Interview:

As a philosophical naturalist and materialist, I am suspicious of the very notions of soul and spirit, and, indeed, of any entity that is claimed to transcend the world of nature and matter. Hence, I am also suspicious of the notion of “the spiritual”. Music is often said to be the most “spiritual” of the arts largely because of its ephemerality and intangibility. But this assessment is a product of the crude ontology of common sense and its overly simplified conception of matter. This pragmatic, everyday ontology privileges ordinary middle-sized objects that can be seen and touched. Yet much of nature is intangible and invisible, for example, air, gravity, electricity, and magnetism. Sound and music are among these invisible yet thoroughly material forces. Of course music is also social, cultural, and political, but society, culture, and politics are the products of human beings who, contrary to most religious and “spiritual” traditions, are thoroughly natural and material beings. What people generally mean when they say that music is “spiritual” is that it is, or can be, tremendously beautiful, that it has a unique power to summon deep emotions and memories, that it can draw people together, and out of their individual subjectivities. This is all true, but it has nothing to do with “the spirit”, “spirituality”, or anything else that is alleged to transcend nature. Nature is extraordinarily beautiful and awe-inspiring and needs no supplementary “spiritual” dimension to make it more so. Music is part of this powerful nature. If music is unique among the arts, it is so because, as the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche elegantly showed, its fluidity, ephemerality, and intensity models the fluid becoming that constitutes nature.

“What people generally mean when they say that music is “spiritual” is that it is, or can be, tremendously beautiful, that it has a unique power to summon deep emotions and memories.”
– Christoph Cox, co-editor of “Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music”