Abstract
This chapter is concerned with the ways in which popular music—including secular and ‘post-secular’ works—may be able to elicit moments of epiphany and serve a positive religious purpose. It begins by outlining a methodology that steers a middle course between ‘immanent’ and ‘arbitrary’ models of musical meaning—by focusing on the notions of ‘affordance’ and ‘transitivity’—and evaluates the religious significance of works in a ‘post hoc’ manner, in light of the listening experience. The rest of the chapter illustrates the advantages of such an approach and considers a wide range of religious, secular and ‘post-secular’ examples, highlighting in particular a variety of musical and textual features that invite the listener’s imaginative engagement and may help to precipitate experiences of ‘general revelation.’ The chapter ends with a short Coda, which reflects on the value from a religious perspective of such moments of enchantment and wonder in music listening.
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- 1.
The need for a broadening of our approach to music has been articulated by Brett McCracken , in his popular publication Hipster Christianity, in which he speaks of a widespread desire to ‘strike down the notion of “Christian music” as representing only that which carries overt Christian content’ and of a growing sense that ‘sometimes the art that leads us most readily to God is crafted by the hands of someone who doesn’t even believe God exists’ (Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2010), 165–6, 174). Such claims might seem a little less implausible to some if we recall that Karl Barth considered the works of Mozart to be ‘parables of the kingdom,’ despite their lack of ‘Christian content’ and even though he acknowledged that the composer wasn’t ‘a particularly active Christian’ and led a ‘rather frivolous existence’ ( Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , 57).
- 2.
This tendency correlates with developments promoted by ‘new’ musicology , such as the movement away from an exclusive focus on formal analysis and a wider recognition of the ways in which music takes on contextually related meanings and is involved in the formation of subjectivities.
- 3.
‘Musical Sense -Making and the Concept of Affordance ,’ Biosemiotics 5 (2012), 394.
- 4.
Ibid., 392.
- 5.
Ibid., 401.
- 6.
Nicholas Cook , ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning,’ Music Theory Spectrum 23: 2 (2001), 176.
- 7.
‘Musical Sense -Making and the Concept of Affordance ,’ 403.
- 8.
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 129.
- 9.
S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), 254.
- 10.
Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 165.
- 11.
As Joel Krueger points out, the shaping of an environment according to its interactive salience is not only something that we do as individuals; it can also be a communal activity, which is invited by and reciprocally gives rise to ‘social affordances,’ which ‘open up a shared world in which people can do things, including construct and coordinate their experiences both individually and collectively’ (‘Doing Things with Music,’ Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10: 1 (2011), 3).
- 12.
Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 49ff.
- 13.
Musicking : The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 13.
- 14.
Krueger, ‘Enacting Musical Experience,’ Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16: 2–3 (2009), 100.
- 15.
‘Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind,’ Frontiers in Psychology 4: 1003 (2014).
- 16.
Music in Everyday Life, Chapter 4.
- 17.
‘In Care Of,’ directed by Matthew Weiner , and written by Weiner and Carly Wray . The episode originally aired on the cable network AMC on 23 June 2013.
- 18.
‘Both Sides, Now,’ written by Joni Mitchell and performed by Judy Collins on Wildflowers (1967).
- 19.
Although the show is primarily focused on the hedonistic world of 1960s advertising, the subject of religion (and the growth of ‘new age’ spirituality ) is subtly interwoven throughout Mad Men. In the episode referred to above, for instance, Don—who is shown reading Dante’s Inferno at the start of the season—has a drunken argument with an evangelizing stranger in a bar (whose counsel Don sarcastically rebuffs, saying ‘Jesus had a bad year’); however, in the same episode there is also a flashback to Don’s childhood and an encounter with another preacher, whose parting words have evidently remained with him and appear to serve as a meta-commentary of sorts: ‘The only unpardonable sin is to believe that God cannot forgive you.’ Other notable religious scenes include the ending to ‘The Mountain King’ (season 2, episode 12), when after a tarot reading that mentions resurrection, Don walks slowly into the ocean, his arms slightly raised in a gesture of openness , as George Jones sings ‘A Cup of Loneliness’ (‘I see Christian pilgrims so redeemed from sin / Called out of darkness a new life to begin. / Were you ever in the valley when the way is dark and dim? / Did you ever drink the cup of loneliness with Him?’), and the ending to ‘A Night to Remember’ (season 2, episode 8), in which Father Gill, Peggy’s parish priest, disrobes for the night, unexpectedly takes out an acoustic guitar and gives a wonderful rendition of ‘Early in the Morning’ by Peter, Paul and Mary (‘Well, early in the morning, about the break of day, / I ask the Lord, “Help me find the way!” / Help me find the way to the promised land, / This lonely body needs a helping hand’).
- 20.
As Michael Bull has argued, such musical enchantment can have toxic or even pathological effects, since it may encourage an addictive, solipsistic withdrawal from social spaces as well as a ‘privatized’ and purely fictitious aestheticization of the urban environment (see Sound Moves). Without disagreeing with this, I think it is also important to keep in view that such negative effects are neither inevitable nor the only possibility.
- 21.
Although the sublime is most commonly associated with visual phenomena, the ability of sound—both natural and man-made—to evoke an experience of sublimity has long been recognized. Burke, for example, highlights different types of sounds (such as the sudden, the intermittent, the confused or the uncertain) that can excite a sense of the sublime ; though he also notes that silence and the sudden cessation of sound are capable of provoking such experiences too. (See A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, part II, xvii.) In his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste , Archibald Alison places even greater emphasis on sound and begins his account of ‘the beauty and sublimity of the material world’ by focusing on hearing. Specifically, after considering a range of ‘simple’ natural and man-made sounds that can serendipitously elicit a sense of the sublime , he turns to ‘composed’ sounds and offers an extended discussion of music’s ability to produce sublime effects (Essay II, Chapter 2).
- 22.
For further consideration of the idea that music pervades the universe, even though it ordinarily eludes our hearing, see Chapters 1 and 2. For a discussion of how these ideas inform the work of contemporary sound artists, who attend to the ways in which features of the urban environment can serendipitously serve as Aeolian harps, see Linda Kouvaras , Loading the Silence : Australian Sound Art in the Post-digital Age (London: Routledge, 2016).
- 23.
See for instance Untitled Sonic Metaorganisms/Untitled Sonic Microorganisms by Francisco López and the Absolute Noise Ensemble (2006). For other examples, one might consider the light and sound installation The Transfinite, by the Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda , which was premiered at Park Avenue Armory in 2011, or the debut album Terminus Drift, 2017, by the Scottish sound artist Joshua Sabin .
- 24.
Interview, 2003: http://www.franciscolopez.net/int_loop.html.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Cited in Thomas Bey William Bailey, Micro Bionic: Radical Electronic Music and Sound Art in the 21st Century (n.p.: Belsona Books, 2012), 250.
- 27.
The piece has not always been well received by theologians. See for instance Wolterstorff’s, Art in Action, which describes the work as an example of ‘de-aestheticization’ and ‘anti-art’ (63, 93). Jeremy Begbie also sees no theological interest in Cage’s work, which he associates with an aesthetic of ‘randomness’ and ‘a denial of any kind of active transcendence ’ (MMG, 103). In both cases, I think these judgments are half right, since they fail to entertain the possibility of a more positive reading.
- 28.
In reflecting on Cage’s piece, it may be helpful to invoke a distinction between different kinds of silence , which are elided in English but which are carefully segregated in Russian: one is ‘molchanie,’ which refers to a cessation of sound, such as human speech, and so focuses on the interruptive character of silence and what has been take away; whereas the other is ‘tishina,’ which betokens a more primordial or pre-existing silence , such as the silence of the Steppe, and so focuses attention on what is revealed or more positively exposed to hearing. Thus, we might say, while Cage’s 4’33” is an artistic staging of ‘molchanie,’ it aspires to lure the listener towards a revelatory experience of ‘tishina.’ (I am indebted to Oliver Davies’s discussion of these terms in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 201–22.)
- 29.
Cage’s ‘Autobiographical Statement’ was delivered at Southern Methodist University, on 17 April 1991.
- 30.
A Composer’s Confessions (Paris: Éditions Allia, 2013), 15.
- 31.
Douglas Kahn makes a related observation: ‘That his [Cage’s] music of objects, matter, and air happened to be both everywhere and inaudible, its sounds only heard through a faith in technology, placed it squarely in a mythic heritage in the West established at the time of Pythagoras ’ (‘John Cage : Silence and Silencing,’ The Musical Quarterly 81: 4 (1997), 589). Cage’s references to God in his lectures are also worth noting in this regard. In one of his ‘Beckettian’ sequences, he writes: ‘Sounds are just vibrations, isn’t that true? / Part of a vast range of vibrations including radio waves, light, cosmic rays, isn’t that true? / […] Doesn’t that stir the imagination? / Shall we praise God from Whom all blessings flow? / Is sound a blessing?’ ( Silence : Lectures and Writings (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 51–2).
- 32.
Cage has spoken of the difference between ‘that “old” music […] which has to do with conceptions and their communication, and this new music, which has to do with perception and the arousing of it in us’ (in Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23).
- 33.
See for example the Introduction to his 1982 ‘mesostic’ Themes & Variations.
- 34.
According to Brandon LaBelle , the aim of ‘Silent Prayer ’ was to ‘shatter the dizzying and dreamy effects of the mall’ and to ‘explode’ the ‘dull drone’ with ‘epiphanous silence ’ (Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 12).
- 35.
‘Music and the Generosity of God,’ Practical Matters: A Journal of Religious Practices and Practical Theology (2014).
- 36.
Krueger, ‘Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind,’ 4, 8.
- 37.
There are of course exceptions—most notably, Joel Krueger , who has recently written an article on the subject of ‘The Extended Mind and Religious Cognition,’ Mental Religion: The Brain, Cognition, and Culture, ed. Niki Clements (Macmillan, 2016). See also Ansdell, How Music Helps, Chapter 18.
- 38.
‘Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind,’ 2.
- 39.
Eric Clark , Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 203.
- 40.
‘Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind,’ 2.
- 41.
Ways of Listening, 20.
- 42.
Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 6th ed. (New York: Phaidon Press, 2002), 169.
- 43.
Only Connect … Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
- 44.
Ibid., 33. In a review of Shearman’s study, Gombrich quibbles with the author’s choice of the term ‘transitivity ’ and argues that ‘apostrophe’ would be more apposite (New York Review of Books, 4 March 1993).
- 45.
Only Connect, 57–8.
- 46.
Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don’t (London: Tauris, 2014), Chapter 6.
- 47.
Interview with Paddy McAloon , The Telegraph, 9 September 2009.
- 48.
Owen Gibson and Patrick Barkham , ‘A New Breed of Rock Star: Quietly Christian,’ The Guardian, 29 January 2005.
- 49.
David Sackllah , ‘Between Heaven and Hell: The New Wave of Christianity in Indie Rock,’ Consequence of Sound, 29 June 2015; and Judy Berman, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Indie Rock,’ The Believer, Fall (2015).
- 50.
Zac Davis , ‘What’s Behind Hip-Hop ’s Religious Revival?’ America Magazine, 13 February 2017.
- 51.
For early examples of ‘post-secular’ popular music , see David Sylvian ’s, Brilliant Trees (1984), Gone to Earth (1986), and Secrets of the Beehive (1987) or Talk Talk’s ‘experimental’ album Spirit of Eden (1988). Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) is obviously an important precursor here, whose work recurrently addressed religious subjects, in questioning, playful and provocative ways, intermingling the sacred and the profane—as well as a multiplicity of faith perspectives—in a fluctuating ‘post-secular’ manner. Indeed, most of the forms of post-secularism that follow can be found in Cohen’s oeuvre. In a more oblique and enigmatic way, the ceaselessly nomadic work of David Bowie (1947–2016) also frequently opens up estranging ‘in-between’ zones, by means of its dark, fantastic and whimsical imaginings of other worlds and modes of being that move beyond a secular construction of reality, without arriving in a religious space. And although in contrast to Bowie and Cohen, Prince (1958–2016) was openly Christian (he was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist but later became a Jehovah’s Witness) and used to include inscriptions like ‘All love & thanks 2 God’ on his albums, some of his songs are so bawdy they would make the Wife of Bath blush and often involve a commingling of ‘the concerns of Saturday night and Sunday morning’ (Toure, I Would Die 4 U (New York: Atria Books, 2013), 126).
- 52.
The Re-Enchantment of the West, Vol. 1: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture , and Occulture (London: T&T Clark, 2004).
- 53.
‘Romanticism and Classicism,’ Speculations ([1924] London: Routledge, 1960), 118.
- 54.
Perhaps somewhat perversely, the sort of music with which I shall be least concerned in this chapter is straightforwardly affirmative religious music. This is not because I see no aesthetic or theological value in such music, but rather because I wish to extend the demesne of religious significance in suggesting that this is not the only sort of popular music that might be of value from a religious perspective.
- 55.
In pursuing this approach, I am indebted to the example of my co-author David Brown , whose groundbreaking work on theology and the arts focuses attention on the ways in which ostensibly secular artworks may be capable of eliciting religious experience .
- 56.
The phrases in quotation marks are borrowed from Roger Scruton, Understanding Music, 225.
- 57.
‘Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon,’ American Music (1998).
- 58.
For an interesting example, see the video to Radiohead ’s ‘Paranoid Android’—which opens up a religious dimension that isn’t unambiguously apparent in the lyrics —or Lady Gaga ’s ‘Born This Way,’ discussed below.
- 59.
For a discussion of the ways in which the meanings of popular music may be co-constituted by its associated visual performances, see Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, ed. Simon Frith et al. (London: Routledge, 1993).
- 60.
Charles Taylor has described this weakened diffusion of religious faith as a ‘nova effect ’—which vividly captures the explosive profusion of possible positions—whose defining characteristics are fragmentation, pluralization and fragilization (A Secular Age, Chapter 8).
- 61.
In my account of the ‘post-secular,’ I am indebted to John McClure ’s work Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens, Georgia: Georgia University Press, 2007).
- 62.
For a good introduction to Vattimo’s work in relation to religion, see Thomas Guarino , Vattimo and Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2009).
- 63.
After Heaven : Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 3–4.
- 64.
‘Hail, Full of Grace,’ The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories (New York: Scribner, 2014), 107.
- 65.
It may be of interest to note that the father of the singer and songwriter Neil Hannon was a Church of Ireland clergyman and Bishop of Clogher.
- 66.
The song appears on the 2006 album Rabbit Fur Coat by Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins.
- 67.
See, for example, Hardy’s poem ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900), which concludes with an agnostic posture of subjunctively attenuated assent: ‘So little cause for carolings / Of such ecstatic sound / Was written on terrestrial things / Afar or nigh around, / That I could think there trembled through / His happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.’
- 68.
We should note that it is equally possible to open up this sort of in-between space from the opposite direction, in moving away from rather than towards the religious, as in the ‘Christ-haunted’ work of the American indie singer-songwriter David Bazan , whose solo recordings, after a loss of faith, continue anxiously to wrangle with religious questions, in a manner that keeps the urgency of such claims in view even as the singer contests their validity. An alternative example might be the work of Metallica , whose lyrics have been characterized as a sort of ‘theological atheism’: ‘despite Metallica ’s explicit questioning and criticism of Christianity and its God, conceptions of God, along with theologically informed notions of sin, guilt, forgiveness, and especially evil, continue to haunt their lives and lyrics .’ (Paul Martens , ‘Metallica and the God That Failed: An Unfinished Tragedy in Three Acts,’ Call Me Seeker: Listening to Religion in Popular Music , ed. Michael Gilmour (New York: Continuum, 2005), 98.)
- 69.
The phrase ‘the impure sacred’ is borrowed from Christopher Partridge , The Lyre of Orpheus (45).
- 70.
The sampled work is apparently the Missa Pange Lingua (c. 1514), which is based on the hymn ‘Pange Lingua Gloriosi Corporis Mysterium’ by Thomas Aquinas (RE:VIVE, 12 May 2016).
- 71.
Interview with Bella Todd in The Guardian, 5 April 2016.
- 72.
Hecker has claimed that the album was influenced by the ‘liturgical aesthetics’ of Kanye West ’s Yeezus and the ‘transcendental’ effects of auto-tuned voices (4 AD publicity material).
- 73.
De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 58.
- 74.
The quotations are taken from ‘Religious Songs’ and ‘Love in the Time of Ecstasy,’ Good News (2009).
- 75.
See Reinhold Niebuhr , ‘Humour and Faith,’ Discerning the Signs of the Times (London: SCM Press, 1946); and W. H. Auden , ‘Balaam and His Ass,’ The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber, 1963).
- 76.
Cited in The Guardian, 22 September 2015.
- 77.
Immediately after mentioning ‘the Lord,’ the singer adds: ‘I know they don’t like the word but I shall observe and I shall do service / Here in the pulpit.’
- 78.
Partial Faiths, 13.
- 79.
The song appears on his eponymous 2009 EP and is musically based around a sample from ‘Tired of Fighting’ by Menahan Street Band.
- 80.
The Christian hip-hop artist Lecrae has defended this aspect of Lamar’s work, while acknowledging that the singer’s ‘affinity for profanity’ is problematical for certain Christians: ‘A lot of it is trust,’ he explains; ‘It’s a question of whether or not you’re heralding sacred things in your music, and what your motive is. To mainline Christians, there are certain cultural nuances that are acceptable and not acceptable. And I think for them, Kendrick doesn’t fall in line with that.’ Cited in ‘The Radical Christianity of Kendrick Lamar ’ ed. Reggie Ugwu , BuzzFeed, 3 February 2015.
- 81.
See Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell, Before and Beyond: Progressive Rock Since the 1960s (New York: Continuum, 2011), 249. All of the songs referred to above are taken from their debut album, Fleet Foxes (2008), whose cover features a section of Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559).
- 82.
Andy Gill, ‘Fleet Foxes : Homegrown Harmonies, Going Back to Nature and the Blues,’ The Independent, 31 March 2011.
- 83.
Liner notes to Fleet Foxes ; BBC 6 Music website, ‘Fleet Foxes on Religion’ (19 June 2008). For an informative discussion of the band’s ‘baroque harmonies’ and the ways in which their music opens up ‘something luminous and transcendent,’ see Jeffrey Keuss, Your Neighbor’s Hymnal: What Popular Music Teaches Us About Faith, Hope, and Love (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 79–81.
- 84.
A Secular Age, 593.
- 85.
See, for example, ‘The Place I Live’ from Clear Moon (2012), ‘Lost Wisdom Pt. 2’ or ‘Between Two Mysteries’ from Wind’s Poem (2009), which contains musical allusions to ‘Laura Palmer’s Theme.’
- 86.
The band’s primary members are Scott Cortez and Melissa Arpin-Henry; the latter provides the voices (which are typically submerged ethereal glossolalic wisps), while the former is responsible for ‘guitartones, deconstruction, processing, tampering’ (liner notes to Voirshn, 2002).
- 87.
Publicity material from Project Records for the album Voirshn.
- 88.
Ibid.
- 89.
Partial Faiths, 19.
- 90.
The song was released in 2011 and taken from the album of the same title.
- 91.
For a discussion of the ‘dizzying admixture of religions’ alluded to in Western popular music , see Mark Pegrum , ‘Pop Goes (the) Spiritual or Remixing Religion in Western Pop Music,’ MC Journal 4: 1 (2001).
- 92.
Partial Faiths, 16.
- 93.
‘Even Men with Steel Hearts’ (Some Call It Godcore, 1995); ‘Asparagus Next Left’ (Achtung Bono , 2005); ‘A Country Practice’ (Four Lads Who Shook the Wirral, 1998).
- 94.
The song is a ‘hymn,’ it ends with ‘Amen,’ and it speaks from an apparently omniscient perspective of finding ‘your soul.’
- 95.
Ibid., 16.
- 96.
Interview with Gaspard Augé, 12 March 2012 (http://www.independentphilly.com/interview-with-gaspard-auge-of-justice/).
- 97.
Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 42.
- 98.
From the album It’s Not Me, It’s You (2009).
- 99.
For another example by a contemporary Christian artist, see Nichole Nordeman’s, ‘What If,’ from her 2005 album Brave.
- 100.
In Purgatorio, XXIII, 81, Dante speaks of a ‘good sorrow’ that ‘remarries us to God’ (‘del buon dolor ch’a Dio ne rimarita’).
- 101.
The song appears on the 1999 album of the same name.
- 102.
GTBT, 120.
- 103.
It should be emphasized that I am not suggesting that ‘transgressive’ treatments of religious subjects and divergence from doctrinal teachings are more valuable than religiously orthodox works of art. I am arguing, rather, that the former may be of value as well, and that it is important when assessing the significance of such things that we don’t simply think about the needs and predilections of the theologically literate—or, worse still, assume that the ‘respectable’ cultural preferences of the bourgeoisie may serve as a measure of religious value—but also consider what might appeal, for example, to the young, the elderly, the disempowered or the traumatized.
- 104.
‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Penguin, 2006), 331.
- 105.
Only Connect, 39.
- 106.
The Empathy Exams: Essays (London: Granta, 2014), 130.
- 107.
Keats, Letter to P. B. Shelley , 16 August 1820.
- 108.
The first two appear on Truelove’s Gutter (2009), the latter on Coles Corner (2015).
- 109.
‘Coles Corner,’ from the album of the same title.
- 110.
One of the best descriptions of this is provided by David Foster Wallace in ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,’ Review of Contemporary Fiction 13: 2 (1993), 151.
- 111.
This issue is raised in another connection by Tony Tanner in The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169.
- 112.
Ibid., 167.
- 113.
Only Connect, 214–6.
- 114.
Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 153.
- 115.
Ibid., 155.
- 116.
The Aesthetics of Music, 75–6.
- 117.
Ibid., 76.
- 118.
‘Yes! I Am a Long Way from Home.’
- 119.
Sigur Rós ’s ( ) (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 119.
- 120.
Ibid., 132.
- 121.
For examples, see the discussions of Tim Hecker , Mount Eerie , lovesliescrushing and Francisco López earlier in this chapter.
- 122.
This is something that we also find in the work of Iannis Xenakis and the Theatre of Eternal Music group, who were the pioneers of 1960s drone music . For the influence of such tendencies on mainstream pop artists, see The Beatles ’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (1966), The Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’ (1967) and David Bowie ’s Low (1977). Perhaps the most extreme example is Lou Reed ’s wonderfully rebarbative Metal Machine Music (1975). There are signs, however, that drones are becoming even more mainstream. In 2012, for example, a compilation album of drone versions of top 40 songs was released, entitled Now That’s What I Call Drone, including tracks by Justin Bieber , Katy Perry and Rihanna . This was followed in 2014 by a parallel compilation album entitled Now That’s What Your Parents Call Drone, with covers of songs amongst others by Lionel Richie, 10cc, Billy Joel and Wham.
- 123.
Charles Conniry, Soaring in the Spirit (Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2007), 170.
- 124.
As Owen Coggins observes, the ‘elsewheres’ of drone music discourse are not merely imagined but are also ‘traversed,’ and are frequently envisaged as a form of ‘sacred journeying,’ ‘inflected with ideas about mysticism and ritual, and are therefore often rendered as pilgrimage’ ( Mysticism , Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 100–1).
- 125.
Tagg has released albums entitled Pentecost (2010) and Leaving This Planet (2013), as well as individual tracks called ‘God,’ ‘The Lion’s Den’ and ‘The Keys to the Kingdom’ (on No One Came Out Last Night and 21mg Pill Series, both from 2007). The album Georgia Red (2016) has a crucifix design on the cover.
- 126.
Her latest album Dead Magic (2018) features the organ of Frederik’s Church in Copenhagen, and on the album Ceremony (2013) she plays the organ in the Annedal Church in Gothenberg. Her 2015 album The Miraculous uses the Studio Acusticum pipe organ in Piteå.
- 127.
Joe Banks, review of The Miraculous in The Quietus, 12 November 2015. Her work has also drawn comparisons with Kate Bush and Cocteau Twins ’ Elizabeth Fraser.
- 128.
The cover art of The Miraculous, which looks like a still from a black and white horror film, features a faceless figure in a derelict room with fading religious pictures on the walls.
- 129.
‘Imagined Drone Ecologies: Listening to Vibracathedral Orchestra ,’ Eventual Aesthetics 6: 1 (2017).
- 130.
See, for example, Elaine Scarry , On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University, 1999); Jane Bennett , The Enchantment of Modern Life; and Rita Felski , The Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). Paul Ricoeur ’s ‘two-sided’ reading of utopian modes is also relevant in this connection.
- 131.
See, for instance, Kenneth Aigen , ‘The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music and Their Implications for Music Therapy ,’ British Journal of Music Therapy 22: 1 (2008).
- 132.
This sort of argument has been elaborated in detail by Peter Berger in The Precarious Vision (1961), A Rumor of Angels (1969), and Redeeming Laughter (1997).
- 133.
Ilkka Mattila, ‘Finnish Ambient Music—Cool Transparency,’ Finnish Music Quarterly 3 (1995), 38. According to Brian Eno , one of the pioneers of the genre, ambient music—which is supposed to be ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’—adds an ‘atmosphere,’ ‘tint’ or ‘surrounding influence’ to the environment (liner notes to Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978)).
- 134.
In an essay on the work of Brian Eno , Mark Edward Achtermann compares the ‘sustained moments of suspension in sound’ engendered by ambient music to Tolkien’s conception of ‘secondary worlds,’ with their pattern of ‘escape, recovery and consolation’ (‘Yes, but is it music? Brian Eno and the definition of ambient music,’ Brian Eno : Oblique Music, ed. Sean Albiez and David Pattie (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 85–104). Relatedly, John Connell and Chris Gibson highlight the ability of ambient music to evoke a sense of ‘other-worldly places’ (Sound Tracks: Popular Music , Identity and Place (London: Routledge, 2013), 198).
- 135.
‘Ambient Music,’ The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music , ed. Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 335, 336, and 337.
- 136.
Popular Music in Evangelical Youth Culture, 130.
- 137.
The first album of Michael Cretu ’s Enigma project (MCMXC a.D, released in 1990) extensively samples Gregorian chant, and ‘The Sun Rising’ by the English electronic group The Beloved (from the 1990 album Happiness) samples a recording of ‘O Euchari in leta via.’
- 138.
Popular Music in Evangelical Youth Culture, 155.
- 139.
Ibid., 105. There are obviously all sorts of ways in which music can rupture the linearity of time or conjure up the sense of a perduring present and hence afford an experience of temporal transcendence . Even within much shorter works there are structures that seem to be especially conducive to epiphanic experience, such as the climactic instrumental loop that frequently follows the final chorus and with which the song often fades into infinity (memorable examples are to be found in ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ by Simon and Garfunkel , ‘Passing Afternoon’ by Iron and Wine, ‘Weightlifting’ by The Trash Can Sinatras, ‘Brighter’ by The Railway Children, ‘They Always Go’ by Dinosaur Jr. and ‘Where Are We Now?’ by David Bowie ). These radiant stagings of a stillness that coincides with perpetual motion evocatively figure what T. S. Eliot refers to as an ‘intersection of the timeless / With time’ (‘The Dry Salvages,’ Four Quartets).
- 140.
The phrase is Adorno’s, from ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,’ Essays on Music, 292.
- 141.
The Reign of Wonder : Naivety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 67, 84.
- 142.
‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’; ‘Is It Really So Strange?’; ‘Girl Least Likely To.’
- 143.
‘Brummelliana,’ The Complete Works of William Hazlitt , ed. P. P. Howe, vol. xx ([1819] London: Dent, 1930–1934), 152.
- 144.
The Mystic Fable, 144. David Brown similarly observes that the words in popular music ‘may sometimes be functioning as more like an additional instrument than with intrinsic significance in their own right. A good example here is the early work of R.E.M. The singer Michael Stipe’s lyrics have been described as “the audio equivalent of doctor’s handwriting on a prescription”’ (God and Grace of Body, 300).
- 145.
The lyrics of David Bowie ’s songs—some of which seem to have been written as ‘Mondegreens ’—frequently exhibit a conspicuous carelessness towards realist models of meaning. As we know from his own testimony, some of these are the result of a ‘cut-up’ technique, while others bear the hallmarks of what we might decorously call the sprezzatura of intoxication. Here are a few memorable examples: ‘Pour me out another phone’; ‘In our wings that bark’; ‘you’ve got everything but cold fire’; ‘I’ve got eyes in my backside that see electric tomatoes’ (‘Drive in Saturday,’ ‘The Bewlay Brothers,’ The Prettiest Star,’ ‘Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed’).
- 146.
‘“Ga, ga, ooh-la-la”: The Childlike Use of Language in Pop-Rock Music ,’ Popular Music 33: 1 (2014), 95.
- 147.
Ibid., 96.
- 148.
‘The Aesthetic Trinity: Awe, Being Moved, Thrills,’ Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 5 (2005).
- 149.
Lector in Fabula (Milan: Bompiani, 1979), 53. (Translation from Barbara Maria Zaczek, Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 125.)
- 150.
Performing Rites, 243.
- 151.
The series is based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta. Season 1 was premiered on HBO in June 2014 and season 2 in October 2015.
- 152.
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 419.
- 153.
For empirical data relating to popular music ’s ability to elicit experiences of transcendence , ecstasy and wonder , see note 30 in the preceding chapter.
- 154.
On Art and Architecture (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 12.
- 155.
God’s Wider Presence, Chapter 1.
- 156.
‘Christianity and Culture,’ Christian Reflections ([1940] Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 22. Personally, I would endorse a more positive religious reading of such experiences (and also of Wordsworth’s envisioning of them) as something that may also for the believer serve to nourish or invigorate faith.
- 157.
Surprised by Joy, 238. Lewis defends the ‘spilt religion’ of Romanticism in a similar way: ‘Romanticism [has been described] as “spilled religion.” I accept the description. And I agree that he who has religion ought not to spill it. But does it follow that he who finds it spilled should avert his eyes? How if there is a man to whom those bright drops on the floor are the beginning of a trail which, duly followed, will lead him in the end to taste the cup itself? How if no other trail, humanly speaking, were possible?’ (Preface to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress.)
- 158.
Unbelievable, Chapter 6.
- 159.
Ibid., 145 and 155.
- 160.
Ibid., 147.
- 161.
Newman claimed that the ‘heathen’ speculations of Coleridge and the ‘fantastic fiction’ of Southey laid the foundations for his religious views, by installing ‘a higher philosophy into inquiring minds’ and awakening an interest in ‘the cause of Catholic truth’ (Apologia Pro Vita, ed. Frank Turner ([1864] New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 212), while Coleridge claimed that his mind had been ‘habituated to the vast’ as a result of reading Arabian Nights (Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–1971), 210). Something similar is affirmed by Messiaen: ‘I really believe it is because of fairy-tales that I have become a believer. The Marvelous is my natural climate […]. I have the need to live a Marvelous, but a Marvelous that would be real! In general the Marvelous is inscribed in myths, in tales of fantasy and imagination, whereas in the Catholic faith the Marvelous that is given is real. It is a Marvelous that one can lean on. In this way I have gradually, and almost without realizing it, entered the state of being a believer. One could say that I unwittingly passed over from the surreal of fairy-tales to the supernatural of faith’ (cited in Brigitte Massin, Olivier Messiaen : Une poétique du merveilleux (Aix-en-Provence: Alinéa, 1989), 27–8).
- 162.
‘The Gleam of an Heroic Act,’ The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson , ed. T. H. Johnson ([1867] Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960).
- 163.
George MacDonald : An Anthology, 17.
- 164.
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Book XIV.
- 165.
Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’.
- 166.
A Defence of Poetry, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 533.
- 167.
In Becoming Present, Ingolf Dalferth provides some wonderfully illuminating reflections on the nature of divine presence , which in a number of respects converge with the conception of transcendence I am attempting to outline here. Of particular relevance is his claim that the moment of revelation ‘displaces or dislocates persons from their given ways of life and relates them in a new way to reality, to themselves, to others and to God by disclosing their whole life to be a life lived in the presence of God’ (Becoming Present: An Inquiry into the Christian Sense of the Presence of God (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 30–1).
- 168.
‘“Goodly Sights” and “Unseemly Representations,”’ 210–12.
- 169.
The Confessions, trans. O. S. B. Maria Boulding (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), 296.
- 170.
‘Ways of Wondering: Beyond the Barbarism of Reflection,’ 319.
- 171.
‘Chaos in Poetry,’ D. H. Lawrence , Selected Critical Writings, ed. Michael Herbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 234–5.
- 172.
The Works of Francis Bacon , ed. James Spedding et al., vol. III (London: Longman, 1857), 267.
- 173.
The Sermons of John Donne , ed. E. Simpson and G. Potter, vol. IV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 265.
- 174.
Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, l. 97.
- 175.
See On Art and Architecture , 12.
- 176.
The Enchantment of Modern Life, 160.
- 177.
Ibid., 4.
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Brown, D., Hopps, G. (2018). Spilt Religion. In: The Extravagance of Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91818-1_6
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