Interview:

As a musician who has spent more of his life making music than not, music is my comfort zone. It is what I know most about in my life as an adult. As a companion, I find music to be flawless. It does not demand anything from me; it is not disappointed, jealous, a letdown, angry, hurt, upset, confusing, disturbing, or mean. It can be uplifting, powerful, emotional, confidence-building, understanding, and escape-plan hatching. It is the perpetual puppy that is always happy to see just me. It is my genie in a bottle.

Music has the ability to allow me to transcend my surroundings, situation, and perceived or physical limitations. It has brought me through some of the darkest hours of my life: my friend’s murder in South Africa, a debilitating accident, my wife’s near death on the operating table. Similarly, it has been present during some of the happiest times of my life: my wedding, playing to sixty-five thousand people at an open-air festival, heading up the coast of California to re-live moments from the movie “Sideways” with my shiny new bride. Music has saved me from being totally alone in the darkness, and also driven me to greater heights in the light, allowing me to 126 feel connected with something larger than myself, something some among us may define as spirituality.

The humanist in me tries to reason that, by nature, the music that affords me this situational transcendence was created specifically to instill the exact emotions needed to give rise to such a perception. He argues that centuries of research, through the pragmatic developmental history of music and its structure, progression, melody, and harmony has endowed the modern songwriter with a code, albeit for the most part culture-specific, to unlock such feelings: music as a reactive algorithm, “if X sequence of notes is played in Y progression then Z emotion will be unlocked”. The meta-physicist in me tries to reason that this can’t be all that the music is doing: conveying someone’s predetermined collection of cues in a delivery format that is guaranteed to trigger a desired response. He says that music can’t just be an aural cigarette, with audio as the tobacco and sentiment as the nicotine. Surely there has to be more to music, and to me, than that?

Before siding with the spiritual superego or secular id, I think it’s important to quantify my own understanding of the term “spiritual” before going on to answer the overarching question of what I believe is the spiritual significance of music. Take a deep breath and read the rest of this paragraph in one sitting. I believe that spirituality, as we understand the term in the West today, has come to denote a practice markedly removed from religion, at least as we have come to perceive the definition of the term “spirituality”. I feel that the definition that makes reference to spirituality as events or beliefs of an “incorporeal or immaterial nature” holds more water with my personal ideologies and understanding of the term than any Chinese-whispered, vernacular explanation involving semi-renaissance imagery, afterlife horror stories and things that go bump in the night. Additionally, I feel that each of us must be consciously aware of, if not necessarily constantly in full understanding of our own ontological and epistemological stances. By nature, these stances will color not only what we believe exists both in the physical and
incorporeal realms, but also what we believe it is possible for us 127 to individually understand about what we believe exists in these realms. If we can wrap our heads around these ideas, I think that we have a fighting chance of understanding not only the modern collective concept of spirituality itself, but perhaps more importantly, our own interpretation of our place within this concept, and how our sociopolitical environment and our very existence as human beings, color our perceptions thereof and any data, real or perceived, that the world with or without physical existence may present to us about it. You may now exhale.

So can spirituality itself really be finitely quantified? Can any of it be weighed and measured as in Dr. Duncan MacDougall’s questionable “21 grams” experiment? The answer for me, at least at this juncture of my life is “I don’t think it can”. You may now be thinking, “Why has this guy contributed to a book about the spiritual significance of music when he is now not even sure if he can define spirituality itself, let alone in relation to music?” I guess my point is that on reflection I honestly don’t think that I have the ability to finitely quantify the spirituality of music, ergo its significance. And well, for me at least, I think that’s okay. I think that the spiritual significance of music is beyond intangible, because the definition of spirituality itself is equally impalpable, at least from where I am sitting, bowing to the wisdom of any as-yetundiscovered multi-dimensional, time-dilational, transcendent super entities out there reading this article with pity in their evolutionary superior eyes, assuming they actually have eyes, naturally. Trying to finitely define either is like trying to play a game of “pin-the-tailon-the-donkey,” blindfolded, in a darkened room that I don’t know the size of, nor how high the donkey is off the ground within, nor if I actually have a donkey tail in my hand anyway, nor if that donkey – that may or may not be there in the first place – is even missing a tail; kind of like an existential, barnyard version of Schrödinger’s cat; except that the cat is a donkey – with or without a tail – and there’s no vial of poison, nor a box shielded against environmentally induced quantam decoherence, but the superposition of coexisting alive and dead states does fit-in nicely with my concept of the glorious ethereal 128 nature of this whole deal. You should probably exhale again about now. You may now be thinking, “Enough of the big words smarty-pants, what can you actually tell us?” I can tell you that music touches me in a way that I consider to be personal and not possible to mechanically quantify. It binds me to places, moments, people, and feelings like no other art form. If these perceptions denote my connection to some greater consciousness, collectively experiencing the same emotions individually yet simultaneously, without necessarily being geographically  proximate, and if such a connection evidences the existence of an incorporeal realm – then no need to sign me up. I’m already a believer. In this event, the spiritual significance of music is genuinely, infinitely immeasurable and is something we should all partake of and in whenever humanly possible. Alternatively, if my connection to music is just a pulse from a neurotransmitter in a chemical reaction arching at seven hertz inside the cortex of my brain’s limbic system, reacting to culturally familiar cues specifically tailored by songwriters to evoke accessible emotions for the purpose of generating specific feelings – well, sign me up for that too.

In either instance the music itself is no less the better and my enjoyment of it is in no way diminished by its significance, real or perceived, by me or anyone else in the physical or incorporeal realms. Naturally, my sitting-on-the-fence attitude to all of this might come back to haunt me (no pun intended) in the event of my death, and the actual existence of the aforementioned classically portrayed, vernacularly expressed non-physical realm. In that event, I envision St. Peter – encircled by those that had the foresight to answer the question of “what do you believe is the spiritual significance of music?” with a positive religious slant – chuckling at my naïveté, pausing only momentarily to point out that the Creationalists were actually right; dinosaur skeletons being nothing more than a celestial gag designed to test our ecumenical metal, before pulling on the big pearly trapdoor lever that sends me to join David Hasselhoff and his half-dead legions of unrepentant musical sinners. Is it too late to change my answer?

“Music has saved me from being totally alone in the darkness, and also driven me to greater heights in the light.”
– J.S. Clayden, vocalist, programmer, and engineer in Pitchshifter