The mystery, religion, (and science) of music
How music overlaps on the Venn diagram with other domains.
This is the title of a Billboard article that was published in May of 1994. It is the transcript of Sting's commencement speech at Berklee College Of Music which you can read here. I revised the title by adding “science”, in the loosest sense of the word. It’s a science in the sense that it has some narrow overlap on the Venn diagram. But there are overlaps in all the disciplines if you want to explore them at a metaphoric level, which I think is where they are most effective, and least effective if taken literally. Sting has, in my opinion, successfully used them in that way. The focus should be on the task at hand, music.
How music is a mystery:
In Paul McCartney’s recent book, The Lyrics, he talked about frequently being stopped on the street by people saying that his music changed their life. But it remains a mystery how that happens when you consider musical ideas are often spontaneous off-the-cuff ideas not meant to be anything. It could just be wordplay, which suggests a rhythm, then the rhythm generates harmony, and so on. I think it may have something to do with music being easier to produce because of recording technology, and the magic (or memes) that can arise from it. When John and Paul started using tape recorders to record ideas around 1965 (before it was all from memory—when the idea for a song came, they memorized it and then quickly rehearsed it and recorded it) it became a kind of magic:
“McCartney told Barry Miles: “with any kind of seeing my aim seems to be to distort it, to distort it from what we know it as, even with music and visual things, and to change it from what it is to see what it could be. To take a note, and wreck it and see in that note what else there is in it, it's the simple act of distorting it...it's all trying to create magic. It's all trying to make things happen so that you don't know why that happened.”” 1
[I wonder how all the Beatles memes will enter the Metaverse, and if the Beatles of the future will be an assemblage of deepfakes, yet seeming real in the sense that their music came from the same mysterious place of “happy accidents” borne of the media, as in the “medium is the message”.]
Music can have mystery simply by sounding mysterious. What's "mysterious"? Music can be made mysterious through the interplay of melody and harmony, and with timbre. Rhythm isn't particularly "mysterious" from a layperson's standpoint. Rhythm primarily activates brain areas having to do with movement, even if we aren't physically moving our body. (We want to move, but culture might tell us we can’t) However, dancing can create group dynamics (entrainment) and is a way to tap into areas that deal with "flocking"—like the Ghost Dance of Native Americans, apparently performed during a total solar eclipse on New Year's Day in 1889, which was symbolic of the augur of a new golden age. The dancing continued on around the clock (or even 3 or 4 days when they used ergot back in the 15th century).2 (If we had a New Year’s eclipse in today’s world it would have the same mysterious—and religious—effects).
For anyone that has witnessed a total solar eclipse, music is a big part of the ritual. It had been similarly ritualized in pop culture beginning in the 1960s with space rock and acid rock, with its own"Ghost Dance" ritual expressed at large festivals and stadium shows. A Pink Floyd show is a good example, and I remember them myself as being "cosmic", which sometimes used eclipses as a thematic element.
Electronic music made music more mysterious at the timbral level. Ambient music is compelling because of the mysterious nature of electronics—that we could access sounds well beyond orchestral timbre. Think the Theremin, the ondes Martenot, or even the Mellotron, decidedly mysterious in nature compared to traditional instruments. Mystery is easier, even facile, which is why we gravitate towards the production of sounds that only require tweaking controllers. Needless to say, pop music is joined at the hip with production. The sound matters lots more in a cultural sense, but traditional notions of music are discarded, sadly.
From How music dies (or lives): field recording and the battle for democracy in the arts:
“Historically, musicians create music by the way they touch an instrument, and these actions can make almost any physical matter sing to some degree, where emotions are radiated through his fingertips. It is hard to imagine those who have never made music outside of the laptop screen and keyboard being able to independently generate much natural sound with their primary motion, the tap of a forefinger, except if interfaced somehow…” 3
How music isn’t a mystery:
Music isn't a mystery in the same way music isn’t really a science other than its use of simple mathematics and symmetry. Music is more about mastery, and the time it takes to get proficient at playing instruments and understanding (some) theory. It’s particularly remarkable that when the late Pat Martino was recovering from his brain injury, his motor skills came back more quickly than the knowledge of theory. This is in fact evidence of how music is a mystery, but only as to how it’s burned in as “hardware”. It’s not a mystery that the knowledge part can return in time with an effort to do so.
How music is a religion:
Sting was the reason I started thinking that music could have the capacity for introspection through storytelling, which jazz doesn’t have at the instrumental level (beyond the emotional arc of a sax solo for example). But interestingly, that the roots of that introspection are in his jazz roots—an introspection that is similar to religious meditation. Music becomes a daily constitution, like daily prayers, but is in the form of playing musical instruments and hearing music internally. All composers know why you need this silence to work things through. Music comes together in spiritual moments, even if they have nothing to do with religion. If we do it “religiously” it is merely a figure of speech, but a strong and universal one. It’s something that lots of people identify with—they “get” it. But “getting” something might be illusory sometimes and perhaps can exceed its boundaries. Police performances were a mix of everything, and we can’t ignore that lots of it was “Saturday Night”, not “Sunday Morning”. Go on YouTube and watch early Police performances, such as Reggatta De Blanc. I don’t see them as spiritual, but they sometimes gravitated towards it when they started to jam at the ends of songs. Jazz is a bit more open to these experiences, and I have taken note of them over the years when the band seems to lift off the stage by the energy created in the moment. (Music is a mystery)
How music isn't a religion:
Music has lots to do with how we position ourselves culturally. If it involves organized religion, then the music is positioned accordingly, even though the more profane aspects of pop music are suffused in the more sacred—like Sting evolving from J’aurais Toujours Faim de Toi to the poignancy of Island of Souls or Wild Wild Sea. This makes music both spiritual and mysterious precisely because it acts on us in mysterious ways and we go with its flow. We aren't sure why it is seductive. But it's not a religion in that it requires any devotion similar to religious devotion and scripture throughout human history. Music is a form of storytelling that can have spiritual themes, but it is not liturgical—even though Sting always cites J.S. Bach as an influence, and that he was raised as Catholic.
Music isn’t a religion because religion has no effect on how the music is executed. If you can’t play a piece because you don’t have the ability, it shouldn’t have anything to do with religion. It has to do with simply getting a performance to a level that works. Moreover, if we want music to be “spiritual” it has to be more like dancing, which gets us out of analysis mode.
***
Masoko Tanga was a filler track on Side 2 of the Police’s first album Outlandos D’Amour, and is essentially a dance groove with an ad-lib rap. It isn’t “spiritual” but there is an uplifting feeling just from the rhythmic intensity.
Some of the lyric:
Zoe ka mo wa I've been sleepin' all day
Took a lot of drugs, watch the tide roll out
Day light na no ma do la
Keep the sugar warmed up, hey!
It is “African” in many ways (specifically Ska/Reggae) one of the primary Police influences, so it’s consistent that music in some ways deals with a “spell”. As he alluded to in his speech, “My mother cursed me…It was a miracle…Music is an addiction, a religion, and a disease. There is no cure. No antidote. I was hooked.” Masoko Tanga is an “infectious groove”, a phrase we use in common parlance, but its etymology has more of a pejorative meaning. We can’t use trance-based music as being a part of a set of principles as religions do, but they can have a spiritual quality at the core, which shows through for some people that are attuned to it—which may lead people to be more reverent of religion.
There are of course Sting songs full of religious allusions, such as If I Ever Lose My Faith In You, which is an example of looking beyond it just being a pop song. There is a midway point where the listener gets the allusions, and either takes them literally or not. The lyric in my view is agnostic.
Recently, I watched a performance of Sting at the Pantheon. I can see the connection he’s making, but it’s a strange mix of sacred and profane, with the use of a beat-up 50s-era Fender P-Bass, with Dominic Miller on a brightly-colored Telecaster, amid the statuary and 1300 years of history. What does Otis Redding’s Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay have anything to do with the Pantheon? I recall years ago watching a travelogue about a jazz cruise through the Mediterranean. They had some footage of Pompeii with cocktail jazz playing in the background and I thought, “Jazz has nothing to do with Pompeii.” Or does it? Jazz certainly does suffuse religious elements in it because of the religious upbringing of jazz musicians. Religion is baked in the cake of both jazz and blues, so while remote, the connections are there, and musicians find those roots. In some ways “sitting on the dock of a bay” evokes a spiritual contemplative moment. It is “happy” in the sense that it uses all major chords, but uses lots of blue notes. There are no “sad” minor chords used, but the sorrow comes through the use of ascending and descending “blue lines”. You wouldn’t hear that in the Baroque for example, and certainly not played in the Pantheon because the note values are too short for the cavernous space.
Lots of musicians can identify with the overlaps of spirituality in music but are only a passing interest. But that doesn’t mean there is a shared devotional element. Music is a way to explore that shared space, albeit brief.
Neil Young:
“Religion is not one of my high points. I really don’t subscribe to the stories surrounding each one, because they are just stories, remembered by men. I do feel the Great Spirit in all that is around me, and I am humbled. I do pray with others if that is what they do. I don’t judge them for that. That is their way. I join them. Then I move on.” 4
Obviously, religious references, bits of Shakespeare, and other literary borrowing have always been easter eggs in lyrics. But I always recall Elton John saying that the music is what the listener relates to first; It’s the music that leaves an impression. Very often you might not know what the singer is saying until decades later, perhaps when certain words or phrases triggered you.
How music isn’t a science:
I see music overlapping more with science on the Venn diagram because I studied music formally. For other musicians, it is much more intuitive and may overlap more with theater, dance and, visual art. After formal study of anything your brain is rewired, but that doesn’t mean we can’t revisit the old systems, which is what I’ve done with Ambient music, as a way to walk on the other sides of my feet as it were or to use my opposite hand—or to put guitars and basses into alternate tunings to avoid routine analyses or “ruts”. The rules tell me I can’t use an F in a C Major7 chord, but you might find that combination in an alternate tuning, and your ear might not prompt the rule. It’s the rut that makes you see it.
Merce Cunningham 1955:
“If a dancer dances, which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance or remembering in his body someone else's dance, but if the dancer dances, everything is there. I don't work through images or ideas, I work through the body. And I don't ever want a dancer to start thinking that a movement means something.” 5
How music is a science:
Equal Temperament is one of the most profound innovations in human history which emerged in the Enlightenment. We listen to music and take it for granted, but we could just as well have had only used Just Intonation where only some of the intervals are in tune.
But as Merce Cunnigham said about dance, pop music shouldn’t be concerned with music being like a science, but it’s ironic how much shop-talk goes on on social networks about music theory, which I assume somehow relates to learning chords to play songs, and people are curious about what seems to be a mystery about music theory. The Beatles sounded like they knew theory but it emerged intuitively from simple symmetries.
Music is created within a system, unlike visual art, which has almost no constraints beyond what the mediums are capable of or not capable of. Oil on canvas and a symphonic work are both ways to express something, but the former has fewer constraints. For the latter, obviously, there are more variables involved. It’s a science in the sense that the composer needs to have more theoretical knowledge, as an architect/engineer would. Painting can require theory, but historically it hasn’t been an academic pursuit as music theory sometimes is, with people debating “sus2”, “flat-13″, and so on. Those are “scientific debates”, albeit simple. Jazz musicians have been known to like those topics as if they were a kind of physics.
Personally, I like the idea that music can be scientific, and the reverse if you want to go there. And you can turn that on and off: In music, I think it’s useful to suss out chord changes (Sussing the suss’s). Take Rick Beato’s YouTube channel for example when he talks about that kind of stuff, and people seem to like it. But in the end, at least for me, there’s a use for it but is sometimes anathema to art-making. I realized this when I moved to songwriting after being a jazz "scientist”. But I do come back to the scientific approach because it is compelling for some mysterious reason, and “cosmic” as well.
Takeaways:
In creativity, there is a resonance that emerges when the spirit of the idea and the spirit of the artist are in perfect alignment.
Art is not just “decoration”; It has spiritual dimensions, even if secular in its expression. Rock music in the 60s had this quality even if the characteristics of the music were more dark.
Little Richard: Sunday morning to Saturday night and back again. All music is spiritual in its purest state.
You can't make art without a sense of spirituality at some point, either at the time it is being created by the artist(s), or perhaps centuries later. Even digital
A book which covers in depth Sting’s religious background: Sting and Religion: The Catholic-Shaped Imagination of a Rock Icon
Turner, Steve. Beatles '66: The Revolutionary Year. United States, Ecco, 2016. (116)
Involuntary muscle twitching is one of the primary symptoms of ergotism…The number of the horrors depicted by Hieronymus Bosch are thought to have been inspired by the symptoms of ergot poisoning, and some hypothesize that the numerous outbreaks of dancing mania between the 14th and 17th centuries, in which hundreds of townspeople took to dancing 4 days without rest, were caused by this. [Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. , 2021. Print. (97)]
Brennan, Ian, Marilena Delli, and Corin Tucker. How Music Dies (or Lives): Field Recording and the Battle for Democracy in the Arts. , 2016. Internet resource. (192)
Young, Neil. Waging Heavy Peace. S.l.: Penguin Books, 2017. Print. (185)
Menand, Louis. The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. (248)