Music

Religion and musical practices are closely linked in most, if not all, societies and are interacting across cultural boundaries in the global age. Siegfried Nadel proposed that music may have had its origins in heightened speech at religious rituals—language performed in a musical way as a means of communicating with the supernatural, or at least as a way of demarcating sacred language from everyday language. We cannot know the origins of music, but it is true that religious practices around the world employ musical sounds. Yet in many, if not most, cases the relationship between music and religion is problematic, causing some religious teachings to include proscriptions against certain types of musical activity. Thus, any consideration of music and religion in a global context must be multifaceted, sensitive to the particular issues of any given religious practice and to how its adherents engage musical behavior.

[Page 847]Like the term religion, music can be difficult to define in a cross-cultural global context. The adage that music is the universal language has been disproved many times over by ethnomusicologists, who have shown that while music from cultural traditions unfamiliar to a listener may sound aesthetically pleasing, the meanings and uses of that music are rarely understood without substantial experience. Like language, music is a universal human behavior; and like language, but probably more so, the understanding of music varies greatly depending on one's cultural competency. This is especially true when music is associated with religious practices where organized sound art is often highly regulated and imbued with symbolic meaning. Thus, when encountering musical sounds from an unfamiliar source, one cannot make assumptions about the intended function of that music, even if one feels an aesthetic attraction. Even within the same religion, a single type of music may be deemed appropriate by one sect but banned by another, so varied is the understanding. Nor is there any universal understanding of what constitutes “music.” In some cases, especially where religion and other belief systems are concerned, the symbolic meaning of sounds may be such that even what sounds like music to the uninitiated listener is not considered music at all by the informed producers and listeners—by the cultural insiders. Even within major global religions, there is no agreement about whether music is created by humans or inspired by the gods, devils, or other beings. One can also not assume that what sounds musical is considered as music to the sociocultural group that created the sounds or even if a given group has an indigenous term that approximates the European American concept of “music.” For these reasons, the terms musical practices, sound art, and so on are used in this entry instead of music to avoid imposing a concept on the people.

The following sections of this entry are organized around three themes, or complementary approaches, to the question of music and religion. First, the close associations between religious and musical behaviors suggest that people attribute great power to music, thus making it a potentially volatile activity within religious communities. Second, the globalization of religions has also resulted in the globalization of some musical practices, forms, and styles. Third, and in seeming contradistinction with the second point but probably related to the first, musical practices within any single global religion tend to vary greatly, containing even opposing approaches to what musical practices are encouraged and those that are restricted or prohibited.

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