By Amanda Alexander
Many years ago, I taught at a boarding school in England. Every couple of months, a small group of teachers from various departments would get together at somebody’s house for dinner, drinks and music. Most people in the group played guitar and piano (not me), and had taken voice lessons (again, not me). We played and sang together for hours.
Some of the songs I knew – like the Billy Joel hits – and some I did not. Sometimes I could read the charts, and sometimes I could not. It didn’t really matter, though. Nobody noticed if I missed a line, or a note, for that matter. We were all caught up in something much more than our own musical contributions. We bonded powerfully during these evenings. Our relationships with each other became more profound, more honest, more comfortable.
When I later moved to New York City, I discovered a different musical community in one of the city’s many beautiful churches. This particular church had two organs, a professional choir and a highly trained children’s choir (I actually thought these choirs were better than those I heard at the New York Philharmonic, but that is irrelevant to this story).
I went to this church on the Feast of All Souls. For the Mass setting, they used Fauré’s Requiem in its entirety. I was familiar with the music: I had listened to recordings of it. But something powerful happened during that liturgy. I could feel the notes from the organ reverberate in my chest while the sounds from the choir tripped up and down the hairs on my arm, making them stand on end. I could literally feel the sound waves moving through my body. And suddenly, I wept. And so did everybody else. The whole congregation began to cry together. I had never experienced anything like it.
As it turns out, there is an explanation both for the bond that was formed by our little group in England and for what happened in that church in New York City. It has to do with the music, of course. Dachner Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied the neuropsychology of music and its power to bind communities together and open new horizons of meaning simultaneously.
The act of making music, Keltner writes, produces “sound waves – vibrations – that move out into space. Those sound waves hit your eardrums, whose rhythmic vibrations move hairs on the cochlear membrane just on the other side of the eardrum, triggering neurochemical signals beginning in the auditory cortex on the side of your brain.” But we don’t just listen with our ears: “Sound waves are transformed into a pattern of neurochemical activation that moves from the auditory cortex to the anterior insular cortex, which directly influences and receives input from your heart, lungs, vagus nerve, sexual organs and gut. It is in this moment of musical-meaning making in the brain that we do indeed listen to music with our bodies, and where musical feeling begins.”
In that New York City church, we were all listening with our bodies, which explains why we all began to weep together. Keltner explains that “this neural representation of music, now synched up with the essential rhythms of the body, moves through a region of the brain known as the hippocampus, which adds layers of memories to the ever-accreting meaning of the sounds. Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible ... Music allows us to understand the great themes of social living, our identities, the fabric of our communities and what should change.” This understanding, which is an understanding not of the head but of the soul, sometimes has no form of expression other than tears.
It turns out that good music may be essential to forming community, and especially communities of faith. Keltner writes, “When we listen to music that moves us, the dopaminergic circuitry of the brain is activated, which opens the mind to wonder and exploration. In this bodily state of musical awe, we often tear up and get the chills, those embodied signs of merging with others to face mysteries and the unknown ... Music breaks down the boundaries between self and other and can unite us in feelings of awe ... 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, and an idea of the times – or what we might call the sacred.”
Music then is not merely personal recreation or liturgical decoration: it is an essential, formative, participative tool that touches the heart and the depths of our humanity, not just the head. It belongs not only in the Mass, but in every gathering of the faithful, and especially to those moments when we seek to form others in the faith. It belongs in and to the community. So let’s take the AirPods out, take the big headphones off, and let’s listen to – or better yet – make music together.
Amanda Alexander is currently the Director of the Department of Ministry Formation Institute for the Diocese and a parishioner of St. Adelaide in Highland. She has a Ph.D. in systematic theology and has taught at numerous Catholic universities.