Dalia's Blog

Music has a lot of meaning to a lot of people for very different reasons. These days it's ubiquitous. A common question when getting to know someone is to ask what music they like, and we often consider that to be important information for telling us about their personality, and even for working out whether we will get along or not.

It's easy to forget that this was very much not the case until very recently. The role of music in life and culture has changed drastically in the last hundred years or so. This is a short length of time for a great deal of change.

In this essay I'd like to explore the nature of those changes. This will involve comparisons between the role of music in the past vs the present, where the present refers to interaction with music as it takes place in western countries, as the changes have been the most pervasive here. But I will also be discussing my own experiences at length, as my relationship with music has been very different from a lot of my peers, and in some ways has almost resembled a premodern musical education.

When a lot of people hear hit music that was on the radio when they were young, they exhibit very strong emotional responses. I don't experience this in most cases, as that is not the musical experience I had growing up. On the other hand, if I hear Amazing Grace or Kyrie Eleison, I will experience a bodily sense-memory, so intense that it almost places me back in the churches I was in when I sang those melodies. This essay is an attempt to explore the differences in this cultural experience.

Folk Music

To put this discussion into context, I need to start with a brief description of the nature of folk music prior to the twentieth century. (When I refer to the twentieth century as a watershed for cultural change, this needs to be understood as a western phenomenon, as many other regions of the world did not experience these changes until much later and to different extents.) This discussion is not rigorous or academic in nature. I will not be citing sources. The majority of my thoughts here are based on observation of different musical traditions, on hearing from people who have participated in them, and by my own extensive reading about cultural history in Europe and elsewhere. There are plenty of academic sources which will describe these phenomena in more depth. In the interests of actually publishing a short essay in a reasonable amount of time, I will not be referring to them, but I believe that my description will hold up in broad outlines. If you disagree, feel free to contact me via the email listed on my home page.

Folk music is not distributed by publishers. Until the twentieth century it was not recorded, and in many cases, the lyrics and musical notation were never even written down. The discussion of folk music overlaps in many ways with the discussion of oral culture. Music and stories were passed down from practitioner to practitioner, undergoing modifications shaped by performer and audience over time. Contrary to what some may believe, this process is relatively stable. People who grow up in oral cultures have been shown to have very faithful memories and loyal adherence to traditions, as these are understood to transmit valuable knowledge from their ancestors. Accordingly, while changes may occur, this does not mean that music mutates unrecognisably within one or two generations. Modifications take place much more slowly and organically than this.

The next thing to understand about folk music is that it varies from region to region. The music is itself frequently related to the people, places, and events of the region it is performed in. Slight variations in place names, characters and events, will be found from one village or valley to the next.

The music tends not to be performed by professionals, but rather by troubadours, minstrels, travelling artists, or merely the resident musicians. Depending on the nature of the music, it can even be performed by a whole community, in the form of verse and response style narration, where the whole audience participates in the music. This is likely (according to my speculation) to have been the origin of the chorus in Greek plays, whence we get the word chorus in our modern musical vocabulary.

So the music developed organically, it had roots in the community it originated in, and it was not performed by professionals. These differences will be notable when we come to consider modern published music, which tends to have a canonical recording, and to be composed by a solitary artist, working in relative isolation from their audience (of course this varies from artist to artist, but as a broad trend the difference is striking).

Ceremonial Religious Music

Folk music can tend towards an anarchic nature, telling the stories that matter to a local community. The line between folk music and ceremonial religious music is not distinct, as one can arise out of the other, and both can mutually influence each other.

In this essay I will be considering the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, as the most exaggerated form of ceremonial religious music as separated from folk music. Eastern Catholic and Orthodox churches share some of the same traits, but to a lesser extent, accordingly as they allow their liturgies to be adapted to the cultures they exist in.

The Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, maintains a rigid separation. At least until the Second Vatican Council, the strictest kind of control was exercised over every aspect of the content and performance of the liturgy (music, rites and prayers of the Mass). Councils could be invoked over discussions of seeming trivialities such as modifications to individual words of certain prayers. The notation of the music was often written down, and was expected, increasingly over time, to be performed in accordance with approved versions. The priest had to perform various physical motions during the rites with the minutest accuracy.

We see here a version of religious music which is far more controlled. I want to draw attention to two aspects here. One is the clear difference between these rites and folk music.

But the other is a similarity it shares with folk music, in contrast with modern live performances for a mass audience. And that is community participation. Of course, there is room for variety in this discussion. Many modern performances include singing from the audience in a spontaneous fashion. And the more elaborate liturgical performances are sustained by a trained choir, leaving little room for congregational participation. But in its more typical form, somewhere in between the quietly mumbled Low Mass and the professionally performed High Mass, it was common and expected for the congregation to sing or say the responses as the priest performed the liturgy. This was even the default assumption in Europe for some time, until the divergence between Latin and the local vernaculars had grown too great for that assumption to hold. And it continued to be common practice in the Eastern Churches, where the liturgy would periodically change sufficiently to allow for continued understanding on the part of the congregation, even if this often took place through happenstance, such as in the case of Old Slavonic, followed by the development of the Ukrainian Catholic Liturgy.

Modern Christian Music

The Protestant Reformation precipitated new developments in religious music. Having thrown off the shackles of Roman Catholic authorities, Protestant leaders found themselves at liberty to create entirely new liturgies and music. At the outset they exercised relatively little of this creativity. Anglican and Lutheran music and rites can be found to have surprising similarity to the Mass they were translated from. But by the time the Wesley brothers and other Protestant composers began their work, they increasingly took inspiration directly from the Bible in the vernacular, and freely composed their own melodies.

This music itself blended with local folk music, at times borrowing or inspiring melodies and themes. It also lent itself much more easily to congregational participation. The music was in the vernacular, it often employed folk melodies, and it was much less common for it to be performed by a choir, especially in iconoclastic Calvinist or Puritan churches.

Nowadays a lot of Protestant church music has evolved a step further. Their churches are now filled with overproduced, emotional music, less designed to educate the congregation about biblical themes, and more calculated to heighten emotion during the pastor's address, and especially during the call to give money, the most important part of every megachurch's ceremony.

We see an uncanny resemblance and cross-polination now between megachurch music, the music of TV advertisig, and the scores of reality TV and movies. It's music designed to manipulate. To control exactly what the audience (no longer congregation) is feeling. This has been dissected before on shows such as Gordon Ramsey, and other reality TV shows, where the audience is told how to view each character and plot development, before they even have a chance to critically analyse the situation.

For some scathing criticism of western cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky is an interesting figure. He has made observations about how American movies treat their public as fools and transparently attempt to entertain at the expense of considering meaning.

When I consider the role of propaganda in modern western cinema and music, and the overwhelming use of "entertainment" (a word that literally means to hold in place), as a means of bamboozling the public, I can't help being reminded of a chilling excerpt we read at my university. It was from Mein Kampf. In it, Hitler described how the use of big shows (in the style of the Nuremberg Rallies) full of overwraught emotion could be used to persuade the public. They were to be made to feel safe and like part of an in-group as long as they participated in the show. Anyone who clearly did not align with that group, must be made to feel shunned and cut off. This had the double effect of dehumanising enemies, and striking the fear of excommunication into the hearts of followers, ensuring perfect loyalty.

Music calculated to overwhelm with emotion has long been studied as an effective tool of manipulation. We would do well to think critically when we hear it.

Solo Music Appreciation

We now come to an area of musical appreciation that clearly straddles a couple of these categories. Modern pop music, of the type that can be listened to in the comfort of one's own headphones, attached to a smartphone or a walkman or an mp3 player, according to the technology of the day, has its origins in a very complex fusion of religious music, whether Protestant hymns or the gospel music of the African people brought to America as slaves, and then thoughtlessly appropriated like so much other music from those people, along with other folk music, notably in many of the performances of the earliest hippie artists in the 60s.

The music people appreciate in a solo context can also be blasted through the tired speakers in a shopping centre or a waiting room, with no care as to whether it's actively listened to or not. It can be music that is designed for mass performances, where it often resembles the hypnotic ceremonies of megachurches, or it can be designed for an intimate studio recording, conveying the personal creative expression of one person to a small audience.

This also has the unintended side effect, as this sort of musical production predominates, of reducing the willingness, and even ability, of the people, to produce their own stories. They become dependent on the creative expertise of a trained artist, whereas previously people could tell their own stories in oral cultures without waiting for permission.

In any case, the mode of appreciation clearly differs drastically from that of older ceremonial religious music and of folk music. In particular, the music is no longer performed for and by a community. Sure, live performance is a thing, and that can include varying degrees of audience participation. But the community no longer has reliable contact with the performer, and the performer is no longer tied to the community they perform in. Their music doesn't have to draw its stories and melodies from the region and people they inhabit.

This isn't to say that any of that is a bad thing. The variety of cultural expression that has abounded with the easy availability of solo recording equipment is immense, and no doubt amplifies voices that we all benefit from hearing. But it is a noteworthy departure from the mode of musical performance that prevailed until recently.

My Experience of Communal Music

At this point I want to describe my own experience. Naturally, I have listened to a lot of pop music. I have listened to a lot of pre-recorded music. I still do. I didn't grow up in complete isolation from modern western culture. But here's where it differed.

From the youngest age I was brought to church. I listened to the same handful of hymns, repeated by different christian congregations, from near birth to the age of sixteen. I heard those songs so often that I could probably still hum their melodies if I heard the beginnings of them. I can often recognise specific hymns just by reading one line of a verse. We sang them so often, they became like a physical part of ourselves, and could be invoked by one or another member of a group of christians by merely humming the first few notes.

Then at the age of sixteen, I became a Catholic. And there the experience was no less communal but in a very different way. The entire Mass was led by a priest. We learned to listen for his incantations and reliably produce the correct response every time. The liturgy was fixed. We would sing affirmations of our belief, gratitude for the mystery of the liturgy (the physical transformation of bread into flesh that was thought to take place in front of us every day), and prayers to saints. The particular words and melodies were also fixed, with limited room for variation. And they were accompanied by set physical movements, standing, sitting, kneeling.

My understanding of this music was heightened when I joined a small choir which performed in the local Latin Mass. Whereas much of the church by the time I was born performed the Mass in English or another vernacular language, a handful of small churches still performed it in Latin. I understood enough Latin to appreciate the ceremony better than most, but for many people it was by this time a set of completely opaque incantations.

The melodies we sung were drawn directly from medieval manuscripts (though debate exists as to how strictly medieval singers were expected to adhere to the notation). I encourage you to do a web search for "medieval notation". You will see the style of music we were reading from. Each square marked on those lines by a quill pen represented a different note at a different relative pitch.

My experience of medieval communal music was taken to a deeper level still by a pilgrimage I took part in in 2010. I attended the Christus Rex pilgrimage from Ballarat to Bendigo. This pilgrimage still takes place every year, though it seems to be far more openly dominated by an unsavoury variety of right-wing nationalist than it was when I attended.

We walked through rural Victoria for three entire days, camping in tents by night. We carried banners, attended liturgies, discussed our faith, made friends. The emotions of that weekend were really profound, especially as we reached the last, and really quite spectacular church, after 100kms of walking on foot. Most importantly for the purposes of this essay, we sang. We sang a lot of litanies, designed to be memorable, easily repeatable, and invoked by a leader, to be echoed by the entire chorus of pilgrims.

This is the style of pilgrimage described by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales (though I daresay we told less baudy tales). It's a style of pilgrimage that took place all over Europe. It still takes place today in many Catholic and Muslim countries around the world. It physically shaped my relationship to music, religion, culture and community. I can still echo the line Orate pro nobis (Pray for us) from the Litany of Saints, with the correct melody, though I haven't heard it in over ten years.

So What?

This isn't some sort of lament. I'm not trying to argue that we need to return to pilgrimages and liturgical responses. Nor that we need to seize the means of publication (though I wouldn't oppose it).

The experience I had was uncommon in modern western countries. I'm not saying everyone should experience it. But I am saying that more people should be aware of it. It represents a form of cultural transmission that used to be far more common. There are still many local communities around the world that pass on their folk songs, even in valleys of Northern England, where the South of England still hasn't completed its ongoing work of cultural genocide against their own people. But these communities are dwindling. We risk losing them if we don't pass on their memories.

There is an old Catholic saying, Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. It means The Law of Praying, is the Law of Believing. What I've always understood this saying to mean, is that our practice, our behaviour, shapes the way we think and believe. I don't think that matters of entertainment are as meaningless as we often claim. I think they have profound influence on how we come to see the world. And I think it's worth examining these effects. "Entertainment" is the diet of the mind. If we feed it junk, we may find ourselves becoming mentally sick, and believing ideas and holding values we didn't realise we had. That's how an entire nation becomes casual fascists without noticing the changes in their beliefs. How they become vulnerable to vast machines of propaganda. Or how they quietly form folk communities where we get to express what really matters to us without anyone inserting themselves to flatten our stories and make money.

As for what you can do about this? Learn some folk songs. Even if you're not part of a regional community that can pass them on to you directly, there are plenty online. Find a collection you like, and learn some. And while it's wonderful to learn songs from many different world traditions, I do also encourage you to learn some from whatever region of the world you or your ancestors are from. Not as some sort of nationalistic pride. Quite the opposite in fact. Nations are giant constructed entities that serve states. Local communities with their cultures tend to be a thorn in the side of these states, which is why they try so hard to eliminate them. There's something special about learning the music of your own ancestors that causes the abstract notion of a nation to fade into meaninglessness.

If you want to learn an instrument to accompany the music, this is easier to do than many people believe. Find an instrument you like, a folk harp, a guitar, a recorder, the panpipes, learn how to play the notes on it, then use it to accompany you. The sensory engagement of playing an instrument is powerful, much more so than just listening to a performance over headphones. Make music for yourself, and then make it for your community. See for yourselves if I'm right about the effects.

When I compare my experience of communal music with the more widespread practice of listening to niche recorded music through personal devices, the differences are profound and striking. My hope is that by describing the differences, others will be able to see them for themselves and evaluate their own relationships to music. I encourage you to look at your listening practices (and engagement with entertainment at large) through fresh eyes, and decide for yourselves whether or not you would like any of them to change.