Experiencing music
Marian Liebmann reviews a book on music and spirituality
It may seem curious to be reviewing a book on music and spirituality for a Quaker publication, when Quakers have a history of rejecting music (and the other arts) as an avenue to spiritual experience. Ormerod Greenwood’s Swarthmore Lecture of 1978, Signs of Life: Art and Religious Experience, brought the arts in from the cold, and there is now a much more positive attitude towards the arts. Many Quakers are involved in music of one kind or another – but mostly outside their Quaker worship. Exceptions are the choral works by Tony Biggin and Alec Davison, such as ‘Cry of the Earth’ – a choral drama presented at London’s on Royal Festival Hall on Easter Monday 1990. But Quaker worship in Britain rarely includes music or singing.
June Boyce-Tillman is professor in the Department of Performing Arts at the University of Winchester, and an ordained Anglican deacon. Her field is music education in the widest sense of the word, covering world music, therapeutic aspects of music and spirituality in their many forms.
Her book Experiencing Music – Restoring the Spiritual: Music as Well-being took twenty years to write and encompasses a vast range of scholarship. It is mostly an academic book that grapples with all the different ideas of what makes music ‘spiritual’. But it also includes many descriptions of her own choral works, and these bring the more theoretical aspects alive. The book starts with an examination of the concept of spirituality and whether it is possible, in our increasingly secular world, to have a ‘religion-less spirituality’, which may ring bells for some Friends. The book goes on to look at different domains of music – materials, expression, construction and values – and concludes that spirituality in music is the sum of all those and more.
The chapter on values is particularly interesting, as the author demonstrates the way in which classical musical values have derived from hierarchical church structures and capitalism, and ignored ‘subjugated values’ of minority (women, black people, poor people) and oral traditions. She proposes new musical structures that are open to all traditions. In this her revolutionary philosophy is akin to much Quaker thinking and practice.
June Boyce-Tillman draws on examples such as the Greek myths of Psyche, Orpheus and Hermes; scenes from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; many Jewish stories of rabbis; and conversations with African musicians. Using these, she then provides her own definition of spirituality as ‘the ability to transport the musicker to a different time/space dimension – to move them from everyday reality to “another world”’ – from which they return transformed.
The last two chapters provide many examples of the choral works composed/facilitated by the author, seeing her role as ‘frame-builder’ rather than autocratic director. Chapter nine concentrates on the use of intercultural musical experiences as spaces for peace and justice-making, modelling a cooperative ethos while valuing difference. She includes examples of working with many cultures – while being aware of the dangers of ‘colonial annexation’, quoting a participant asking: ‘Are you going to take our music like you took our land?’ – thus highlighting the need for respect and acknowledgement, including the payment of artists. A vignette also describes how a session on guided imagery and music helped a fraught political conference in the Caucasus develop a more constructive dialogue.
In the last chapter, the author describes in more detail her annual event ‘Space for Peace’ in Winchester Cathedral – which includes school choirs, classical choirs, wellbeing choirs, church choirs, community choirs – all in different parts of the cathedral – with soloists drawn from Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions – and instrumentalists from classical orchestras, African drum groups and children’s groups, including those with learning disabilities.
This is not a book for a casual read, but is a treasure trove of musical, social and spiritual insight, and the way music can open doors to spirituality. Maybe Quakers may have a place for it after all.
Experiencing Music – Restoring the Spiritual: Music as Well-being by June Boyce-Tillman is published by Peter Lang.
