Beauty At Work
Beauty at Work expands our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. Sociologist Brandon Vaidyanathan interviews scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders across diverse fields to reveal new insights into how beauty shapes our brains, behaviors, organizations, and societies--for good and for ill. Learn how to harness the power of beauty in your life and work, while avoiding its pitfalls.
Beauty At Work
The Transformative Power of Music | "Can Beauty Save the World?"
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In this panel during the international symposium "Can beauty save the world?" held at McGill University, Oct 24-25 2025, Jean-Sébastien Vallée (McGill), Katie Bank (Birmingham), Rebekah Wallace (Oxford), Ian Corbin (Harvard), and Jonathan Berger (Stanford) explored the transformative power of music. The panel was moderated by Stephen Bullivant (St. Mary's London).
We began with a performance by an acapella quartet from the Schulich School of Music (McGill).
Jean-Sébastien described the conductor’s task as creating a sonic space where sound becomes meaning—a community where difference becomes harmony. One of his singers, who had just lost her husband, came to perform because “singing with my choir is the only way I can breathe right now.” Katie and Rebekah described how early modern thinkers saw music as acting on the whole person, not as external stimulus but as an activity of the soul. Ian reflected on the relevance of music to our longing for wholeness, which passes through failure, undoing, despondence. Jonathan discussed his fascinating research on the sonic signatures of sacred spaces, and how the balance between clarity and blur in sound transforms acoustics into awe.
The event was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.
Learn more at www.canbeautysavetheworld.com and www.beautyatwork.net
#beauty #music #transformation #philosophy #musicology #spirituality
Hey everybody, welcome to Beauty at Work. We are in between seasons at the moment. So, in the meantime, I want to share with you a series of panel discussions from a symposium that we organized in Montreal in October 2025. This event was the launch of a new international research project called Can Beauty Save the World? The project is funded by the John Dempleton Foundation. The panels feature discussions between philosophers, historians, musicologists, neuroscientists, social scientists, religious studies scholars, and practitioners from a variety of domains exploring the meaning and power of beauty in a secular age. I hope you enjoy this discussion. Morning, everybody. Welcome to day two of our symposium. Can Beauty Save the World? We're going to start this morning with an experience of beauty. And uh and for that, I want to introduce uh Jeffrey Chan and then a group of uh students from the Schulich School of Music who will uh lead us in a performance.
SPEAKER_14Oh, I should say here.
SPEAKER_02Bonjour. So we are a group of core conducting students at McGill. It's our pleasure to be here to sing the opening a little bit of music for fun. So the conference is called Can Beauty Save the World, right? So what we just performed is a Renaissance piece by Lazus. So we have four more pieces. One piece that I really want to mention is by William Buildings. So most of the uh he's a very early American composer. Everything we know about him is that he looks very ugly. So his beauty can really save the world, but maybe his music can save the road. So we'll see if he can do it. Please enjoy.
SPEAKER_05Oh come quickly, sweetest one, and give my sword quickly Oh come quickly. Oh come quickly, sweetest one, and give my swords voice of my sports quick oh come quickly for us, what raised my spiritual quick, oh come quickly, oh come quickly, glorious, and raise my spite I am the rose of sharing and the lily of the valleys.
SPEAKER_06I am the rose of sharing and the lily of the valleys As the lily among the toes, so is my love among the daughters. As the apple tree, the apple tree among the tree gold. So is my beloved among the sons, so is my beloved among the sons.
SPEAKER_05I said for such things touched on the shadows in white, and his fruit and his fruit was sweet to my taste. And his fruit and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
SPEAKER_06He brought me to the bankruptcy house, his banner over me was love. He brought me to the bankruptcy house, his banner over me was love.
SPEAKER_05Stay me with legends.
SPEAKER_06Comfort me with apples, so I am sick.
SPEAKER_05For I am sick, for I am sick of love. I charge you the daughters of Jerusalem by the most of the field. That you start home, that you start at home, that you stir no tongue, that you stir no tongue, oh wake O wake, oh wake, oh wake my love to the peace. The voice of my beloved Behold we come up, living upon the mountains, steeping, skipping, stepping living upon the mountains, stepping upon the hills. My beloved is a sent unto me.
SPEAKER_06Rise up, rise up at highest up.
SPEAKER_05Rise up, my love, my stay will come away. For the Lord the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. For Lord the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The ring is over, the ring is over, the ring is over and gone. For all the winter is past the rain is over and gone.
SPEAKER_06The voice of my beloved Behold we come lipping upon the mountains, skipping skipping, skipping, skipping, skipping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.
SPEAKER_05My beloved stay and sent unto me rise up, rise up, rise up, rise up, my love, my death will come already.
SPEAKER_04That's wonderful. Uh it is now my pleasure to introduce the moderator for our first panel, which is on the transformative beauty of music. Uh, Dr. Stephen Bullivant is a professor of theology and sociology of religion at St. Mary's University in the UK and professorial research fellow in theology and sociology at the University of Notre Dame, Australia. Um I would like to welcome Stephen and the panelists to take the stitch.
SPEAKER_13Uh well, good morning. Um, after the choir saved the world, I'm here to ruin it again. Um it gives me great pleasure to introduce our panel is that it will become a panel at the end for the QA, but to stop them craning their heads to see the presentations, we're going to leave them in their seats um and bring them up in turn. John Sebastian Ballet is an acclaimed conductor and scholar and is professor of music here at McGill. Katie Bank is an early music historian and research fellow at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Rebecca Wallace is a philosopher who holds research fellowships at the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford. Ian Corbyn is another philosopher at Harvard Medical School and director of Harvard's Public Culture Project. And Jeremy Berger is a composer and musicologist at Stanford, where he directs the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
SPEAKER_03So, John Sebastian. Good morning, everybody. Bonjour. Welcome to Montreal. I hear that many of you are visiting from outside of Montreal. It's great to have you here at Miguel and uh in Montreal. We just heard fantastic singing from four students from the Schulek School of Music. They are also conductors, and I'm glad to uh have them in my studio as my uh students. So, starting this morning with music, uh lead us to ask this deep question can music through art, through through beauty, share, uh change the world? And I come to this question as a musician, as a performer, and mainly as a conductor. Everybody find me in one of the spots there. At the center of my work, every day, in rehearsal and in performance, there's one simple but powerful idea: transformation. The work of a conductor can look mysterious. Uh, you've probably seen a conductor standing at front of the orchestra, waving their arms. Maybe you've even wondered what does it all mean? What are we actually doing? And in truth, we conductors also ask the same thing frequently because conducting is not about control, it's not about telling musicians what to do. For me, conducting is about uh opening a space through gestures, through breath, through movement. My aim is to create a space, an artistic, emotional, sonic, human space where the music can take place. And in that space, musicians bring their own expression, their own emotion. My role is not to impose my interpretation, but to invite them, the musicians, into my vision and let them be artists and express themselves within the frame that I propose as a conductor. When that happens, the performers, the music, and yes, also the conductor are transformed all together. And this shared transformation, the meeting between people through sound, is what I would like to explore with you in the next few minutes. We're asking today how does art transform us? How does music transform us? And from my own experience, that question expands into several more. Who in turn transforms the music? How is music itself transformed? And perhaps more importantly, what makes transformation possible with music? When we engage with art, we enter a aesthetic experience, a moment where feeling, imagination, and understanding come together. But these moments are really simple. They happen on so many levels all at once. There's the personal transformation when we are moved by beauty, there's the communal transformation when we experience beauty through our musical community, and there's artistic transformation when a work of art is actually transformed through interpretation and performance. Let's take an example. A piece by J. S. Bach, you have here in front of you the first page of the manuscript of Bach Saint John Passion. Black ink on paper. It is silent, it does nothing. As long as it stays on the page, it is only potential. But when musicians take that score and bring it to life, when they breathe into it, it becomes a sound energy experience. That experience changes us, both listeners and performers, simply by being in contact with such a powerful masterword. Pieces like Bach's uh Martin B. Minor, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or Mahler's Second Symphony carry a creative force that transforms us. Their beauty, their complexity, their humanity. They remind us what genius can reveal about being alive. And something else happens too. The music itself changes. Each performance brings new life to the same note. Different people, different emotions, different audiences, different stories. They all color how the music sounds. The music of Ba or Beethoven or any piece is never the same twice. It is reborn every time it is played. And this is what makes art alive. It is not a fixed object, it is a dialogue between the score and our own humanity. Now let's look at a different kind of transformation. The one that happens within a community of performers. An orchestra or a choir is in many ways a small society, a living model of how individuals can listen, cooperate, and create together. It is made up of unique voices, each with its own personality, background, and personal voice, personal sound. And yet those differences don't divide, they connect. The musicians breathe together, listen together, and find balance together. And to me, this is the image of the ideal world, one that shows that harmony is not the absence of difference, but the art of shaping difference into something shared, into beauty. And sometimes during a rehearsal or a concert, something shifts. The musicians stop being many and become one. That unity, that shared purpose is truly powerful. And this is one more level of aesthetic experience. An experience of beauty in community. Beauty seen and perceived in the shared sense of community. Let me share a quick story with you. In this photo there with the singers, one of these singers is Anne. On the morning of our final rehearsal for this concert that you see here pictured on the screen, she lost her husband who had been struggling with health issues for many months. And that was a really sad day for Anne and for you know all of those who knew her. We all thought she would step away, but she did not. She insisted on singing all five concerts. When I asked her why, she said, Because singing with Mike Wire is the only way I can breathe right now. And that sentence has never left me. In that moment, transformation did not come from the music itself. It came from the act of singing together on the power of community. This, I believe, is one of art's greatest gifts. It allows us to be together, to see beauty, to live in a static experience when words are no longer enough. Now let's think about the audience that you see here. They are not just spectators, they are part of the music. When a concert begins, energy moves in both directions, from the stage to the seats, from the seats back to the stage. The audience shapes what happens, their silence, their breath, their attention, all becomes part of the performance. The musicians feel it, they respond to it, and the result is always unique. With the audience in mind, each concert becomes a living exchange, a circle of transformation between composer, performer, and listener. Now I want to return to my own experience as a conductor, to what it feels like to stand at the center with so many stories happening all at once. Here you can see a photo of a performance of Handel's Messiah. And at that very moment, we are singing the Hallelujah chorus. And as many of you may know, there's a tradition that calls for the audience to stand during this movement. This comes from a king who once decided to stand, and since then, many of us in many parts of the world stand when it happens. So that's what you see there. That moment when thousands of people rise together as the music of the Hallelujah chorus begins is really moving. There's something powerful in that moment. On stage with me, there's the, you don't see them, but there's the the Toronto Middleston Choir, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, two organizations with more than a century of shared history. Also on front of me is Anne singing through her grief. Her personal story became part of something much larger in that moment. And before us, or behind me, the audience standing, some who have heard that piece countless times, reliving old memories of the Hallelujah chorus. And some others hearing it for the very first time and probably wondering what is happening? Why is everybody standing right now? Is it the end? It's all happening at the same time. And the hall is filled with all these stories. And there are even more. There are the stories, so backtrack there. There are the stories of the musicians with their years of diligent training, the organizations that are present there with their long histories, the audience as individual, coming with their own backgrounds, and also as a collective body that in that moment decided to assemble. All of them are present, resonating together in the same space at the same time. And beyond that, we can also hear other stories. The stories of the instruments, many of them built centuries and centuries ago in different parts of the world. We can also think about the hall in which we perform that was created and built by people who believe that experiencing music could build connection and transform us. And there's the invisible story of music itself, traveling through time, carrying memory, emotion, and hope. All of this at the same time in that second when the music takes place. Moments like this reminds me that music is never only about the present. It gathers times, people, and meetings. To me, while no longer in linear time, we enter circular time, sacred time, a space where past, present, and future meet, and where every story, every life finds its voice with all the others. So, what does this tell us about beauty and its power to transform? To me, music gives us a way to feel and to understand beyond words. It teaches us to listen deeply, attentively to ourselves and to each other. And in that act of listening, we sometimes touch something beyond ourselves, a shared vibration, a sense of belonging in a community, a glimpse of the sacred in the everyday. When we are moved by a single chord, beautiful musical phrase, or even a silence, we step outside our individual boundaries. We feel connected to the music, to each other, to all our life stories, to our shared history, and to our humanity. And that to me is what transformation through music really means. What does music mean because music does not only reflect the world, music can remake the world. One note and one shared breath and one shared silence at a time. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_11So Rebecca and I are co-eyes based in the UK working on the project, and we just wanted to introduce a little bit about what we're doing here.
SPEAKER_07In the 1920s fantasy novel, Lud in the Mist, a young boy is playing in the attic with his friends. An old lute tumbles out from among the stacks of stored goods, and a single note is plucked. This note forever changes his life. Although, therein body, Nathaniel Chanticleer's life is now lived to the temple of the fairy folk rather than his village compatriots, and he is never again the same man. This story shows in fantasy form the power of music not just to affect our lives, but to constitute our mental and emotional worlds as well as our relationship to the world at large. That is, how we perceive, interact with, and inhabit the world. To ask the question of how music can do this is at the same time a facet of a much broader question. What is the relationship between us and the world? How are we the kinds of beings the world can influence? And how is the world such that it can have an effect on us? In the early modern period, this broader cosmological and metaphysical question was often worked out through the analysis and the practice of music. Ongoing debates in the 16th and 17th centuries assessed the question of music's power over us and at the same time took place within larger discussions of both the composition of music and the composition of the human person, such that we can be moved by music. So Descartes, for example, wrote his Compendium musicae in kind of 1618, 1619, in which he attempts to work out a theory of perception through looking at music. But this theory of perception will then culminate later in his 1649 uh passions of the soul, which talks much more broadly about how perception works, how things out in the world can have an effect on us. Even before this fuller articulation of philosophy, though, early modern writers wondered very intently and intentionally about music.
SPEAKER_11So, what form did this wandering, this metaphysical wondering take in the 16th, late 16th, and early 17th centuries, in England specifically? So, amongst and between the long Reformation, the rise of English print, the prolific theatrical and poetic entertainments of wordsmiths like Shakespeare, Sidney, or Spencer, or the songs of composers such as William Byrd or Thomas Wilkes, this musical, metaphysical wondering bubbles within a variety of art forms and writings. And so it's just a couple quick examples. This is a fairly well-known quotation from Shakespeare. Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hail souls out of men's bodies? Sheep's guts are what they made the strings on stringed, it's very stringed instruments out of. And so somehow this thing that exists in the physical world is does something a bit more. But this is a very poetic understanding of this concept, and we'll talk about that more in a little bit. This is from more of a treatise rather than an artistic output. But Thomas Wright wrote in 1601, for what reason do corporal music and consorts of instruments so ravish and abstract a spirit, a soul, transporting it into almost a paradise of joy. One of the reasons we're looking at this period is because these words, a soul, a spirit, animal spirits, there wasn't a single way, not that we have one today, but there wasn't a single way to talk about these things. And there were a lot of pseudo-poetic, pseudo-literal ways of discussing the soul, the quality of the things that happen inside of us. I think the other thing to recognize from this quotation is that Wright recognizes that music is something of the corporal world. It exists externally, it is something physical, but then it goes inside and does something. So we're specifically looking at this period because it was a time of fundamental shifts in thought about music and sensing. In medieval and early 16th century philosophies, music was both a literal and poetic model for the human person, musica humana, with our inner world a microcosm of the universe, which was understood as the music of the spheres or musica mondana. The study of music was also the study of the human person, as music ultimately presented the body with fundamental questions about the quality of music and human nature, as well as the relationship between them. So we know that you know you clap your hands, you hear an instrument, it is a physical thing. Early modern thinkers knew that it kind of went through the air somehow, entered the ear. And that's where things uh get a little bit more vague because they know it goes into the body, somehow resonates with something inside of you and changes your actions. It makes you feel things that make you do things. And that's what these early modern thinkers were really uh concerned with. Um I won't get into it too much today, but the impact of the Reformation is substantialness because it does shift um ways of thinking about sense senses, which is all fundamentally tied into this. And early modern thinkers couldn't quite agree about how music worked on the soul or the spirits. So music, one one writer says music crept miraculously by stealth, finding its way along a certain passage into men's souls. Um, or perhaps some thinkers thought more along a pseudo-aristotelian sympathetic resonance, such as George Sandes here. So in 1632, George Sandes noted the effect of music on human feeling, but rejected the harmony of the spheres. So he saw that as a more poetic way of understanding music rather than the actual mechanical way that the universe was set. And that's something that shifts in this period between the 16th and the later 17th century. Um he instead argues that the spirits which agitate in the heart receive a warbling and dancing air into the bosom and are made one with the same wherewith they have an affinity, whose motions lead the rest of the spirits dispersed through the body, raising or suppressing the instrumental parts according to the measures of the music. And I should note that this is just in the footnotes to his edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses. I can talk about all of this art in great detail. I'll refrain for now, but if you have any questions, happy to chat about any of these as well. So then by the later 17th century, you get writers such as Samuel Pete, who often conflates his music, his feeling about romantic love, his feelings about spiritual or godly love. So, like many in his society, Peach was a regular churchgoer, yet most of his spiritual writing was often reserved for musical rather than overtly religious experiences. So, for example, here we have here the best company for music I ever was in my life, and I wish I could live and die in it. Both for music and for the face of Mrs. Pierce and my wife, Anne Nip, who was pretty enough, but the most excellent, mad-humored thing, and sings the noblest that I ever heard in my life, and rolled with her some things together most excellently. I spent the night in ecstasy almost. Anyone who participates in communal music making today completely gets this experience. It's a high, like nothing else, and you seek it out. Another example? Ah, but that which did please me beyond anything in the whole world was wind music. It was the wind music, which is so sweet that it ravished me. And indeed, in a word, it did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, as I have formerly been when in love with my li my wife. That neither then nor all evening, going home and at home, I was not able to think of anything else, but remained all command over the soul of a man as this did upon me, and makes me resolve to practice wind music and to make my wife do the like. His poor wife. So in religious and more secular eras alike, one finds musical spiritual experience on the periphery of, or even central to, fundamental questions of human existence, such as the quality and purpose of beauty, being, or community.
SPEAKER_07So we can see that for a variety of theological and philosophical reasons, the early modern period is a really interesting laboratory thought for our study. This is not only because debates about music took place in and amongst broader, increasingly empirical methodological shifts in the study of the natural world, but also because of the way the English language was shaped and codified throughout this period. So today, for example, even in our more secular society, we still resort to platitudes about a choir sounding like angels or describe a performance as heavenly. As these are kind of still considered the most accessible terms for such an experience. The spiritual language surrounding these musical experiences has persisted, in other words, even as society has changed. So, but what's interesting, I think, to think about is that we may have lost a meta, a metaphysical key for understanding how spirituality was and also can be understood. So, how can we both recover a deep understanding of how spirituality and singing are kind of entangled while articulating this in terms of today's spiritual language, you know, language that resonates with um how people experience the world today. In a purely mechanistic view of sense perception, um, which does inform still how we talk about perception today. This doesn't really fully explain how music can have power over us, because for one, music affects everyone differently. And so, therefore, a kind of completely mechanical explanation is insufficient for explaining music's power over us. The problem of how one translates the kind of purely physical sensations to something like an experience, maybe an emotion, that moves us fundamentally to our core as whole human beings, is still largely unresolved. A different anthropology, one which was prevalent before the modern period, however, might inform some of these issues by reframing lines of questioning at the outset. So, for example, rather than seeing the question as one of how something can kind of affect us from the outside, coming and moving a kind of part of us that um is a discrete entity with inside. Maybe we can look more at uh the kind of activity of a living, moving body, a person as a whole, um along more Aristotelian lines, let's say. Um, and music is a vital entry point into this discussion. Music in the early modern period is a particularly rich area for examining shifting notions about human nature and spirituality, as the relationship of human beings to music was often central to exploring these anthropological questions. So at the theoretical level, we eventually see the evolution of a more, let's say we might term it now Cartesian view of body and soul. But in an Aristotelian metaphysics, the soul and the body aren't separate. There's a kind of living, breathing human being as a whole, which is composed of the dynamic structure of the body, the kind of self-creating active nature of a living body and its material constituents. Um, and that's the proper seed of human activity, the person as a whole. Um, this makes many activities open to being spiritual, given that living human breathing bodies are soulish bodies. So, just to kind of sum this up by a quote from Aquinas, so when we talk about the soul being moved, Aquinas says this is actually kind of a matter of speech. Um, and Aquinas says that whereas we say the eye sees, it's really the human person who sees by means of the eye. And he says, well, just so one can say that the soul thinks just as the eye sees. But one speaks more strictly in saying that the human being thinks through the soul. And the early modern period, because of its critical shift in anthropological understanding, gives key insights into how and why we use the categories we use we do today for talking about spirituality. Music making was a critical part of these early modern discussions and a perfect example of human beings engaging in an activity for which there was no clear distinction between spiritual and musical dimensions. Musicking is an activity of the whole human person and acted by means of our soulish constitution. Music seems to have the power to change not just one or two or five discrete emotions, moods, feelings in us. Rather, it seems to kind of change our whole psychological spiritual makeup. Like Nathaniel Chanticler, one note can change the course of an entire life, sending it in an entirely new direction. This is implicit knowledge to everyone, anyone who has experienced music and this way in this way. Can music's power help us recapture and reconnect with a spiritual body?
SPEAKER_10So I was just gonna sum up some of the historical. We have various parts, but oh yeah. Sorry, Mike.
SPEAKER_11Um, we have various parts to our UK subgrant, but I'm gonna sum up some of our research questions for the historical portion. So, how might this history inform our understanding of transformative musical experience today? How might pre-modern musical experience give us insight into the formation of our current categories for talking about spirituality, musical experience, and the human person? Can it help us discover or rediscover a fundamentally different approach to what constitutes well-being? And so on and so forth. We have more, but we can discuss those a little bit later. Thank you.
SPEAKER_12Thanks to Brandon and Tara and the other organizers for inviting me. Uh, the uh event last night featured multiple personal heroes of mine, um, including two people who served on my doctoral committee many years ago. Uh so if you hear resonance with what I'm gonna talk about today and what we heard last night, that that makes good sense. So, one of the questions that was posed to us uh in advance of this panel was uh under what circumstances, how can music give rise to transcendent experience? Um, I'm gonna try to dig in on that a little bit and offer some thoughts. Transcendence, when we glimpse it, often emerges from the ashes of worldly failure. This failure is part of our birthright. For whatever reasons, the human animal seems to come equipped with certain desires and intuitions that cannot be properly realized in a purely material, spatiotemporal world. One central desire, perhaps it is the central desire, is for wholeness. This desire shows both its spatial and temporal faces in the phenomenon of falling in love. There is a rich and variegated body of poetry, song, philosophy, and scripture that describes the desire of lovers for seamless total belonging, to be a whole together, or at least to be one flesh. This desire is, of course, doomed to failure. The space between lovers is finally ineradicable. Similarly, the onset of new love can give rise to desires and pledges, for a union that will stretch out unbroken into eternity, that simply cannot be satisfied in our time-bound world, at least not using the simple resources of a fragile mortal organism. Everything that has parts eventually falls apart. When the reality of this futility presents itself, when we are grown old in one sense or another, and the chase for worldly wholeness has shown itself illusory, we have a few options. We can despair, we can reconcile ourselves to our tragic, fragmented lot, or we can keep chasing, but now differently. This latter course is described by the poet T. S. Eliot. We must be still and still moving into another intensity for a further union, a deeper communion, through the dark cold and the empty desolation, the wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters of the petrol and the porpoise. And my end is my beginning. This chase follows on On the widespread and almost, I would say, ubiquitous sense, that there is, beneath the level of human effort and participation, or in perception rather, beneath my attempts to get and keep the people or things that I want, a different kind of wholeness, which we can discern by inference and intuition, if not direct observation. We can intuit this kind of wholeness in the miraculous cohesion of every living thing. It is what the physicist and philosopher Henri Bortoft calls an active absence. Modern scientists have assembled schematic drawings of the processes of life that would beggar the imagination of earlier scientists. We have a massive and ever expanding sense of how the different parts of a living thing function and work together. Part A of the cell works constantly to renew the molecules of part B while being simultaneously dependent upon part B for its own functioning. There's a marvelous symphonic quality to every living thing, an impossibly virtuosic internal orchestration directing and coordinating the organism's various parts and processes. Modern scientists who, as a professional matter, eschew any talk of the soul, are prone to say things like the organism, the system, or the whole is responsible for this work of coordination, without being able to point to the place where this conductor stands. The less reflective among them might point to DNA as the coordinating center. But this is an act of misdirection. DNA on its own is inert. It must be activated by other parts of the cell, acting at the behest of, well, we wish we could say. Well composed music, I want to suggest, is an artifactual riff on this active sort of absence, this invisible whole that coordinates and harmonizes an orchestra of parts. A composition animates and directs, making, for a time, one from many. Just like the soul temporarily gathers together the parts of an organism and makes them one thing. The discrete physical entities of performers, instruments, tones, or rhythms are gathered together by the composition and become, in some sense, via the mysterious interpenetration and co-resonance, which we call harmony and rhythm one thing. If a score is a sort of artificial soul, it is a soul capable of transmigration. A song exists outside the vibrating strings or vocal cords that make it incarnate in this room or that. It can hopscotch from performance to performance, manifesting again and again across time and space. It may be carried on written scores or in neuronal proteins, but these material entities are bearers of the song, not the thing itself. Music can, therefore, hurl the receptive listener's mind soulward. If you listen closely to a piano concerto, it is easy enough to feel that you are somehow participating in whatever invisible mind is guiding the play of the parts, feeling what it feels, understanding what it understands. This is compounded with your participation in the interior lives of the musicians, who are both communing with and playing host to the mind of the composer. This is a kind of experience of belonging that is ripe for confrontation with Elliot's further union and deeper communion. And yet not every listen, not nearly every listen, produces such a confrontation. For that, I want to suggest some kind of senescence, some kind of oldness, is often called for. We must be made bone deep aware of the futility of our normal ways of belonging, at least in some cases, our normal ways of pursuing wholeness. The limits of our discrete individual selves must be undeniably clear, or why would we look to anything so much deeper and further afield? But this oldness can be a prelude to rebirth. In 2010, the music psychologist Alf Gabrielson published a book titled Strong Experiences with Music. In a chapter titled Music and Transcendence, he collates a number of first-person accounts of transcendent experiences occasioned by music drawn from multiple decades. One thing that crops up very frequently is the affective experience of loss, smallness, melancholy, and longing, with various indicators of personal finitude. A young man, for instance, reports that his transcendent experience, occasioned by Arvo Perrt's Spiegel im Spiegel, was characterized by what he calls melancholy, a feeling of longing, humility, and reflection. He goes on to say that tranquility and silence are important. An elderly woman reports in the 1940s that while singing in the choir for Brahms Requiem, notice a piece about death, that quote, suddenly the experience of the sound of the orchestra and choir together with the content of the text became so powerful that I was sort of lifted up out of myself. Perhaps it could be expressed expressed in terms of falling to bits. A middle-aged woman reports that my body and the music became a whole where I knew I was dead, but it was a death that was a birth into something that was liberatingly light, a light that didn't exist in this life. A woman in the 1980s reports, in relation to Wagner's Reingold, I felt a sensation of incorporal floating, a total emerging with the music, or quite simply with something bigger. God, the universe, perhaps, where the experience of me, myself was completely annihilated. Okay, there's many more examples, I'd better skip some. So some of the pieces mentioned here have death as a theme. Some are in a minor key, some have a melancholy mood. Some turn in slow cycles that bespeak a kind of stasis, a pause of linear progress and agency. So I want to suggest that what all of these pieces have in common is this some enactment of undoing, of the death of ordinary human agency. I am powerless, I am small, I am coming to pieces. This sort of kind of uh mimed death cuts me off from my normal ways of pursuing wholeness, and in the process opens me up to a form of wholeness that seems to come rushing up of its own accord to show me that I have always already been part of it. So epiphanies like these are not unique to music. Other non-artifactual aesthetic experiences can also play this role. In some striking accounts that I've examined in other in writings of mine, um uh trees are often a site for this kind of transcendent experience. Every living thing is, in principle, fired by the deep beauty of soulish self-creation, and so more beautiful more than beautiful enough to open our eyes to this deeper kind of union and communion. But if ordinary things are to announce themselves in this way, it sometimes helps, in the accounts I've looked at, to be despondent, uh, to be discouraged, to be struck by one's one's own irradicable existential limitations. So uh Richard last night talked about the fact that a lot of really important uh works have been written in prison. I think that's an example. So I've no doubt that that in some of the musical experiences discussed above, the ground might have been prepared by experiences of just this sort. Yes, just this sort. Um music is perhaps unique, I want to suggest, in its ability to specifically and intentionally tear down and route to its offering of rebirth.
SPEAKER_08So um first of all, welcome and thank you for inviting me here. This is uh an extraordinary event with extraordinary people. The first talk started with a slide that space where sound becomes music. And today I'm gonna talk about the space itself, the material place where sound turns to music. The last talk mentioned um Elliot's line, In my end is my beginning, and the speaker said, I am powerless, I am small, I am coming to pieces. The first talk yesterday was um was Keith's Grecian Urn, O To Grecian Urn, in which he says, the foster child of silence and slow time, a line that completely eluded me when I was in high school and we first learned the poem, but now comes back to haunt me. Let me start with this example from Bach. And even though you're hearing discrete chords and discrete events, you notice in the spectrogram that there is sound that continues all the way through, which is the reverberant sound of the home. Eulogizing his father, Carl Philippim Bach recounted how upon entering an organ, how about encountering an organ in a church, Johann Sebastian would, in Carl Philipp's words, quote, test to see whether the organ has good lungs. To determine this, Bach would, quote, draw out every speaking stop and play in the fullest and richest possible texture. At this, the organ builders would often grow quite pale and fright. One can only imagine this effect as he uh went from church to church and town to town and tested the lungs of this organ. Upon pressurized air exhaling through a church organ pipe, sound diffuses, reflects, and reverberates throughout the structure. Each arch, each column, each buttress, each pew affects the sound quality, blurring, distorting, resonating, amplifying, and coloring the music being performed. Architectural space is a filter whose reflective and resonant properties modify sound. The space within which sound is created and experienced itself is itself a musical instrument. In fact, it is in a very real sense the musical instrument. Sound is transitory, fleeting, and ephemeral. Sound can distort temporal perception. Music can just suspend time. There should be a a uh snippet here from uh Victoria's Oma Numysterium, which is um uh an incredible work of acoustic blur. Architectural acoustics can further alter temporal perceptions. Architecture is voluminous, stationary, and material. At times it alters perceptions of size, and in particular, perception of one's own size. One can feel small, confronting vastness. These altered perceptions can trigger and convey deep affective states, and in the case of music, it can be transformative. Sensory responses and cognitive responses are a blur in this case. We often talk about, in the last two days, we've heard the the term perception, and I think it was used vaguely, if not um incorrectly, in terms of that point where a sound coming into the ear is perceived and then interpreted in the auditory cortex. That that path that it takes is um is in itself a mysterious and amazing path. This wall painting from Pompeii depicts Echo and Narcissus, hopelessly lamenting her unrequited love for narcissists who is infatuated with his own reflection. Echo is doomed to repeat all she hears. The inherent pathos of the acoustic echo is ubiquitous across time and culture. Western music has embodied it as a pervasive and fundamentally characteristic, uh as a fundamental characteristic in virtually every period and genre. A great deal of sacred architecture elicits awe and wonder through echo. For a person from my generation, this sound immediately triggers a response. So this is uh Pink Floyd's uh uh uh work, Echoes. And here is a uh snippet from uh from a uh dance by Henry Purcell. So Percell actually orchestrates the echo. He writes the echo into the piece. This is uh a small church in Rome, which I spent many, many, many months uh studying. Um it's the church uh San Anocetto uh in Palazzo Altems. Um it's become important to me because uh as I spent a year in Rome study studying acoustics, um I uh I was sent to this place by someone uh haphazardly who said, This place has really wonderful sound. And I walked in and it was transformational. It completely changed my life. And so um so I spent months doing careful studies of the acoustics of space. We measured it, we modeled it, we popped balloons in it, we did sign wise sweeps in it, we um we did everything we needed to have a complete understanding of the space. And then I asked the curator of the Museum of Palazzo Altemps what she knew about the music that was written for this space, and she said, Well, come with me, and she took me up to her to her office, and she opened her cabinet, and sitting behind so Italian, sitting behind her cat her desk is a stack of uh manuscripts from 1604, the year the church was consecrated. And this was all the music that was collected for this church, the the greatest composers of Rome. Um and um and in studying uh Duke Altemps, I began who was himself a uh uh composer, he was um he was a mathematician, an astronomer, a collector of instruments, and very much involved in the architecture of this church, it dawned on me that here's a person who was thinking about the relationship of the space and the music. Um, and the more I study this music, the more I'm convinced that this is one sweet spot of many, where we can see that the correlation between the architectural space and the music that was written is a direct one. So this is a um, this is so that first recording was done in near anachoic conditions. Um, and then with the studies, the acoustic studies we did of the church, we built a convolution filter that we were able to convolve that recording with the acoustics of the church. And what you heard in the second recording is exactly how it sounds within this church. Um the animation is um is a very slowed-down version of what happens when one sound, in this case a balloon pop, uh, dissipates through the church. So it's a it's an incredibly complex object. So the balance between acoustic clarity and blur is what makes this space a particularly sweet acoustic space. And that balance pervades the experience of music throughout. It was one that became particularly acutely important early modern art, composition, architecture, and thinking. Um, just to uh underscore the difference here, so this is another example from the same setting by Felice Anirio heard within the acoustics of Palazzo Altemps. And just as a point of comparison, we did another study of the of Chiesa de Jesus, the the central Jesuit church in Rome, which was a church that was uh built and consecrated at approximately the same time. Um and here there was uh a wonderful controversy in um in building the church. The the Jesuit priests wanted a flat roof in order for there to be acoustic clarity, for their words to be heard. And the and uh uh uh Cardinal Farnese, who was uh funding the church, wanted a dome for particularly for visual pleasure, and um knowing that it would entirely distort the acoustics. So here's the same work as heard in uh Chiesa Digital. So our our current ears have gotten pretty used to um to this incredible blur, but to me it it's it's it's sort of an atrocious um uh uh act on this music that has this beautiful clarity. And it goes back to that initial uh example of Bach, where the sound is blurred from one chord to the next. So what is it about music that created in a particular space evokes all? Can we find relationships between music and architecture for which the work was created? And I conclude by asking these questions, which are have been plaguing me for about a dozen years now and continue to plague me. And I will conclude with one more brief example. This these are the final moments of Alvin Lussier's uh monumental piece, I am sitting in a room, in which Lucier sat in a small room and recorded himself speaking, and then recorded the recording and recorded the recording and recorded the recording and recorded the recording until the resonance and acoustic and reverberation of the of the room completely distorted his speech. So the beginning of the piece is him saying, I am sitting in a room and and describes what he's doing, and this is his last iteration of it. So this is a rather extreme example of what decay and reverberation and resonance will do to music. We are used music read. Thank you.
SPEAKER_13That was fascinating. What I mean, bodies presumably affect space and and and the acoustics and and the kind of the instrument of the space. Um so I mean, how does a full church differ from an empty church?
SPEAKER_08Absolutely. I'm not sure. Yeah, absolutely. That's that's um so I mentioned the pews and the and the but but the people in the church and what they're wearing, the tapestries, they're everything is uh is a uh has effect on the acoustics. And in the models that we build, we actually build um we build um uh we model the differences between a church that's full of people and and absolute people.
SPEAKER_09Oh, I think we've got a roving mic, so do you pause to just curious if you've ever seen David Burns' TED Talk on the coevolution of music and architecture? Okay. Yes, I have.
SPEAKER_08And David and I have talked a lot about this. Amazing.
SPEAKER_09Thanks to all the panelists, a wonderful eclectic group, a president. Presentations. There was a strand for me that ran through them. And it started already with the performance at the beginning because I was looking at the singers and I was thinking that the experience of the music is partly sound, but it's also corporeal. And it also involves looking at their faces as they sing and the way that they embody the music as they project and breathe and so on. And so I was thinking about corporeality with each presentation. And I think that they all, maybe in different ways, and some more explicitly than others, touched on this issue. We listen to recordings of Pink Floyd or whoever, and that's that's quite a bit different from experiencing the music in the material space and in the embodied exchange that's involved in music. So I just uh interested in any further comments you have about how important the corporeal fact of um music being uh uh performed through through bodies changes the experience and and the power of music.
SPEAKER_03Let's start from the the performer standpoint. I I think you're completely right that the way we look, the way we communicate, not just through sound, but through just our being and our presence has a big impact. And uh in performing arts, this is a big part of what we train uh singers and performers and conductors to connect that way. Uh to me, as a conductor, when I think about how my gestures are influencing people witnessing them, uh this is part of this as as well. And it also impacts the audience. Seeing a conductor moving a specific way connected to the sound would have an impact. There are a number of research about mirror neurons, how how those mirror neurons react to specific gestures being made and how those mirror neurons would fire when we see specific gestures. And I think this is a way that from a conductor to an orchestra or singers, specific way of being, specific way of breathing, would have an impact on them. And the other way too, this being done from the stage would impact the audience as well, at the same level as the sound, as I think. And I think this is, as you mentioned, we record, we listen to recordings, the impact is different. Not just not because the sound is slightly different, but because we don't have this connection with the human, with the body that impacts our mere the mirror neurons.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I think one of the questions that I'm really interested in is how our view of what a body is changes over time. So, you know, we have words like materiality, immateriality, body, disembodied. But actually, if you look at kind of different metaphysical constitutions of the world, what that means can vary depending on how you conceive the material or the physical world to be constituted. So I think the the body is an interesting one in terms of human beings because it's a living body. And one of the questions in a kind of Aristotelian framework is what is the difference between a living body and a non-living body? And I think maybe there is something there. Music and singing specifically, I think is an interesting question because you're breathing. You know, there's there's so many facets of it that have to do specifically with the living body. And I think in music too, you know, if you look at the constitution of music, it's not just the sound waves, it's the organization of the sound waves. And it's the, you know, is a whole host of other things around the way that the, let's say, the material realities and the not quite so material, but the ones that are manifested through the material, like the organization or the relationship between the different notes, um, is constituted. So I think you're right. I mean, that's that's something I feel like music is a really interesting case study to look at the way that we conceive of what is physical and what is material.
SPEAKER_01Hello, thank you for everything. Uh, it's a little bit less of a question rather than a comment, which I'd love for you to respond to. So I'm a voice teacher, and one of the things that I've recognized is that the posture of the teacher also affects how um, and I mean that spiritually and physically, affects what comes out of the student. Like my student will be different if I get up and stand beside them, if I sit behind the piano, if I mirror their movements, uh, and also if they can see themselves. So I purposefully get them to work not looking at themselves and looking at themselves, because sometimes I'll say, look in the mirror. I think you're automatically gonna see what's needed here. And that helps develop a relationship to themselves and to welcome their own body and to get used to it because it's ever-changing. We're literally corporally different every day. So, what would you say about the the role of hospitality and within the context of teaching in order to develop like the sort of things that you've been talking about in terms of communion and transformation?
SPEAKER_03I think it's from a performance standpoint. I I think what you mentioned about the the impact of one's posture on the sound is is great. And again, I think it it does connect with the the the impact of mirror neurons, where we see something and how we perceive it and how it affects our own being. Often with students, we see it with singers or conductors or any performer that's a sense of proprioception that is not fully clear, they don't really always understand where their body is and what is happening in them. So seeing the model and through through their eyes, but also through mirror neurons that just give them a feeling, I think is is great. And the impact of that to me is when we perform, we have such a big impact on those who are seeing us. If we hear a singer that has a really tight jaw singing for us, we don't, I mean, we may hear it in the sound, but at some point we may find our own jaw getting a bit tighter. So this is beyond understanding of the music. This is this uh you know connection that not that is happening. And I think that this has a lot of power. So this is beyond the power and impact of music, but it's this kind of this human connection that that we can perceive and the impact that it has on us.
SPEAKER_11There's a lot of this in Shakespeare's studies as well. You know, how people communicate through gesture. It's all beyond language, right? It's it's gesture is such an important part of performance in any any kind of quote unquote performance. I don't really have anything to add other than this is something that I think about a lot in terms of early modern performance, especially because they didn't really have a concept of performance as we know it today. So, what are you doing? What are people doing when they engage in music and engage in music and when they engage in in uh theatrical things as well? Like, what exactly are they doing if we don't have that word performance? So that's something I would love to talk about with anyone at some point.
unknownThank you.
SPEAKER_04That was fantastic. I have a question that I've been pondering around the the maybe some of the things that Ian talked about. I mean, uh, the relationship to things like grief and loss, and even even things that Jean Sebastian talked about, where some of those experiences are triggered by uh encountering music, maybe in certain spaces, uh, music that may not have any particular lyrical content. But the, you know, so you might be sitting in a in a venue where something about the texture of the sound or the way it impacts you isn't affecting you simply on a sensory basis, but is evoking meaning. And I'd be curious if you all could shed some light on what is it about sounds that may not be tied to like it may not be trying to convey a particular meaning, or maybe it is, but but it's not just awakening some kind of pleasure center in the brain, right? But it it is tied, it is, it matters to us precisely because it evokes certain meanings. But where do those meanings reside or how is it that those are evoked?
SPEAKER_08So I'll I'll just sort of reiterate what I said before, which is when one is in a space that has a large, large reverberation, a long decay time, one tends to feel small and one one gets a sense of vastness. And that's that's an initial initial sensorial response that's um that's often related to the music that's being played or the sound or the words that are being said there, but that in itself is an affective response to sound.
SPEAKER_12Um I don't know how good an answer this will be. I uh I worked for some years as an art dealer, and a lot of the art that I represented, uh the artists I represented worked in in abstract uh modes. And so there'd be colors splashed across and gestures. Um, and what I found was that if you looked close and hard enough, if you took enough time with two colors sitting next to each other, you could start to feel like, I mean, nothing that the painter would have articulated in words, but I remember looking at one uh painting for a little while with in the artist studio and saying, God, the this color harmony, like it does finally work, but but just barely, and there's some residue of not working. And is this about sort of relationships and aging and accepting things that are incomplete but work? And he was sort of like, yeah, yeah, kind of, yeah. So all I can say about that is that I think we have borderline miraculous abilities to uh to ascertain meaning in nonverbal material stuff and and read in it if we're open and sensitive enough to read it in a certain way.
SPEAKER_03And I think from a a performance standpoint, the the meaning of any music is created by the context in which it's performed. The space has a lot to do with that. Who are the listeners, who are the performers? You know, we had mentioned before Brahms Requiem. In in the second performance of Brahms Requiem, the piece was still incomplete. And number five, which is the one with the Soprano solo, The Soprano Sings Only Once. So that movement had not been written yet. And when it was performed, them that was for a Good Friday service, and the church thought it was not Christian enough, so they said, let's add something to make Brahms Requiem a little bit more appropriate. So they added, I know that my Redeemer leaveth from Messiah, from Handel's Messiah. So they added that solo at that exact moment within Brahms Requiem. And Brahms heard that and thought, I need to add a soprano solo. Uh but then when they added that piece, I could imagine when the music of Handel took place in the middle of a requiem, the meeting, the perception of that text and of that music was completely different. When we hear it as part of Messiah, opening part three, there's a sense of light and hope in E major. There's something bright about it. In Brahms Week, Quiem, when we get there, I would imagine that the perception of that was much more reflective, much more about the grief. So the same music, depending on the context, can have a completely different uh taste.
SPEAKER_13If there is one more. Yeah, I think Elaine.
SPEAKER_00Oh, well, I want to ask a question, and and I have to outline the steps, citing a few uh things in neuroscience, and the neuroscientists in the room might tell me that each of those steps is no longer believed, so I apologize in advance. But I'm just wondering if in thinking about synesthesia, some scientists, for example, Ramashandran, say that one account is that there's incomplete pruning between different sections of the brain, and that the that the the synesthetic uh you know experiences that uh incomplete. And Ramashandran says that may actually be a model for the way metaphor works, that um that there is this crosstalk in the brain, that um you may not or I may not have that same kind of crosstalk. And yet when the poet says it, um I immediately recreate it in my brain. And there's one philosopher, unfortunately, whose name I'm forgetting, but in an article in Noose, um he argues that when somebody like Shakespeare or any poet Hopkins heats um introduces metaphors, it's as though they are at that moment shifting into a new dialect, yet on the spot, we all become fluent and we can speak that language. And I'm I'm just wondering if that is um seems also descriptive of what's happening in music. And I guess when you were showing the the transcript of Black's manuscript that that I mean the distance between his mind or understanding of music and mine is so vast, and yet some recreation of the Olympic feats that are being carried out is actually being being recreated.
SPEAKER_03I mean, the to build on the last part of your comment, the recreation, the bringing to life what we see from the score, especially with music of the past, I think is a great challenge, especially if we consider any kind of definition of what authenticity may be uh in terms of what it could mean for us. But one thing that is never authentic as a performer is our audience. No matter how much we work, we could never have an authentic audience from when that piece, that that manuscript was done in Leipzig. Uh so we cannot recreate that. So it also triggers the question: how do we use what we have from a composer, a masterwork, and how do we make it relevant, yet respecting intention, potentially having different ways of approaching the definition of authenticity? Is it how it was performed? Is it based on the intention? Is it based on uh you know the practice of it? But I think the the trying to make it relevant. So it means that there's a transformation of that music depending on the context in which we do it. Doing this in Canada, doing that in North America is different than doing it in Europe, just in understanding of that, you know, doing it in a concert hall where people are not there for a religious reason. How do we make a Bach passion speak to them? We go probably back to the fact that passion refers to the suffering of one person and we connect it. So there's, and it changes the way the music unfolds, I think, from the performers and from us. So I think we we we change the way we use this language to make sure we can all connect with it.
SPEAKER_11I always find it striking how in the early modern period, even though they're talking about it in different terms, it's the exact same conversation, just not in neurological terms. You know, it's oh, but there's a quality, maybe based on the planets, about why music affects individuals in a different way, but it's basically the same question. We're asking the same questions over and over again. And I think it's a very good exercise to do, even if we don't find the answer. One of the challenges of historical investigations of this, it taps back into what Bill was saying, is that you're always missing those bodies. You have these material remnants of the music as it happened. You have the the score, you have um perhaps even the actual violins or the actual bows that were used. You've got the spaces, the architecture, but you don't have those bodies. So, how much do our modern today bodies have in common with historic bodies? And to what extent can we use our bodies to understand those historic bodies? And that's that's one of the great questions I grapple with. Um and I don't know.