Meeting of 22 November: ‘Heavenly harmony: Music and Transcendence’ and **End-of-Year Party**
Music is for many (most?) people the number one art form. It is the most direct the most accessible the most affecting. Very few of us aren’t moved by at least one musical genre. Even some tone-deaf people love music and as cynics have pointed out Hitler was besotted with the final scene of Götterdämmerung.
You are invited to nominate a piece of music that moves you inspires you makes you weep sends you into an ecstasy or which makes you think there might be something in Happy-clappydom after all. To be realistic there will probably be time in our meeting to play and discuss only half-a-dozen or so short pieces. We shall also need to leave time for some general discussion of music and its effects. Unfortunately therefore there will need to be a selection process. Please let me know as soon as possible what piece you would like to bring. It should be available and easy to identify on a CD for playing on an ordinary CD player. If yours is chosen for playing we shall probably play two to four minutes of it. In selecting the ‘program’ variety will be a major criterion. We won’t learn much if we have eight Gregorian chants or the whole second half of Handel’s Messiah. Some of us would enjoy such a narrow range but it won’t force us to confront the fact that ‘our kind’ of music may mean nothing to most people on earth.
Our subsequent discussion might be based on questions such as: How do we feel when listening to music? Could we sometimes call our response‘spiritual’? If so what does this mean? How important is the role of music in religious services? How important has been religion in the development of musical forms? Is the great diversity of musical styles used in religious contexts entirely cultural or are there also underlying individual differences? Does listening to music change us?