I got the music in me

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
October 16, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

After the last weekend of Austin City Limits Music Festival, in this church where music is such an integral part of our religious and spiritual experience, we look at the unique ways in which music moves our spirits.

Call to Worship

Come, Come
-adapted from Rumi by Leslie Takahashi Morris

Come, come, whoever you are
Come with your hurts, your imperfections,
your places that feel raw and exposed.
Come, come, whoever you are
Come with your strengths that the world shudders to hold
come with your wild imaginings of a better world,
come with your hopes that it seems no one wants to hear.

Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving
we will make a place for you,
we will build a home together.
Ours is no caravan of despair.
We walk together;
Come, yet again come.

Reading

Song of the Universe

For each child that is born
A morning star rises
And sings to the universe
who we are.

Listen carefully…
Can you hear the song
The one sung for you
When you were born.
The song sung by the cosmos
In motion
Rejoycing at your life.

You the result.
You the outcome.
You the celebration.

Listen carefully…
Can you hear it still?

A song of possibility.
A reminder that we still have time to be who
and what we need to be.

Listen carefully …
The vast expanse echoes a recognition
that it’s not always easy.
Possibilities
can be hard to pursue.

Roads not taken, wrong turns,
destinations that disappoint.
Through this,
the song persists.
The universe sings no less because time and space wear us thin.

The music calls us

Sermon

We live in a city that holds music as a central part of its identity. Likewise, music is a core ministry of this church and, for many of us, a vital component of our individual spirituality.

I think we are so blessed by the amazing talent of our music director, Brent Baldwin and the many wonderful musicians he gathers here. One of Brent’s many talents that stands out for me is his incredible ability to produce such high quality music across such a wide variety of styles and genres.

And that to me is such wonderful aspect of our music here at the church. We get to experience and learn about styles of music that may be challenging for us but deeply moving for other folks in the church and visa versa, and because of that we get to discover harmonies between these different styles that we might never have otherwise imagined.

OK, I think I have probably embarrassed Brent enough with all of this high praise.

Anyway, this all got me exploring why music can stir our emotions and move our spirits so deeply – what makes it such a central part of all known human cultures?

As I began that exploration, I quickly started to realize that the definition of ritual I talked about in a sermon last month exactly describes what is going on with music. Like other forms of ritual, music is structured and patterned. It is rhythmic and repetitive. Perhaps even more so than other forms of ritual, music can synchronize our feelings, thoughts and body movements to create a powerful unifying experience. And finally, when we experience and create music together, we synchronize with each other, which can create a very strong sense of bonding.

So, music is a form of ritual. And perhaps even more so than other forms of ritual, we are discovering the powerful ways music can benefit us.

Children who learn to play a musical instrument at an early age (or take singing lessons as the voice is an instrument also), develop greater motor and cognitive skills. Adults who learn to sing or play an instrument also reap benefits. Their brains tend to remain much more adaptable, and there is early evidence that they may be less likely to develop dementia.

Music therapy has psychological benefits, including improvements in depression and anxiety disorders. It has been used to steady the heart rates of premature infants and adult cardiac patients. Music can have powerful healing effects for people who have experienced trauma.

One of the most amazing ways that music is being used is to help people with Parkinson’s, as well as Alzheimer’s, other forms of dementia and stroke victims. I want to show you part of a video that I think demonstrates this so movingly.

Naomi Feil works with elderly dementia patients to help them reconnect and develop a feeling of safety. In this video, she sings hymns to Gladys Wilson, who has Alzheimer’s and has been non-verbal since also suffering a stroke.

[“Song Crosses Boundaries” video]

Later in the full version of that video, Gladys also speaks and says that she feels safe and taken care of.

You may have noticed that Naomi moving with and holding Gladys, matching her rhythm and tempo to Gladys’ movements was an important element of being able to break through to her.

That demonstrates yet another important aspect of music. While its effects on us can happen from simply listening to it, many of music’s benefits increase even more if we participate in it in some way and some only if we participate – if we sing, dance, sway, clap, play an instrument, drum on the back of a pew!

This seems to be related to the fact that the parts of our brains that process musical rhythm and tempo are strongly connected with the parts of our brains that control motor skills.

In the PBS documentary, “The Music Instinct”, neuroscientist Stan Levitin who has performed brain-imagining scans as people listen to or make music, says that we process pitch, tempo, rhythm, and so on, the various elements of music, in different parts of our brain. So, he says that looking at brain scans of people listening to music is like seeing a symphony going on in the brain, because so many areas, so many neural pathways are involved.

When we participate in the music in some way, even more of the brain lights up on those scans. Even better, when we do so with other people, we also activate the areas of the brain associated with social behavior.

This may help explain why many cultures have no concept of simply listening to music alone. It is necessary to see the movements and gestures of the musicians, to the feel the vibrations and to physically move with them. Some cultures do not even have separate words for music and dance.

This connection between music and our motor skills has profound implications for helping people with certain physical disabilities.

Here is another video that powerfully demonstrates this. It is from the trailer for a documentary about a man with cerebral palsy who learns to dance, and in doing so, transforms his life.

[“Enter the Faun” video]

So, music and its associated movement can have these amazing influences on us as individuals. Even folks who are unable to move some areas of their body still seem to benefit from participating in and moving to music in whatever ways they can.

But the benefits we derive also go beyond us as individuals. Music also can strengthen our relationships and group social bonding. When we participate in music together several things happen.

1. We engage with one another in coordinated, cooperative behavior, often evoking strong emotion, greatly increasing group cohesion.

2. Our bodies produce an oxytocin boost, a neuropeptide that results in increased affection and bonding between us.

3. Music activates the part of our brain that helps us comprehend what others are thinking and feeling, increasing empathy toward one another.

4. Music increases cultural cohesion. Perhaps more so than any other form of ritual, it communicates belonging and passes down cultural memory through the generations. There’s a reason folks say things like “these are the songs of my people.”

I want to show you part of one more video, that I think wonderfully demonstrates how music binds us together. Simon McDermott’s dad, Ted, has Alzheimer’s and is often non-verbal and cannot remember his family members. However, Simon singing an old, familiar song with him brings Ted’s memory back, and for those moments, they reconnect and Simon gets his dad back.

[“Quando Quando Quando” video]

That video just makes me feel happy.

So why is music this powerful to us? What makes it so intrinsic to all know human cultures?

Well, that is the subject of much research and great debate in several fields of study, and the answer is we just do not yet know.

There is much research on what the origin of music might be, how it is related to language and whether or not it is innate. If we are born with certain musical capacities, it would indicate that music played an evolutionary role in our development and survival as a species.

The earliest known musical instruments are flutes that date from about 42,000 years ago. However, it is possible our making of music goes back even further and that there is just no archeological record of it remaining to be found. Our musical origins remain a mystery.

Likewise, whether our propensity for music conveyed some evolutionary advantage or is just a by-product of other capacities we developed as humans is also a subject of debate.

I ran across a couple of theories as to what potential evolutionary roles it might have played. One is that like a peacock strutting his feathers, musical ability would have made the male human more attractive to females. I’m personally not buying that one, as tone deafness would have been evolutionarily selected out by now, which it hasn’t. Witness the campaign staff and surrogates for a certain Presidential candidate.

The other theory is that the group social bonding music creates that I outlined earlier might have allowed for the formation of larger and larger groups, which could well have conveyed survival advantages.

The evidence for the innateness of our musicality is mixed. One the one hand, musical forms vary greatly across cultures and many of our musical preferences seem to be learned. However, there is also evidence that we may be born with at least some of our musical proclivities and capacities.

Newborn infants can detect a downbeat, relative pitch changes, tempo changes, musical intervals that are harmonious and the like, making it possible we are born with these capabilities (though infants could have heard music in the womb also).

Likewise, certain commonalities in music seem to exist across all cultures, which might also indicate they are innate. Lullabies are remarkably similar in all cultures for instance. All cultures use the octave interval, though they divide it very differently.

Villagers in a remote area of Cameroon who had no prior exposure to Western music and who’s own music was very different than that of ours, listened to three different pieces of Western European music – one that we would associate with feeling sad; one with feeling happy; and one with feeling afraid. When asked to identify the emotion evoked by each musical piece, the villager’s responses were exactly the same as Western Europeans, indicating there is something innate about our emotional response to certain characteristics of music.

So, we just do not yet have all the answers for why music seems so central to our very nature as humans, so here’s how I like to think about music.

Scientists and mathematicians will tell you that math can describe and predict all known phenomenon in the universe. And it’s not that we came up with an abstraction and applied it to our universe, it is that math seems intrinsic to all that exists and we are discovering the math as we learn more and more. Math is in a way the language of the universe.

Music, at its most basic level can also be described with math – its pitches, chords, intervals, beats, rhythms, notes and harmonies are all simply math at their core.

So I like to think of music as the universe finding its voice. And we, we are its instruments.

So sing even if you think you might not be able to hit all the right notes. Learn to play an instrument even if it’s just for fun and even if you don’t think you’re all that good at it.

Dance the dance the best you can.

Make music with those you love and those you might someday. You got the music in you, and you always will.

Amen.

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