I have often thought that God wants to speak to the language of our hearts more than to the language of our brains. After I had left the Church for many years, I remember that my first movement back toward God was marked by listening in a darkened room one night to Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus.” It was only after getting someone to translate the words that I realized the music was Mozart’s great tribute to the Blessed Sacrament.
Has anybody had a similar experience? How can science explain this kind of movement of the heart played upon by musical instruments?
MOST DEFINITELY!!! I can’t answer the scientific side of it, but I can most assuredly say that music has brought me to higher levels of spirituality and closeness to God more so than almost any other thing on this earth. As a musician and someone who uses my voice to produce music, the entire experience can sometimes become transcendent. For me, music speaks the language of God.
I believe all music that I make is a prayer. I say a prayer before I open my mouth and the notes and words come out as my prayer as well. There have been times when while I was singing, whether sacred classical music or secular classical music, my mind will suddenly shift and I’m in this level in which I feel enraptured, like in ecstasy. I feel so much warmth and love, which I know is from God. Then, when I look out into the audience or down into the congregation from the choir loft, I sometimes see this glow surrounding many of the people and this warm light in the room. I know I probably sound like a TOTAL nut talking about it, but this is what I truly experience and feel. Once I am done singing during those special times, it’s as if I’m in a daze and not quite aware of my surroundings. It’s not until I hear from audience and sometimes even from congregants who seek me out after mass that I realize something occurred because they felt the same ecstasy as well.
When I am the listener and the same thing has occurred with the performer or musician who is rendering the music at mass, I also experience that same kind of ecstasy which the musician(s) (instrumentalist or singer) were used as a conduit between the spiritual and the earthly. It’s the most bizarre, yet amazing experience, and I know that at that moment the musicians I hear have tapped into their spiritual depths, let go of everything earthly and relied solely on the music to create such an inspiring piece of spiritual beauty. That is true art in any form of art, really.
It also doesn’t matter for me what language or lack of language it is in. Although I’ve had to learn languages for my musical training and have an elementary understanding of them, I actually don’t need to know the literal translation to experience what is being sung. If the singer or the instrumentalist understand what they want to convey, it will expose itself naturally. AT least that is what I get.
After a few years of analyzing myself, because I am so emotionally and spiritually connected to music, I think that is the reason why my negative reaction to poorly composed or just aesthetically ugly religious or sacred music is so visceral. I have at times come to the point of running to the bathroom to throw up when I’ve experienced it at mass, although I’ve more recently learned to keep it down and offer it up.
) and do secular, religious and sacred music. Music has been a part of my life for as far back as I can remember. I began my music lessons at 4 1/2, and have been involved in church music since I was about 8 singing in the choirs, then cantoring/choir, liturgical minister in college, then after a semester in London and experiencing wonderful music liturgies there and realized that what I was taught as a kid regarding “old” sacred music was pure bunk (basically, snubbing their noses on centuries of this music and that the Church doesn’t do that old stuff anymore), I joined the cathedral choir in my city back home which still did it and never looked back.
Although I personally don’t see myself as a philistine at least in the arts (I can’t speak for other aspects in life, as I’m sure I probably am regarding different subjects), I’d be proud to call myself one if it meant just being plain honest about a musical composition that is really garbage. Some people think that getting in with the avante garde will make them an individual as well. It doesn’t, obviously. You actually have to truly believe in it, not pretend to or delude yourself into believing it and unfortunately there are those who do that. That makes the music more about the Ego rather than about the spiritual aspects of finding God. Although, I have known a couple who are the real thing and thus have respect for them in that regard.