The School for the Sacred Arts

Music

Music is an incredibly powerful phenomenon that touches us in profound ways. For more and more people, music has transcended being simply a form of art or entertainment and has become much more -- a source of spirituality, of religious experience, and of connection to the divine. This class, taught by Sacred Center founder and director Robin Sylvan, examines music from this emerging paradigm of the sacred, and explores the nearly universal connection between music, spirituality, and religion from a variety of perspectives - historical, structural, experiential, and personal.

Music, spirituality, and religion are intimately linked in almost every culture around the world. On the one hand, music is an integral component of countless religious practices, from the simple trance-inducing drumming of Siberian shamans to the sublime and sophisticated orchestral masses of Johann Sebastian Bach. On the other hand, countless musical traditions explicitly acknowledge and articulate the potent religious and spiritual power of music. Perhaps the greatest of these articulations is the Indian idea of Nada-Brahman, or God as sound, in which music is understood as a path to unite with God. Closer to home, we find widespread indications in contemporary culture that many people are finding meaningful religious or spiritual dimensions in various forms of popular music, whether as listeners, concert-goers, dancers, composers, or performers.

In this class, we begin with a survey of traditional sacred musics from around the world, including indigenous peoples and eastern religious traditions, as well as our own Judeo-Christian and western musico-religious heritage. We then turn to theoretical considerations and develop a framework for understanding why music, spirituality, and religion are such a good fit for each other, drawing on a multi-dimensional model Sylvan developed in his Ph.D. research and his book "Traces of the Spirit", as well as several alternative models from different cultures. Next, we look at the spiritual and religious dimensions of popular music, beginning with the crucial historical connection between West African possession religion and American popular music, and then moving into several different contemporary music scenes that clearly demonstrate powerful spiritual and religious aspects, including jam bands, the rave scene, and hip hop. Finally, we will connect all of this material to our own lives and examine the various ways that many people are finding religious and spiritual meaning in their personal connection
to music.

This class sessions themselves strike a balance between discursive teachings that draw on Sylvan's extensive scholarly research into this subject, listening to recordings of all the musics being dis-cussed, and experiential practices that allow us to get a firsthand taste of some of the musically-induced spiritual states being explored.