On the concept of 'religion in the music system

"Religion in the music system" means the appearance of religion and spirituality generally with an aesthetic-communicative system generally understood (emically) to be "music" rather than "religion". As we know from former readings, a clear-cut differentiation between "religious system" (including rituals, contexts, beliefs, ethical and cosmological doctrines, institutions, and social structures) and "musical system" (including practices of composition and performance, contexts, theories, aesthetics, pedagogies, institutions, media, and social structures) is not always possible, and in particular an emic distinction may not exist, especially in small-scale and preindustrial societies, e.g. Bali, at least in former times.

In other cases, a clear verbal and practical separation between "musical system" and "religious system" can be more definitely asserted, and one can diffferentiate therefore between:

1. music in the religious system
2. religion in the music system

We can discuss the conditions for such a differentiation, which are undoubtedly linked to several co-occuring factors:

• the division of labor which occurs in a complex society with a monetary economy
• rise of complex large-scale societies comprising differentiated quasi-autonomous social structures and institutions (e.g. church, school, voluntary associations, political organizations, government, corporations, etc.)
• capitalism, in which the relentless search for profit leads to adaptive differentiations, including the development of "entertainment" as as commodity.

More generally, the two systems interact; the impact of religion on the music system is broader than the mere appearance of the former within the latter, including:

• The appearance of spirituality in the music system (e.g. spirituality in jazz)
• The appearance of whole genres of religious music in the music system (e.g. gospel)
• The influence of religious sound upon music, through training or exposure (e.g. influence of styles of Qur'anic recitation upon many forms of 'secular' vocalization throughout the Islamic world)
• The influence of religious strictures upon music generally (e.g. the crackdown on popular music in Iran, together with support for refined Persian art music)

Can you think of other examples?

The appearance of spirituality in the music system can possibly be read as a form of resistance against the capitalist subsumption (exploitation?) of "art" (music) as commodity by underscoring the supposed antithesis - the eternal value of "perennial truths" expressed in art. This resistance occurs perhaps also in the emphasis upon "roots" or "traditional" music, transcending materialist aims. Religion and spirituality in music may represent the extreme: religion as a touchstone for the authenticity of true feeling, grounded in the experience and value of the cosmic, the transcendent, the permanent, the utterly immaterial, irrupting within the material music system (of productive forces and relations) as a means of material gain.

Whether this apparent act of resistance is (or can be) effective is a question for discussion...

Other discussion questions:

• what constitutes the appearance of religion in the music system? What are its signs?
• Consider how the spiritual enters the musical: what is the difference between simple text transformation (contrafactum) and sonic transformation? What about pragmatic transformations? How is spirituality transmitted in timbre, in texture, in references to religious music?
• what differentiates religion in the music system from music in the religious system? How could the same "unit" (song, etc.) be regarded as an instance of either phenomenon?
• how are social issues combined with the spiritual...'music with a message' (e.g. issues of civil rights and anti-racism appear in spiritual jazz; spirituals reference enslavement in ancient Egypt to reference slavery in the US; the dual meaning of freedom (social and spiritual))
• how completely can "religious" and "musical" systems ever be differentiated? Can we always (when can we) distinguish religion in the music system from music in the religious system? What is the difference? What are the indicative factors?

--Michael Frishkopf