Friday, January 6, 2017

Wondrous Mystery: Music and Dance (6 January 2017)

“To a certain extent, we surrender to music when we listen to it—we allow ourselves to trust the composers and musicians with a part of our hearts and our spirits; we let the music take us somewhere outside of ourselves.  Many of us feel that great music connects us to something larger than our own existence, to other people, or to God.  Even when music doesn’t transport us to an emotional place that is transcendent, music can change our mood.” (236-7)
-        Daniel J Levitin This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

I am at the end of this year’s Winter Solstice Season. It is Epiphany; 6 January.  Reveling in the quiet beauty of the Night near the threshold of the Hinterlands, I am once again listening to Stile Antico’s A Wondrous Mystery (2015).  This CD has been my evening meditation music almost every night since St Nicholas Eve.  Listening to it, I’ve been led into reflecting on both the humanistic and mystical themes underlying the lyrics as well as being emotionally and aesthetically enveloped into the wonderful textures woven by this choir’s beautiful voices.  I ride the contemplative crescendos and decrescendos_ feeling the presence of the intervals in my flesh.
Music is – and has always been – a primary tributary to my spiritual life; endlessly providing pathways into peace and reinvigoration as well as runes of inspiration for creative work and empowerment.   Music accompanies me through the seasons and has often been the springboard for experiences of self-transcendence; as some of my blogs at this site will attest.  Some of my earliest memories revolve around music.  Music has been associated with each of the different spiritualities and religious traditions in which I’ve been immersed over the last five decades, and many of my fondest memories from my adventures in religion are deeply linked to particular musicians, albums and songs.  Music itself is a wondrous mystery!
The Winter Solstice Season has always been for me a time of intense musical experience.  There is just so much music to choose from and experience that one never runs out of new music to listen to during the Yule.  Good Winter Solstice music; deep, profound, uplifting music—proffers great joy and leads me down paths into depths often as-yet unexplored as I journey through the darkening days of December to Solstice Night and beyond.  Every year I seek out new music to accompany me through the Yule; from St Nicholas Eve unto Epiphany—and I usually find at least one CD to add to the growing collection. This year there have been two: the Stile Antico disc and a CD by Apollo’s Fire called Sacrum Mysterium: A Celtic Christmas Vespers (2013).  A Wondrous Mystery effectively centers me after a long day’s work and refreshes me for the remaining evening hours.  I have listened to Sacrum Mysterium in afternoons when I was off work, experiencing through the progression of tunes a sense of ‘poetic liturgy;’ of being involved in an unfolding story.
 These two CDs have kept rising to the top of the mix as I engaged with them, runing out the mysteries of their beauty, depth and mythic power.  This year I also danced from night to night through the season, being reminded again and again – by the rhythms of the music to which I was dancing – that carols were originally ‘round dances.’[i]  Loreena McKennitt’s Midwinter Night’s Dream (2008) contains a number of carols that evince this archaic origin, as does Moya Brennan’s An Irish Christmas (2013).  Lorenna McKennitt’s “Good King Wenceslas” and her rousing “God rest ye Merry, Gentlemen” were among the first carols I ever heard set to a music that facilitated circle dancing!  Each of these CDs lends itself to deep movement and meditative flowing, whether one is actively dancing or sitting cross-legged near the Yule Tree, Hearth or Meditation Table.
There is a restorative element to dancing.  Dancing in a circle is a refreshing way of leaving the linear paths of practical daily life; verging toward dreaming and hopes revived.  There is a rhythm that emerges from dancing the music which weaves you into the flow of the harmony and rhythms to which you are dancing as well as a rhythm that emerges between yourself and others with whom you might be moving in company within the circle, whether actual persons or imagined friends.  Egos melt, if the dancing is to continue, and there is then an emergent interplay of motion, sound, sweat and rising joy when the dancing gets good.  For me, dancing balances contemplation, one being active meditation while the other is the manifestation of being stilled in the ground of one’s being-in-becoming.
I have come to think of music as a ‘universal human language’ (it’s an old cliché, but I’ve found it true to experience) that is related to verbal language but perhaps stems from a source much deeper in our evolutionary history than the words and grammar in which we so readily express ourselves.[ii]  When music is good, it can heal, inspire, and educate us about the human condition. Winter Solstice music – whether Christian, Pagan or Secular – has always been, for me, a beacon of that wondrous mystery that is a dolmen of the mystic’s deep home, gathered into being-in-becoming.

Once I moved from dance into meditation each day, I often found myself listening to Annie Lennox’s A Christmas Cornucopia (2010).  The instrumental CD by Linn Barnes titled simply Yule (1995) also led me in a quieter dancing as well as being good background for readings on the Winter Solstice season and its music. When music accompanies meditation, adventures sometimes take shape; imaginative escapades and poetic scenarios form out of the interaction of the music and the meditative mind into which you settle.  When the music is good; that is, when it complements your meditative state and inner journey--you can be even more stilled, quieted and refreshed by the simple praxis of breathing, focusing and letting go than when meditating in mere silence.  Music can open vistas into which you may wander and be refreshed, inspired and even healed.  Physical stress often washes away as you enter devoutly into meditation’s inward paths; indeed—this is the practical first-fruit of rhythmic breathing.  This leaves the meditator feeling unburdened of the world and practical matters that were occupying one's mind.
As I emerge from the season, I am listening to Loreena McKennitt’s To Drive the Cold Winter Away (1985); a ’cold and chilling’ album (that’s not a critique!) of tunes that make me feel that I am sitting by a warm fireside in some old castle or ruined monastery.  There is a celebratory side to the music, while also facilitating silence and solitude.  It is beautiful in its ‘coolness’ and hypnotic in its rhythms and textures.  There is a sense of ‘openness’ to the music – as if it has ‘space’ within its realms – which makes me think of solemn wintry scenes and the freshness of cold night air in the epiphanic reaches of the imagination!  I will put all of these CD’s away tomorrow, and not hear them again for 11 months, yet listening to them has transformed me in subtle ways; once again--as such music does every year.

Leaving the Winter Solstice Season behind, I now turn to other musics that will companion me through the round of the seasons until Yule comes ‘round again.  The wondrous mystery that music is, the healing that it can bring and the way it can facilitate a move into the liminal realms of experience and existence, continues to fascinate me and keeps me awake – if not wakening – in the midst of living life day to day.  Daniel Levitin says in The World in Six Songs (2008):

“Music – and particularly joyful music – affects our health in fundamental ways.  Listening to, and even more so singing or playing, music can alter brain chemistry associated with well-being, stress reduction, and immune system fortitude.” (98)

_And I would agree.  There is music that girds up our strength and music that humbles and renews our spirit.  There is music that restores the soul, and music that liberates us from the humdrum, the drool and the persistently unpoetic sonority of ‘the world.’  Music can empower a person to be in-the-world but not of it.  At the Hinterlands at the end of the Yule, I affirm this potential!




[i] For one reference to this connection between carols and round-dances, see Ronald Clancy’s Sacred Christmas Music (2008), pp. 36-37.

[ii] I’ve been doing a lot of interesting reading this year on music, spirituality and evolution.  Among the best of my reading was Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music (2008), Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body (2008), and Gary Tomlinson’s A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (2015) as well as Daniel Levitin’s The World in Six Songs (2008).

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