“More than one hundred years before Beethoven, stone deaf, had heard the imaginary music of stringed instruments expressing his inmost thoughts and feelings. He had made signs with ink on ruled paper. A century later four Hungarians had reproduced from the printed reproduction of Beethoven’s scribble that music which Beethoven had never heard except in his imagination. Spiral grooves on a surface of shellac remembered their playing. The artificial memory revolved, a needle travelled in its grooves, and through a faint scraping and roaring that mimicked the noises of Beethoven’s own deafness, the audible symbols of Beethoven’s convictions and emotions quivered out into the air” (Huxley, 428)
I wrote a paper, it’ll be three years ago, about an ‘object’ that evokes a religious experience. Having never had a religious experience it was a difficult assignment. The class was advanced philosophy of religion and it was populated predominately by atheists and agnostics. There were a few religious people in the class, but interestingly enough none of the objects the religious chose to present on where actually affiliated with what someone might call established religion.
Many of us, well, nearly all of us, chose music. It was a trend the professor had noticed. Each year a greater percentage of his class would choose music as an object of religious experience. I would like to reflect on the why of those choices and possible motivating reasons.
I chose Rufus Wainwright’s version of the Agnus Dei. We were using Rudolf Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy as a model of dissecting what qualified as a religious object. The Wainwright song fit, at least to my mind, because of the emotions in invoked, its otherness, its darkness, the transition from minor and strange abruptly to a full and resounding major chorus. I was raised Catholic and so there is a very subjective reason why the song speaks to me. I used to sing the Agnus Dei, play it on trumpet and French horn. I used to be a musician in ensembles so I had a theoretical understanding of music. This personal experience led to the song being more meaningful for me than for others. Then again, this seems to be a hallmark of religious experience. It is deeply personal. It’s like jazz, “if you have to ask, you ain’t never gonna know”. There was something profound in its invocation, something that surely pointed to something other, something outside itself.
Music is problematic from a philosophical standpoint. On the one hand it is abstraction. The notes on the page stand for something, they’re at a remove from the immediate experience of hearing music. Moreover, there is not a principled reason (at least to my knowledge) why minor chords should sound sad or lonely. Why should certain frequencies (the one over period of oscillation) should have that quality when heard? At least, not unless there was something more to music than its playing and perception.
I’ve just finished Aldous Huxley’s Point Counterpoint. In the novel there is a passage where one character, Spandrell, is desperately trying to believe in or find God and his last argument, his last resource, is music. This argument is ruthlessly knocked down by Rampion, a man who has a very Nietzschean view of human nature, disagrees because he sees music as an attempt for man to be more than what man is. The argument becomes, and the same for religious experience, does it refer to something outside of itself. If I have a religious experience, does it mean anything outside of what I felt? Just because I had what could be called an otherworldly experience, does it refer in fact to something outside of the world?
The argument in music’s case, as far as Spandrell pushed it, was summed up in this question, “Did the music refer to nothing outside itself and the idiosyncrasies of its inventor?” (427). Rampion thinks that it does not. Music is music. It is personal, experiential, but just because it is does not mean that it points to anything beyond itself, anything beyond human experience.
Maybe the reason myself and so many of the nontheists in the class chose music as our religious object is because of this perceived disconnect. Spandrell I feel would agree with us. Choose music, it’s somehow holy even if we don’t believe in anything holy. It points to something other. Rampion would laugh at the whole class and our project. Good try students, but you’re looking for something that isn’t there. Music reduced is still just music. It doesn’t refer, nor should it. Even so, the immediate experience of it is powerful, even for us who really don’t believe much of anything in the way of religious reality.
If anything this post has just been a series of musings and nothing very substantial. Oh well I guess. It’s a theme I’d like to explore given more time, more reading, and more musings. Perhaps the next book on my list to read should be Godel, Escher, Bach.
Either way, enjoy Rufus Wainwright’s Agnus Dei.
