My favourite band of the moment is from Lebanon, or perhaps it's just my fave tune of the day. The band? Mashrou' Leila. The song? Imm El Jacket. Lyricism and heart; moving and intriguing. Why don't I know this song/band/music?
Much of my going-to-sleep/waking-up time is spent in tune with Monocle Radio 24. I've grown accustomed to their very eclectic music selection. Coming from a listenership of mainline pop, groovy salsa and Pat Methany's fusion jazz, all tinged with SBS Pop Asia, I found Monocle's music jarred. Yes, they sometimes played (and play) listenable tunes including ones I'd already garnered from J-pop and K-pop, especially 2NE1's 'I am the best' (which I first discovered mashed up on SYTYCD with Mark and Jenna), or the 'oldie' W & Whale's R.P.G Shine (criticised for being an over-simulated US pop song) - but sometimes I just had to turn off or turn over.
But this is only the beginning of a mediated music journey into songs which lift the spirit and carry with them the seduction of theoretical exploration into global media and spirituality and religion. Here we revisit the theoretical marvel developed by the anthropologist, Clifford Geertz.
What makes something religious? Geertz (1993) in his Religion as a cultural system lays out a five step pathway to guide us in our religious explorations. He says religion can be defined as: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men [sic] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic (1993:90).
Importantly, Geertz unravels his 5-point coda and in so doing reveals its deeper significance, on this occasion, the depth of meaning about the relationship between sacred (even secular sacred) symbols and the establishment of powerful, long-lasting and pervasive (persuasive?) moods and motivations. He lays it clearly:
'Whether one sees the conception of a personal guardian spirit, a family tutelary, or an immanent God as synoptic formulations of the character of reality or as templates for producing reality with such a character seems largely arbitrary, a matter of which aspect, the model of or model for, one wants for the moment to bring into focus. The concrete symbols involved—one or another mythological figure materializing in the wilderness, the skull of the deceased household head hanging censoriously in the rafters, or a disembodied "voice in the stillness" soundlessly chanting enigmatic classical poetry—point in either direction. They both express the world's climate and shape it.' (95)
In this way, the symbolic resonances situated within the global wealth of religious and spiritual practices (including mythical apparitions and ancestors past) merge into a two-way habitus in which dispositions are framed and reframed in continuous confluence. In the process, religious worshipping and ritual performance evoke more than reverence and solemnity - although they do that too. Marvellously he writes:
'The moods that sacred symbols induce, at different times and in different places, range from exultation to melancholy, from self-confidence to self-pity, from an incorrigible playfulness to a bland listlessness—to say nothing of the erogenous power of so many of the world's myths and rituals.' (97)
Sacred worship and ritual actions affirm the dispositions of practice for community and the individual. They reinforce understandings and modes of behaviour and uphold the way of story and ethos.
What's especially telling about Geertz's outlook is that raises other questions about the nature of religion and the way it shifts and slides in the contemporary world. What's significant in the postmodern and postsecular restaging of religious traditions (and not only in the west) is that religious practice takes on the mantle of secular and popular movements and objects which hitherto were not deemed to be religious or spiritual, but were instead (and in some places still are) blasphemous or sacrilegious.
This blurring of the sacred and the profane, and the accompanying sacralisation of the profane (religions embracing pop and rock genres), and profanisation of the sacred (sacred objects as high street fashion items) are bound together in an ongoing flow of redefinitioning (religion) and repositioning the place of religion as a vital (and everyday) component of social life.
But can secular projects actually be or become religious? Religions were slow to embrace pop music, at least initially and still in some places, but the rush to embrace different genres from hip hop to black metal, or hard rock to grunge has been global. The early NY and LA African American poetic and political street rap has been transmuted and re-imagined linguistically and culturally. Music speaks. It informs, delights, inspires, transforms. To hark back to Geertz, it can also create moods of exultation and melancholy, along with an incorrigible playfulness, a bland listlessness and the ecstasy of erogenous power - and can do this all at once.
Inspiration from Geertz and Durkheim colours my worldview and religious dispositioning. And music still calls as function and emotional repertoire as a backdrop - or foreground - to our actions, moods and motivations. As a religious experience, music seals and re-opens - it sparks and enlivens to heady heights or, in sacred sound and in silence, it can re-open our wounds and sufferings.
Music can also heal. Admidst sounds of drumming, bells, cymbals, gongs, accompanied by sacred dance, repetitive chant and soaring rhythm, music binds the listener within the cosmic tree - entranced, enchanted, enraptured.
Apparently there has been a hiatus in the way that religious studies viewed or reviewed religious music. At least that is the view of Guy Beck in his book Sacred sound: experiencing music in world religions. He maintains that 'the purely silent approach to religious studies easily forgets to treat 'Holy Scripture as 'living' ['breathing'] text, whether in chant or song (2006:7). Within the enlivened sounds of the divine, Beck underlines his view that 'sacred sounds' stir the religious adherent to reach and 'understand religion at its deepest level' (8). And I would add, to experience it as an embodied expression of faith.
'... it is really the power of the oral form of the scriptural text that truly invokes the emotional, intuitive, and memory-laden processes in the majority of religious practitioners'. (8)
But these emotions emerging from sacred music, as well as the music itself, have been repositioned in pop culture, as if the notion of the sacred itself is being stretched. To illustrate this idea further, the phenomenologist of religious Geradus van der Leeuw simply said that 'music is a world in itself' which reaches across space and time (cited in Sylvan 2002:33). Listening to music we are transported to other realms, memories, places, dreams, and imagined pasts, presents and futures, and all the while, while being in the now.
With music we journey to and with the 'wholly other' of Rudolf Otto (1923). Or to and with the numinous. But how does this journey in a contemporary pop cultural setting take us into that holy or divine space of musical expression that Beck elicits?
Van der Leeuw (1963) explains that the outflow of sublime and sacred music moves the adherent though 'its overpowering character. We cannot express it; we find ourselves in the presence of the wholly other'. People can be 'swept away' while travelling on an oceanic feeling. He says: 'We are on a ship. The waves are smashing violently against the sides of the ship. We feel different' (1963:231).
But could it leave us shipwrecked, transformed by its violent smashing? Or does it transport us to a place of safety when the waves die down? Here I am thinking (in metaphorical terms) of the graphic scene in Life of Pi as Pi and Tiger (Richard Parker) lie exhausted and half-dead after the huge storm.
'Pi Patel: We're dying, Richard Parker. I'm sorry.
[Pi sits on the bench and places the tiger's head on his lap, Pi weeps and turns his head up to the sky]
Pi Patel: Amma, Appa, Ravi, I'm happy I'm going to see you soon.
[Pi looks down at the tiger]
Pi Patel: Can you feel the rain?
[Richard Parker opens his eyes slightly, but remains listless]
Pi Patel: God, thank you for giving me my life. I'm ready now.' (Screenplay writer, David Magee; novel author Yann Matel, MovieQuotesandMore.com, 2014)
Through the movement of waves and the surgings of storms, the spiritual uplift and the falling back into the abyss of deep despair are 'moods and motivations' - emotions so intimately bound up with the practice of faith.
Sorry, I digress - a diversion from sacred music into sacred story....
As Geertz so evocatively wrote, religion, however it manifests, is created of 'a system of symbols [sacred forms of music] which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men [sic] [through connections with the musical sacred] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence [music and ritual enhance and affirm scripture and holy text] and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality [Eliade's hierophany in which the sacred reveals itself in music (1959)] that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic' - and faith embeds itself into our hearts and lives.
Oh well, enough of reflecting on waves, storms, and hierophanies, let's get back to pop and Monocle's Global Music with SHINee's Dream Girl, and We were Evergreen's Daughters.
References
- Beck G.L. Ed., 2006. Sacred sound: experiencing music in world religions. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
- Eliade M. 1959. The sacred and the profane: the nature of religion. Trans. W.R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
- Geertz C. 1993. Religion as a cultural system. In The interpretation of cultures: selected essays, 87-125. Fontana Press.
- MovieQuotesandMore.com. 2014. Life of Pi quotes. Sublimely symbolic, http://www.moviequotesandmore.com/life-of-pi-movie-quotes.html#1
- Otto R. 1923. The idea of the holy: an inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational. Trans. J.W. Harvey. London: Oxford University Press.
- van Der Leeuw G. 1963. Sacred and profane beauty: the holy in art. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
- Sylvan R. 2002. Traces of the spirit. The religious dimensions of popular music. New York: NYU Press.
Image source
Pixabay. 2014. Concert Performance Audience Lightshow Music Party, http://pixabay.com/en/concert-performance-audience-336695/
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