Simple Songs for Psalms

Singing as incarnation

     It is widely understood that music is processed by a distinct faculty within the brain, separate from speech and other faculties. Some of the parameters of this separation are known from observing the behavior of people who have sustained brain injuries from trauma or strokes. In certain cases, patients who were unable to speak were able to sing—to sing words, with meaning and intent! (See Research finds brain link for words, music ability) This alone is suggestive that the formation of the singing activity is carried out independently of speech and other forms of rational ideation. Counting also falls into this category.
     The more that is learned about the functions of the brain, the more we must come to accept that activities which people experience as unitary are in fact distributed. While this makes little practical difference in ordinary life, it has profound implications in the partitioning of steps in education, in the estimate of the influence of culture in development, and numerous other inquiries into human nature and experience. This is visible in mathematics training: schools teach arithmetic as an isolated, poorly-motivated discipline in early years in order to train arithmetic faculty, and only later work to integrate that faculty into the general intellect. The reason is now, if not completely known, at least clearly supposed, namely, that this pattern of math teaching imitates a certain division of labor within distinctive parts of the brain parts which develop at different rates. There are dozens of examples of this kind.
     So it is with music. Music stimulates faculties within our minds that are not otherwise activated. Somehow, people are “wired” for music. Music and, in particular, singing appear to be an inborn instinct. Furthermore, music involves many other parts of the brain at the same time, integrating these into the single experience we call the appreciation of music. The neuroscientists have discovered that “music activates almost all the human brain: the sensory centers, the prefrontal cortex that underlies rational functions, the emotional areas (cerebellum, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens), the hippocampus for memory, and the motor cortex for movement.” (See “The Musical Mystery,” by Colin McGinn, a review of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks, The New York Review of Books, v. 55, n. 3, March 6, 2008.) Listening to music can be casual or intense, though the more intense it is, the more pleasurable the experience can be. The performing of music can often be a very intense experience, causing the performer to lose track of time, awareness of surroundings, and even, in the most absorbing musical experiences, awareness of self.
     Some psychologists and neuroscientists have drawn a bold conclusion from what is known about music: “musical memory connects with our sense of self, since musical taste and experience are closely linked to personality and emotion. The music we remember is, without exaggeration, part of who we are.” (ibid.) This is surely true of our earliest musical memories. It thus behooves us to stock our brains with music that has good and uplifting associations.
     The most powerful way of adding to our musical memories is with songs that we sing ourselves. It makes a far greater and more permanent impression on our memories than solely listening. The imprint is not only from the ear but from our muscle memories and from the interior energy required to produce song from our bodies. Performing upon an instrument can be an intense, absorbing, and physically demanding experience, but singing involves physical structures far more intimate and directly controlled than most instruments require. Singing essentially blanks the mind from most distractions, as even singing a familiar song or hymn involves the whole mind as well as the singing apparatus.
     There are, no doubt, a few unfortunate people who “cannot carry a tune in a bucket,” as they say. (Interestingly, I know one such person, who nevertheless, inexplicably, loves to sing.) But most people can match a pitch, and with practice, they can reproduce a simple tune. This seems very little, but it is enough to get one’s foot in the door of Psalm singing. In singing the Psalms, we expect to leverage the mechanisms alluded to above for the purpose of bringing the message of the Psalms, one might even say, the experience of the Psalms, within ourselves, and to interiorize it as we should desire to do with any Scripture.
     There is a difference. Understanding Scripture is first of all a cognitive activity. Once mastered, the thought derived from Scripture enters us and remains fixed in its final form, subject to later recall and further meditation. But, in song, we join words and music, not merely to produce “words+music,” the cognitive plus the aesthetic, but a third thing that is somehow both simultaneously. The result is not a fixed set of facts but an experience, with stages and passages, with steps and turns.
     No one can say fully what this experience means. But part of the meaning of singing psalms is that one explicitly experiences the process of acquiring meaning, often on more than one level, through a succession of ephemeral yet connected states. The experience becomes a far larger structure than a logical and factual statement. Through this feature, the singing of the psalms has the most important impact—different from reading and analyzing Scripture, different from simply listening to music.
     The nature of the Psalms as song lyrics is powerful evidence that it is in the activity of singing that God desires us to encounter His word contained in the Psalms. In this way one can bring the Psalms into the body. In effect, one incarnates the Psalms. One moves and breathes according to the rhythm of the Psalms. After a few repetitions, the Psalms and their message stick.

          C. Preparing to sing the Psalms

 
Copyright, 2010-2011, by Robert McAnally Adams,
        Curator, Christian Quotation of the Day.
Logo image Copyright 1996 by Shay Barsabe, of “Simple GIFs”, by kind permission.
Send comments to curator@cqod.com.

Last updated: 3/6/11

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