Awe

In his book How Music Works, David Byrne charts the history of this idea, that the sounds of music shift our bodies to a shared experience of awe. Some 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras proposed that the solar system emitted perfectly harmonious sounds that are the origins of the rhythms of life—of weather, seasons, cycles in nature, waking and sleep cycles, love and family life, our breathing, the beating of our hearts, and life and death. When we play and listen to sacred music, Pythagoras reasoned, these celestial sounds synchronize the rhythms of our lives, which fold us into what the Greeks called communitas, or social harmony. When we listen to music with others, the great rhythms of our bodies—heartbeat, breathing, hormonal fluctuations, sexual cycles, bodily motion—once separate, merge into a synchronized pattern. We sense that we are part of something larger, a community, a pattern of energy, an idea of the times—or what we might call the sacred.

Music surrounds us in a cashmere blanket of sound.

Sound and Feeling

After the performance in Philadelphia that night, Yumi emailed me a story of musical awe she experienced while playing Mozart’s Requiem

the week that her grandfather died:

This was Grandfather’s piece. Mozart’s Requiem, which we coincidentally played the week he died, January 2011. . . . When we started playing Confutatis, all the tears I never shed when he died came out . . . the angry, aggressive 32nd notes, from all the 40 of us strings in unison playing with sharp accents . . . each one like punches. And suddenly, the heavens opened up with Voca me, and all the light shone through, bright white almost blinding light. Like sun rays beaming through in sound. Angels singing. Grandfather, and Grammy, were there with me . . . shining on us. And then the memory floodgates opened to when we sang this in high school chorus, with Mr. Gibson and my friends, in the music room . . . back in time. And then suddenly back to now, the re-entrance of the fortissimo accents and missed opportunities and grief and anger. I could feel tears streaming down my face because my eyes couldn’t contain them anymore. Became momentarily aware that I was in performance . . . and let it go, it’s a safe place on stage. I felt the surge of anger subside, and, by the time we finished the Requiem and ended the concert with Ave Verum . . . even with my tears, I felt glowing, calm, deep sadness, and peacefulness. I felt like Grandfather heard me.

Yumi’s story follows awe’s familiar unfolding. It begins with encounters with the vastness of her grandfather’s death. Mystery strikes her in sensing her deceased grandparents’ presence. Yumi’s self transforms, moving through webs of associations—memories of singing in high school, a blending of sensory experiences known as synesthesia. She feels touched by bright light—an epiphany—bursting through sound. Her body gets into the act, glowing, overtaken with tears in recognition of the vastness of it all. Through the experience, she feels she is speaking with her grandfather.

Yumi’s observations about the meaning of music find a home in an influential philosophical study of the arts, that of Susanne Langer. In her books Feeling and Form and Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling

, Langer advances her central thesis, that the arts’ purpose is to objectify feeling. Each art, Langer details, is a unique kind of representation of emotion. In making music or visual art within a culture and moment of history, we archive our beliefs about what Langer called “the pattern of life,” or what I will call life patterns. Life patterns are the great themes of social living and are central to our experience of emotion, such as what it means to suffer. To experience loss. To love. To protest unfairness. To be subordinated by forces more powerful than the self. To be in relation to the Divine. To encounter mystery. To live and die.

The arts, Langer continues, represent our experience of life patterns in a realm of symbolic meaning that differs from that of our spoken language. Our spoken word is typically held to standards of truth, or veracity. The syntax of language and its arrangement of subjects, objects, and verbs seeks to represent events in the three-dimensional space of our usual, waking experience. Events unfold forward in a linear sense of time. Cause-and-effect relations are unidirectional.

Music, Langer posits, is freed of the constraints of veridicality that structure so much of our spoken language. As a result, our experience of aesthetic emotion—through music or visual art, for example—follows different laws of space, time, and causality. In this realm of experience, fast, holistic intuitions arise about life patterns, or possible truths about our lives. The realm of meaning in the arts, Langer concludes, has “no counterpart in any vocabulary.” Music “is a tonal analogue of emotive life.”