Like many Americans, I was entirely unfamiliar with these types of music and my own childhood experiences with religious music—in a Reform Jewish synagogue that tried to emulate and assimilate aspects of American suburban Protestantism—exposed me to slow, serious, and joyless music. “Whites are afraid to show their emotions, particularly joy,” Joni Mitchell told me. “I think it goes back to the original sin and the biblical accounts of Adam and Eve being embarrassed—that has negatively impacted white social interactions for centuries. Most white singers don’t have anywhere near the emotion that black singers do—Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith—every single note is invested with all the feeling of human existence. In my younger days, I had my little white girl folk voice, and I didn’t know how to put emotion in it, and I also hadn’t experienced enough of the world to really express life’s emotions fully. Black culture is much more balanced, they put a value on emotion and spirituality. White culture wants to keep all of that stuff quiet and tucked away.
“Some of our deepest feelings come through the spirit,” Joni continued. “To the extent that religion is a manifestation of spirit, it really ought to reflect the full range of feelings, especially joy. The ballet I wrote (Shine) is Gnostic, because Gnosticism rides the cusp, in a way, of all spiritual thought. It absorbed just about every religion, and put the goddess back in, it was earth-friendly, woman-friendly, and all the things that religion isn’t at this time. It saddens me so deeply what we, the Woodstock generation, have done to our planet. And nobody listens! We keep trashing it, ruining it, there won’t be anyone left fifty years from now and its purely our Tower of Babel arrogance that has brought us to this. Only humans have the stupidity to destroy their own planet. You talk a lot about ‘evolution’ in The World in Six Songs, but maybe it would be more accurate to talk about humans as the products of devolution, of a relentless pursuit of perfection in stupidity and arrogance. Even religion today has lost its ability to pull us out—now it’s all warrior gods. My song ‘Strong in the Wrong’ is a direct attack on these subversions of religion. On the other hand, the Gnostic God is a thing within you whereby you lose your self-consciousness and transcend. It’s more like Buddhism, in that way. So the Buddhists in the dance troupe kind of lit up because, it’s not like the Buddhists are afraid to do a Catholic dance, but man! the Catholics are sure afraid to do a Buddhist dance.”
A highlight of the ballet, which Joni choreographed, produced, and wrote the music for, is a dance to one of her favorite poems, “If ” by Rudyard Kipling (“If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . .”)
I always considered Kipling’s “If ” to be a religious poem, not about what it is to be “a Man” (or a Woman, or an Adult), but how to be more Godlike, more spiritually enlightened. Joni rewrote the text slightly, changing the word “knaves,” for example. “And I changed the ending,” she explains, “ because I wanted the ballet to emphasize wonder and delight; the ability to recharge your innocence is what makes you inherit the Earth. I changed the ending to ‘If you could have sixty seconds’ worth of wonder and delight’—which are those glimpses of the waking mind, they put you there right in the moment—‘then the Earth is yours.’ In other words, if you can perceive it; if you can wake up for a minute or a second and seize the damned thing, at that moment you own it. It doesn’t matter whose property you’re on. You could be walking with the owner of a huge parcel of land, but if you see it and he doesn’t, at that minute, who owns it, perceptually, spiritually? There’s a lot of meat on the bone of that idea.”
Whereas Joni looked back to Kipling for spiritual inspiration, David Byrne mentioned “My Body Is a Cage” by the Montreal-based band Arcade Fire.
My body is a cage
That keeps me from dancing with the one I love
But my mind holds the key
“To me,” David says, “it’s religious and at the same time anthemic. It gets really big at the end, but it’s still very personal. This song’s not calling for spiritual or political revolution or, ‘we must march and fight’ or ‘we shall overcome,’ or whatever. ‘My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love, but my mind holds the key.’ It’s beautiful, but to me it’s a little bit backwards; usually it’s the other way. Usually it’s the mind that’s keeping the heart from acting. So it’s the mind telling the heart ‘No! I’m gonna stop you from indulging in your passions.’ And then it goes on: ‘I’m living in an age that calls darkness light . . .’ It’s biblical language, but they apply it a little bit to the personal and the political. It’s not one of the social bonding or friendship songs from The World in Six Songs, a kind of rousing ‘hey, we’re all in this together.’ It’s more like one person’s torment, one person’s inner experience, which is what makes it such a powerful religion song to me.”
“My Body Is a Cage” showcases religion as a struggle not just against immorality—its usual sphere—but against immortality. The conviction that there is something beyond this corporeal existence—a life, a future, beyond what we know and see here. But my body is a cage preventing me from seeing it. My body is a cage preventing my essence from being able to reach out and merge with that of my lover or my creator.
David Byrne spends much of his time listening to music of other cultures, and they have infused and informed his own compositions, as they have for Paul Simon and Michael Brook. A favorite religious song of David’s is “Roble” by the Argentinean singing group Los Fabulosos Cadillacs.
Ya cayeron ojas secas
El frio del invierno va a venir
“It has the sort of sweeping melody you find in national anthems,” David explains. “The melody begins with a slow build and then just climbs up; it has some really peculiar stops and hesitations where it lets the note just kind of hang over so that you know that there’s probably an extra bar or something in there, which has this big emotional crest. And then it comes down. Lyrically, roble is Spanish for ‘oak,’ and the words are basically about how it loses its leaves and then they come back.”
Sin resistir, sin dormir
Roble sin fin vos sabes lo que es morir
Solo soñar con la lluvia lo lleva a revivir
The anthemic nature of the melody and the long, slow rhythms transform the lyrics from a literal story about an oak tree to a metaphor—a spiritual lesson about change, growth, perseverance, and renewal. “Without resisting, without sleeping, the oak tree knows what it is to die,” David says.
“I can’t help but apply it to the Argentine political situation, because these guys are from a generation that grew up in the era where people disappeared for their political views. In Spain, Argentina, Romania, citizens have lived through a period as children, and they remember this repressive situation; that was just the way things were. And then, things open up. I can’t help but read that the song is a little bit expressive of that as well.”
The Big Idea of most religions is that even if things aren’t so good now, they’ll get better. We see this powerfully rendered in the so-called black spirituals of the South, in “We Shall Overcome,” and “People Get Ready (There’s a Train A-Coming)” by Curtis Mayfield:All you need is faith to hear the diesels humming
You don’t need no ticket, no you just thank the Lord
Psychologists and anthropologists have found that after a certain minimal level is attained, increased material wealth and comfort do not make people happier. An oft-quoted adage is accurate: The secret of being happy is to be happy with what you have. Too often in Western society—a society built on consumption—we don’t stop to enjoy what we have, but rather work to obtain more and more. In contrast, hunter-gatherers and people who live in subsistence cultures work to acquire only what they need, and do seem, by many measures, to be happier. David noticed this in traveling around the world with his band Talking Heads. “We would go to the outskirts of towns where we were playing in Latin America, or Africa, or Eastern Europe and see people who—compared to us�
�have very little in the way of material goods. Obviously no Wi-Fi, no air-conditioning, no electricity or refrigeration, but they live as they have lived for thousands of years, and they’re happy. Even more noticeable is that there is a cohesion. Westerners like us feel like they don’t have much, but they have something that I will probably never have: their social networks, their family, and their centeredness and rootedness.”
Anthropologists note that all human societies look for God and for meaning, but the specific ways they do so vary enormously. What is recognizable from one age to another, and one culture to another, is the drive; what can be fascinating is the different ways that this uniquely human drive becomes channeled. We don’t know if any animals have spiritual thoughts. Chimpanzees, dogs, and African gray parrots certainly behave differently when separated from those they love, something we might label despondency or depression. But if they have the ability to reflect on why they are experiencing the emotions they are—to realize “I sure would feel better if my owner Irene was here”—there is no evidence of that. They may well live in a world of the ever-advancing present, with no ability to plan, contemplate future or past, mourn, or look forward. A psychological study of dogs some years ago addressed the common experience of dog owners that their dog was there to greet them when they arrived home, suggesting to many (hopeful) dog lovers that their beloved anticipated their arrival, waiting by the door with a mental image of their imminent return. In fact, under controlled experimental conditions using hidden cameras, the dogs did not wait by the door, they simply were able to hear the car or footsteps of their owner a half block away and went to the door in what may have simply been an act of Pavlovian conditioning (hear car, go to door, owner comes in and makes a big fuss over me).
A wide range of animals use song across a diverse array of instances, but no animal has been observed composing or singing a song of longing, or love, or spiritual yearning. And yet all human groups do. The musical brain brought a new hum of neural activity between the brain’s rational and emotional centers, along with all the billions of new connections possible with the enlarged prefrontal cortex. Self-consciousness and perspective-taking emerged and as far as we know are unique to humans. They lead most of us at some point in our lives to think about our place in the world, to think about the nature of thoughts, to pose questions and to look for answers.
Religion grew out of this desire to make sense of the world. Even without explicit training, most children reach a point where they ask: “Where did I come from?” “What was I before I was born?” “What happens when you die?” And, looking around at the world, “Who created all this?” Every human society that historians and anthropologists have uncovered has had some form of religion, and a belief system under which these questions are addressed. Some have even claimed that science is a religion, with its own rules of behavior and its own explanations about the origins of the world and of life, many of which rest on unobservables.
Much of what we know about the thoughts and beliefs of early humans is necessarily speculative, because they were not literate and did not leave us detailed explanations. Anthropologists make inferences, however, by visiting contemporary humans who live in societies that both lack written language and have been cut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years or more. These cultures tend to be composed of hunter-gatherer, pre-agricultural humans living in small groups. Their dominant belief is not that the world functions according to predictable, logical principles, but rather that events unfold at the whim of capricious gods who require various rituals or sacrifices in order to provide water, food, cure illness, and allow women to bear children. These beliefs are often based on a combination of superstition and lore handed down from generation to generation. A baby becomes very sick, a village elder sacrifices a wild boar, and the baby is cured. The next time a baby becomes sick, a wild boar can’t be found and so the elder sacrifices a possum. The baby dies, and the elders come to believe that only boars can appease the gods. Hundreds of coincidences like this lead to rituals that form the basis of an early religion, based (typically) on pantheism, sacrifice, pleas, prayer, and appeasement.
One can argue that among the most significant events in all of human history was the invention of monotheism. Monotheism transformed the dominant worldview from one in which events happened for no apparent reason (at the whim of capricious gods) to one in which there existed a logic and order in things (according to the plan of the one true God). The laws of nature and natural processes were seen as the product of a rational, intelligent being. The advent of monotheism put an end to child sacrifice (which was ubiquitous in the pre-monotheistic world) and ushered in an era of logic. This swiftly led us to the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, and science.
The cognitive capacity and drive toward holding religious/ spiritual beliefs (though not necessarily the beliefs themselves) underlie the foundation of society, according to Rappaport. Human organization could not have come into existence in the absence of religious beliefs. Societies, by necessity, are built upon orderliness, organization, and cooperation. In many cooperative undertakings, such as building granaries, fending off invaders, plowing fields, providing irrigation, and establishing a social hierarchy, members of society must accept certain propositions as true, even if they are not directly verifiable. Preparing food in a certain way allows us to escape toxins in the food. A leader asserts that a neighboring tribe is planning to attack and we need to either prepare a defense or launch a preemptive strike. A wait-and-see approach is potentially calamitous—we need to act on faith.
Religions trained us and taught us to accept society-building, interpersonally bonding propositions. (Whether we still need religion in an age of science is a separate matter, and one that I don’t want to get distracted by here.) Ceremonies with music reaffirm the propositions, and the music sticks in our heads, reminding us of what we believe and what we have agreed to. Music during ritual is designed, in most cases, to evoke a “religious experience,” a peak experience, intensely emotional, the effects of which can last the rest of a person’s life. Trance states can occur during these experiences, resulting in feelings of ecstasy and connectedness. Because the sacred belief is associated with the ecstatic state, it becomes reconfirmed in the experiencer’s mind, with the music acting as an agent for reconformation every time it is played, ad infinitum. The emotion marks the belief. Three emotions in particular are associated with religious ecstasy: dependence, surrender, and love. These same three emotions are believed innately present in animals and human infants and were no doubt present in humans before religion gave them a system for expression and indeed for uplifting thoughts in self-conscious adults.
It is especially true that a cornerstone of contemporary society is trust and the ability to believe in things that are not readily apparent, such as abstract notions of justice, cooperation, and the sharing of resources implied by civilization. Indeed, modern technological civilization requires that we trust millions of things we cannot see. We have to trust that airline mechanics did their jobs in tightening all the bolts, that drivers on the road will keep a safe distance and stay within the lines, that food-processing plants observe health and hygiene codes. We simply cannot verify all these propositions directly—any more than the religious can verify the existence of God. The fundamental human ability to form societies based on trust, and to feel good about doing so (via judicious bursts of oxytocin and dopamine), is intimately linked to our religious past and spiritual present.
And music has been there to imprint these thoughts on our memory, sometimes long after a ritual or ceremony has ended, and long after an epiphany or revelation has passed. Music is able to do this because of its internal structure. Like human languages, human music is highly structured, organized, and hierarchical. Although the details of musical syntax remain to be worked out, there exist multiple redundant cues in music that constrain the possible notes that can occur in a well-formed melody. The human brain is an exquisitely
sensitive change detector, and to be such, it has to register minute details of the physical environment in order to notice any violations of sameness, any deviations from the ordinary. The newest evidence, from the laboratories of Dick Aslin and Elissa Newport at the University of Rochester, and of Jenny Saffran at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, shows that even human infants are sensitive to patterns and structure, detecting even minute changes in a musical sequence, and noticing when a sequence or chord progression is atypical.
The most surprising conclusion from this work is the way in which human infants accomplish this: Their brains (as do those of adults) compile statistical information about which notes are most likely to follow other notes (an ability afforded by the rearrangement or computational abilities of the musical brain). They do the same for language, learning a complex calculation of probabilistic regularities as to which speech sounds are most likely to follow which others. It is in this way that infants “bootstrap” a working knowledge of speech and music and a sophisticated awareness of what combinations are typical and which are atypical in the language and music to which they’ve been exposed.
What’s exciting about this research is that it offers a parsimonious explanation for how both language and music are acquired. It also offers a compelling account of why music is so memorable, why we can still sing along with a song on the radio we haven’t heard since we were fourteen years old, and why songs serve as such effective mnemonic devices for the knowledge of civilizations and the following of rituals and religious practice. The reason is because of the multiply embedded cues of melody and rhythm, constrained by form and style, as encoded in a series of statistical maps and, ultimately, statistical inferences.
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Page 21