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Jan 25, 2014 - 02:41 PM |
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A brief reflection on religion and music |
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 Response to:
I am an atheist in favor of religion by Misogynyst Gynecologist
I'm writing this entry in response to LeHah's as it started a reflection that would have been inappropriate as a comment by its length. Hopefully LeHah ends up reading it as it is truly based on the thought process that was started by reading his entry.
What sparked my writing this is that I struggled for the longest time during my studies in classical music with religion's important presence in classical music, mainly through my progressive move towards atheism and the fact that I had a hard time reconciling my activity as a non-believing choir singer with the fact that a huge chunk of the popular choir repertoire is religious in nature. That choir singing in general still largely takes place in churches also caused me some discomfort with my changing world view, as I wished to avoid any kind of association with organized religion as much as possible in every aspect of my life. Ironically, I became much less of a contrarian after the double whammy I've lived in the last year and half (doctoral crash and burn / loss of the most significant romantic relationship of my life), though I'm still more of the opinion that organized religion causes more bullshit than it prevents.
Anyway, enough commentary on the commentary, here is the response~
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I can agree that historically, religious organizations seem to have been a boon to the arts in general. However, I'd say it's more a question of similarity in function as well as a question of socio-economics that makes it so, rather than a question of profundity in artistic intention being in some way dependent on a specific religious sentiment. And music, fortunately, is a much more solid edifice than organized religion in that it doesn't presume to dictate anything concrete about the way the world works. It's all just commentary and almost always intended as such.
A question of similarity in function in that both religion and music are an integral part of human ritual in all its forms (births, deaths, mating, comings of age, etc.). Of course, the church had a grip on these rituals for the more notable parts of Western society (i.e. the monarchy) starting at least in the Middle Ages. As this is the period of history where the tradition of writing and preserving music became more widespread and reliable throughout occidental culture, it goes without saying that the Church had an important grip on this. The influence of these earlier pieces extended to composers of subsequent generations making the base of the Christian religious musical catalog and its influence more extensive than the secular one. It had a head start, in layman's terms.
Of course this is also a consequence of the fact that the clergy were pretty much the only people who were well instructed enough and had enough funds to proceed to the exercise of writing music down and preserving it. What's untold here is that repression of alternative currents was also part of the Church's mission, and so we are left with very few examples of secular music from this era by virtue of its ephemeral nature when it isn't written down.
One such instance is the rise and fall of the Cathars, closely linked with the tradition of the Troubadours and Trouvères, mainly in France in the few centuries after the first millennium. In essence we had a group of nobles who decided to step outside the Church and develop a new belief system based on the ideal of courtly love. Their music has reached us as a big enough monument of songs of love not linked with divinity. The Church couldn't abide a group of heretics of such importance, and the crusader army was dispatched to quell this movement. A massacre of some importance took place, and so this tradition which held much promise as an alternative to the Christian influence on the arts was nipped in the bud. Here's a more detailed yet still succinct introduction to this if anyone's curious.
An interesting fact that goes counter to the idea that religion actually helped in the production of "great" music is the fact that there was a form of censoring present in the Church's ideology that prevented composers from expressing themselves to their full capacity. One specific example is the interval of the tritone, which was proscribed from most religious musical practice and which incidentally is the base of what makes most music truly interesting, as the potential for tension and release (one of the most fundamental of concepts that makes a piece of music interesting) it provides is unparalleled by any other interval in the Western musical system.
It's interesting LeHah mentioned Mozart as an example of religion's positive impact on music, as he is pretty much at the turning point historically of the strong dependency of music on religion and the monarchy. Most people are familiar with the historically cited fact that Mozart was the first really significant composer who was able to make a living without having to be dependent on some noble patron or the Church. Beyond the extensive use of the tritone being proscribed, dissonance in general was regarded as an undesirable phenomenon. Mozart had an understanding of the usefulness of dissonance that extended far beyond what was admitted in most of high-society (and even more so the rigid edifice of the Church) at the time, and he was given a hard time for it in professional terms. Hard to think of Mozart as a renegade today, what with his place as the figurehead of classical music, but he certainly ruffled more than a few feathers in his time.
Another very significant element of Church repression that prevented an added richness of musical expression for too long a time is the disdain for any instrument that wasn't able to produce a pure tone. I'm referring of course to percussion instruments in general, one of the two most basic, fundamental, and accessible means of musical expressions, the other being the human voice. In fact, outside of the Christian tradition of classical music, very few are the religious traditions which do not include percussion in their rituals in one way or another. If the human voice is the prime tool for visceral melodic and harmonic expression in music, the aspect of rhythm was largely ignored as insignificant or considered secondary for the longest time in the Western tradition of classical music, as a consequence of the Church's influence.
My whole point is that it could be argued that religion, rather than encouraging musical expression, may have been more of a stifling element than anything else. I'd cite Mozart's operas and even more specifically Beethoven's Symphonies as prime examples of the expressive power that might have been unleashed much sooner had it not been for the Church's influence. The fascination for religious texts and profound devotion of many composers to the religious tradition can obviously be considered a strong contra-argument to all this, but in my view it isn't immediately obvious that such great minds would not have been able to find some other source of inspiration, whereas the examples I mentioned of repression and control of output can hardly be considered positive.
As for current pop music being somehow inferior to music of a more religious nature, I'd say if people can be brought together by something in a positive manner, it doesn't really matter what the object itself is. I know that a lot of the schlock that plays on Top 40 radio doesn't hold a candle to the true greats, but it is also generally intended to be easily discarded as soon the "next big thing" comes along. And so, assigning the same kind of significance to it as we do to the classics is for the overwhelming majority of it an obviously erroneous way of proceeding. Still, in separating the wheat from the chaff, every now and again we see artists from this sort of environment emerge that change something or produce a meaningful body of work, and this just further proves the point that musical ingenuity finds its way regardless of societal pressures and conventions. Remember that the Beatles, LeHah's example, started off as nothing more than another pop band like so many others. Jazz music is another example of a tradition that veered off completely from its origins to form a corpus that cannot possibly be described as insignificant. Sure it stemmed from religious styles of music, but this is again simply a virtue of the close association of music with ritual, which has also historically been associated with religion.
On the idea of music as ritual outside of a religious context, raves and large scale electronica festivals can be cited as a prime example of music not needing religion to keep innovating and moving forward. I'm not familiar enough with electronic music to the point of citing specific groups or artists that fit the criteria for paradigm changing, though I know some people who certainly could. Regardless, the whole point is that we have here another example of music not needing religion to bring people together in a positive manner and of a significant (if still in relative infancy and thus not as widely recognized) body of musical works that may well one day have examples be cited alongside the greats of the classical tradition, though it will certainly be a while before the rigid edifice that musical academia has become allows it. And in the end, if you want a tune to help you reach a state of bliss it is a much different thing to wanting a tune that will make you want to shake your booty, although the two aren't necessarily exclusive. As most people here (I imagine) I tend to favor the first, but give me a good funk record every now and again and I won't fight you.
To return to the initial point of this rambling, if we have a great number of historically significant works have been written in a religious context, this doesn't in any way justify the continued pressure religion has and continues to exert on society. I'm no longer in as much of a rush in general to confront people on their religious views as I have been in the past. If an individual holds a certain amount of conviction that there is something more out there in his heart and this helps him get through his day, I'm happy for him. What I still have a hard time swallowing is the group-think and pressure that comes from groups of people codifying these individual convictions into a set of rules you absolutely must follow or else... And this is what prompted me to write this entry, as I'm an atheist that couldn't possibly be in favor of religion in any organized form. I'm not much more of a scientist than LeHah is, but, by nature, religious doctrine cannot be reconciled with what we know about the world by simple virtue of it necessarily having to posit explanations that are not based on experience and quantified fact, but on some supernaturally obtained knowledge of reality. Whether we posit a deity or not is of little significance, as the simple virtue of basing one's decisions on factors outside of our physical reality is foolhardy in its most benign form, and plain dangerous in cases where decisions affecting important issues and large masses of people are concerned.
Post-scriptum sum up: Yes imagination is an awesome thing, and I can appreciate the monument of religiously-inspired works as much as anyone else. I just don't agree that we need to approve of religion to do so, nor that it was ever necessarily a pre-condition to it.
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