Awe

Fifty years after the era of Romanticism, Charles Darwin timed his daily walks near gardens to listen to the music in King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. The local flora and fauna and music fed his thinking as he wandered and wondered about evolution. These encounters opened his mind to questions:

I acquired a strong taste for music, and used very often to time my walks so as to hear on week days the anthem in King’s College Chapel. This gave me intense pleasure, so that my backbone would sometimes shiver. I am sure that there was no affectation or mere imitation in this taste. . . . Nevertheless I am so utterly destitute of an ear, that I cannot perceive a discord, or keep time and hum a tune correctly; and it is a mystery how I could possibly have derived pleasure from music.

Mysteries of musical pleasure indeed.

Scholars of music have long believed that we create and appreciate music to understand emotions like awe. Here we ask: How? And why?

Darwin’s reflections hint at three answers. A first is found in Darwin’s musical “shivers,” that bodily sign of merging with others to face mystery and the unknown. It is a human universal to get the chills and tear up when moved by music. That is because we listen to music, philosopher Susan Sontag rightly observed, with our bodies. Or as Miles Davis put it upon first hearing jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker:

“What? What is this?” Man, that shit was so terrible it was scary. . . . Man, that shit was all up in my body.

Music stirs awe by opening our bodies to its neurophysiological profile.

Music also opens our minds to the sublime beyond “affectation” and “imitation.” In our twenty-six-culture study, people often wrote that music brought them moments of clarity, of epiphany, of truth, of really knowing their place in the great scheme of life. The writer Rachel Carson often listened to Beethoven to open her mind in this way:

Listening to Beethoven, the mood became, I suppose, more creative, and rather suddenly I understood what the anthology should be—the story it should tell—the deep significance it might have. I suppose I can never explain it in words, but I think you understand without words. It was a mood of tremendous exaltation, I wept.

Music has “deep significance”; it illuminates “patterns of life,” in the words of philosopher Susanne Langer, whom you will soon meet. Music teaches us about love, and suffering, and justice, and power, and with whom and where we find our community. How does this work, though, that a pattern of sounds might lead us to understand, in the case of awe, the vast mysteries of life? By listening carefully to the symbolic meaning of sound we shall discover how.

Finally, we should not forget how social music is, that for 100,000 years, and most likely longer, we have been listening to and performing music with others. In music, as a community woven together in sound, we find a shared identity—Darwin’s “taste for music.”

Cashmere Blanket of Sound

In the autumn of 2019, I visited Yumi to hear her play music conducted by John Adams, a Pulitzer Prize–winning American composer. Fifteen minutes before the performance, I found my seat with 2,000 other symphonygoers, all buzzing in sounds of collective effervescence rising above curving waves of red velvet seats. Yumi strode onstage and waved, then sat down with the 100 members of the orchestra, all playing different notes. It was a cacophony. An acoustic assault. In one instant, though, an oboist played an A, and all musicians joined. Music. An orchestra exists.

During the performance, Yumi sat upright, her body erect and arms at disciplined angles, as if listening to her cello breathe. Her face moved through expressions of concentration, determination, ferocity, absorption, and bliss, when her eyebrows lifted and her eyes closed. Yumi seemed to drift into an invisible space surrounding her. I had seen that face earlier that day at the Rodin Museum, in Rodin’s Gates of Hell, his Dante-derived, awe-inspiring sculpture of swirling bodies hovering near the doors to the afterlife.

The next day Yumi and I enjoyed a cup of tea at an outdoor café near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. It was a fresh, sparkling fall day of changing maple leaves and urbanites walking with newspapers tucked under their arms and city-friendly dogs on leashes. I asked Yumi what it was like to play as part of an orchestra for two thousand people. She told me of how challenging Adams’s composition was technically, and recalled her daily practice of exercising her forearms, biceps, wrists, and fingers.

Her tone then shifted. She talked about what it feels like in her body to play. She feels the vibrations of her cello. The wood touching her arms. When she is playing, her thoughts travel to new spaces, soaring and floating, not knowing where she is going. As she spoke, her hands rotated outward with fireworks-like twinkling movements of the fingers. She continued: