge the possibility that such language might equally spring from concretely situated subjective experiences.11 Instead, such talk is derided as a âfableâ and the ârelic of a certain nineteenth-century-vogue for sentimental metaphysics.â12 As a result, listening experiences involving a sense of transcendence or enchantment are set over against âthe realities of the social worldâ13âas though such experiences took place somewhere outside the real.14
Yet surely it is possible for a listener to have âsituatedâ religious experiencesâeven if these are experiences of transcendence âand for musicâs âcontext -related meaningsâ to be inflected by faith or theistic concerns? One might also ask whether contemplative rapture in listeningâeven when it is an enchanted tarrying with aesthetic forms âis really so bad?15 Surely, as the practices of music therapy have shown, there are all sorts of psychological, emotional, and social benefits to be gained from experiences of musical transcendence .16 And yet, like Leppert and McClary, Kramer positions experiences of âraptureâ and âsublime transcendence â on the same side of the fence as aesthetic autonomy, which is set over against ââreal-worldâ concernsâ and the âactualâ conditions of âlife and thought.â17 In other words, what we find in Kramerâs reading of music is an ideological privileging of certain kinds of âsocial utilityâ and contextual meanings along with an un-argued-for suppression of others. Of course, it might be objected that Kramer is entitled to hold whatever beliefs he wishes about religion.18 However, the problem is that he seeks to delegitimate certain possibilities on the basis of unaired presuppositions, and in doing so performs something of a vanishing trick on musicâs transcendental significance.19 Against such taken-for-granted assumptions, the essays in the current volume argue that these possibilities were never entirely effaced and that music may still serve as âa venue for transcendence .â
Given that in such discussions terms like transcendence and ineffability are often used interchangeably, it is perhaps important to emphasize at this point what...