Music

The most radical development of Vatican II is the pronouncement that the fully realized celebration of the Liturgy requires that every Catholic all over the world be trained as a musician.

Music has a way of traveling through our imagination and into our body and soul. It transforms us from the inside out, entrancing us with its melodies and rhythms to center us in the moment. It penetrates us with frequencies that transform understanding to confusion, certitude to wonder, and loneliness to belonging. It affirms feelings that we didn’t know we shared with others and thoughts that only wish to be known when expressed in song. It offers solace when we hurt and creates an environment for our rage when we’re angry.

Can the prosody of lament be a vehicle for identifying, naming, and immunizing oneself against the impact of despair and other disempowering emotions? Can the expression of anger at the perceived absence of a deity, a general prelude to disaster, also be a way of coming to terms with those occasions when abandonment is incapable of teleological reframing? Can lament be understood as a fundamentally numinous and liminalizing genre capable of generating eschatological convergence among those that suffer across space and time?

We have an intrinsic sense about music: what songs we like, what instruments we prefer, what songs we listen to when we’re feeling certain ways (or what songs we listen to when we hope to feel different), and yet, many of us carry a deep insecurity about proclaiming what we listen to and why – not to mention our formal or informal abilities to participate in music-making.

In the same way that so many of our experiences become increasingly individualized and personalized through the development of new technology, music is more and more becoming an experience that most frequently happens only “in our heads”. Headphones and earbuds have democratized access to sound recordings in a profound way and yet, these media don’t harness the full power of music. The live experience of music saturates our bodies with the associated waves of what we’re listening to, physically altering our bodies in a way that isn’t fully captured on headphones. These shared bodily experiences are intrinsic to meaning-making and community-building, which points to just how powerful a medium music is for forming us in empathy and understanding.

You cannot sing a song and not change your condition.

It is from this perspective that we study and develop music in Rhythms of Faith. When we experience music in-person, it changes us – it builds a bond with the community that we’re experiencing it with. When we learn to make music together this effect is only amplified. The time spent crafting our bodies and minds to feel and hear together imperceptibly synchronizes our seemingly divergent perspectives into one.