After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
–Aldous Huxley
“All rise, please.”
The ancient organ begins to play as the select group of tourists chosen to sit in the cathedral pews untangles themselves from their coats and scarves to stand up. I glance around the quire at my expectant companions, holding their Common Worship prayer books a little too close to their unsure faces. Suddenly, the organ quiets, and the St. Paul’s Cathedral’s boys choir begins to sing. I freeze, having suddenly lost all desire to process my surroundings. I close my eyes. The choir’s harmonies swirl around me, and I stand, still, my own wrinkled copy of Common Worship sitting forgotten on my seat.
“Hail, gladdening Light, of his pure glory poured who is the immortal Father, heavenly, blest, holiest of holies, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The choir continues to sing, and emotion pulses through my body. I ride out the dynamics of the music, my ears taking in more sound with each crescendo, heart beating faster with every accelerando. When the service ends, I walk out the doors of the cathedral into the cold, dry air, wrapping my scarf around my wet cheeks.
There is no doubt that music is a powerful vessel for human emotion. All music elicits a response from its listener. But are the emotions that we feel when hearing a piece of music perceived, or do we create them ourselves? Does music contain certain explicit emotions, even before we listen to it? Or is music simply a resource in our own emotional construction?
When I was six years old, my family took a vacation to Kauai. We snorkled, ate snow cones with ice cream in the middle, laid on the beach, and counted geckos on the wall outside our condo. On our way to the beach each morning, we listened to a Hawaiian radio station that seemed to only play Jimmy Buffet. I remember my mom would turn down the volume when the “bad words” came on. It seemed amazing to us that the station would play Jimmy Buffet over and over – or so we thought, until the second to last day of vacation, when my dad accidentally hit the eject button on the CD player. Out popped a Jimmy Buffet CD.
Now, almost 12 years later, whenever I hear a Buffett song, I am flooded with flashbacks of beach days, laughter, snow cones, and the sight of my father in a snorkel mask and flippers. When I hear those songs, I remember the night my mom and dad got into a fight about where to eat dinner. I feel the excitement I experienced traipsing down to the beach on our last night in hopes of glimpsing one last sea turtle. Those songs carry the memories and emotions of that family vacation. Ask anyone in my family what they think of when they hear “Margaritaville” and I can guarantee that they will say Kauai.
I wonder if I feel joyful and carefree when I hear Buffett songs because those are the emotions I felt in Kauai, or because the songs actually contain those emotions. After all, Jimmy Buffett is all about living the island life – eating cheeseburgers in paradise and cold beers on Friday nights. Do the emotions I feel come from the actual song, or am I creating them myself by patching together my experiences in Kauai to construct an emotional response to the music?
I recently read an essay by John A. Sloboda and Patrik N. Juslin on this perplexing relationship between music and emotion. They conclude that the listener of a piece of music is “an agent who makes emotion happen by his or her ‘musicking’ . . . in one sense, the still silent member of a classical audience is no less active than the performer on the stage. It is simply that the form, vectors, and boundaries of that activity are different.” The listener is an active participant in the creation of the emotion of a piece of music.
My friend Brandon is studying abroad in London this semester, and he recently saw the band The Civil Wars play at The Union Chapel, a popular concert venue in Islington. The Civil Wars is comprised of artists Joy Williams and John Paul White, and their music is minimalistic, consisting of silky vocal harmonies accompanied by only a guitar and occasional piano. The lack of instrumentation creates a sound that is powerfully beautiful, yet delicate and a bit haunting.
Brandon told me that after the concert set was finished and Williams and White had left the stage, the audience called them back out for not one, but two encores. The second time, the audience was in an uproar, demanding “One more song! One more song!” from the pair. As Williams stepped up to the microphone, she was crying.
“I’m sorry to be so emotional but this has never happened before. This night has been so special to us, you guys have been a wonderful audience. Thank you for participating in this experience.”
Williams is absolutely right; music is participation, an exchange, an active dialogue between artist and audience. On their website, Williams and White even described their songs as “intimate conversations,” exchanges of emotion between themselves and their listeners.
There is no dichotomy between the emotional state of the artist and emotional response of the listener. The two are not mutually exclusive; instead, they come together to create a two-sided emotional exchange. The evening I attended Evensong in St. Paul’s Cathedral, I left carrying with me both the choir boys’ sense of spirituality and my own very personal experience of worship. After the service, on my bus ride back home, I sat quietly, resting in the space between those two. I felt quite complete.
