Music and the emotions
Bob Kauflin spoke at my church on Sunday night on ‘Why do we Sing?’, which was excellent. (I was on power point, and I was told to be prepared to be "flexible" at the end of the sermon, to the point of not knowing which songs we'd actually sing. The pressure. Then I discovered that they’d replaced the mouse with some newfangled one that had no scroll button, so I was finding it hard look through the slides without changing them up on the screen. Thankfully Paul Dale had told me he’d come back and deal with it. I love the way he comes to the rescue of us powerpoint button pushers when things get disordered (which they rarely do) - you know you've got back up from the top. And then it actually didn’t get so complicated.) Anyway, this sermon also flowed on from an excellent lecture Rob Smith gave at the Moore College School of Theology on music and emotions (at the moment I can’t seem to find an online link to either of these things, sorry). And then yesterday I was reading on through Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman, and I came across an intriguing few pages on learning music and it's connection to the emotions (and the power that it has to make you feel emotions, without necessarily being able to tell you why, in the words of Bob Kauflin: this is why Christian music must have good words; we need to know why we can be peaceful, not just feel peaceful ...). Here are some snippets:
Marek and I embark on our musical education in tandem, and as the first step toward God knows what unknown heights, we are taken for a “hearing test” – something apparently advised by experts as a way of testing a child’s potential “musicality”. For an hour, we are led through such paces as singing fragments of melodies, repeating the pitch of notes played for us on the piano, clapping out rhythmic patterns, and trying to identify similarities between different intervals. Marek gets over all of these hurdles with flying colors; I have the humiliation of failing most of them. I do not have a good ear.
Later, though, one of my music teachers will tell me about the importance of “inner ear” – the ability to hear feelingly. In this, I turn out to be better. Music seems as lucid to me as books … It speaks to me about everything in pearly, translucent sounds.
… She is the first in a sequence of music teachers to whom I owe the closest thing I get to a moral education. In this intimate, one-to-one apprenticeship – an apprenticeship mediated through the objective correlative of music – they teach me something about the motions and the conduct of my inner life. When Pani Witeszczak attempts to convey to me what tone to use in a Bach invention, or the precise inflection of a theme of a mazurka, she is trying, indirectly, to teach me the language of emotions. “Music is a kind of eloquence,” she tells me.
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Music – philosophers have known its dangers – insprires me with such grandeur that I think I know what inspiration is about. As I progress to pieces by Mozart or Chopin or Beethoven, I begin to feel in possession of enormous, oceanic passions – anger and love and joy and grief that surpass merely being angry, or happy, or sad. “I know how anyone in the world feels,” I confide in Marek once … If I can express the passions contained within a Beethoven sonata or the Chopin Berceuse, then I know everything about being human. Music is a wholly adequate language of the self – my self, everyone’s self. And I am meant to speak this language; life wouldn’t be complete without it. Music begins to take the shape of Fate, or Destiny – a tremendously powerful magnet toward which my life will be inevitably moving.