Re-enchanting the world: Music and spirituality

ABSTRACT

This article will examine the historical and contemporary literature in this area, to produce a model of the phenomenography of the musical experience which is linked with strands in the literature exploring the relationship between religion and spirituality. It interrogates the attitude of Christian theologians to the place of music in worship and its relationship to the sacred. It charts the move from this to a more generalised view of the spiritual dimension of music linking these with cataphatic and apophatic theological traditions. It uses frames from Buber’s view of encounter and Turner’s notion of liminality to link strands in the spirituality literature to the musical domains and the transformative properties of the liminal space.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• spirituality
• liminality
• theology
• religion
• experience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Rev Dr June Boyce-Tillman MBE, PhD, MA, LRAM, FRSA, FHEA is Professor Emerita of Applied Music, University of Winchester, UK; Extraordinary Professor at North-West University, South Africa; and Convenor of Music, Spirituality and Wellbeing International.

Notes

1 See the network entitled MSWInternational - an international network bringing together Music, Spirituality and Wellbeing. https://musicspiritualitywellbeinginternational.wordpress.com/

2 This is drawing on the usage of Primavesi (2008) and other ecotheologians.

3 To take Allegri’s choral piece Miserere from sixteenth-century Italy: in the area of ‘Materials’, it consists of a choir. In the area of ‘Expression’, it is peaceful with fluctuations as the plainchant verses come in. In the area of ‘Construction’, it is an alternating psalm with full harmonic verses and plainchant alternating verses. This is intimately related to its role as a psalm liturgically. In the area of ‘Value’, it is held as a masterpiece within the Western canon of music; it is frequently recorded and achieves a place in classical music charts; and it represents an important statement about the Christian’s attitude to penitence, based on a Jewish psalm, especially as expressed at the beginning of the penitential season of Lent. It has a declared Spiritual intention.