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Music as Spiritual Experience
Abstract
This paper examines a phenomenography of spirituality in the music experience examining the internal relationship between the experiencer and the experienced and its diverse awarenesses.1 It will examine these questions:• Is all music a sacred experience?• Is there a secular music?• Is the aesthetic a contemporary version of spirituality?• Can spirituality be freed from a particular religious tradition?The model proposed is based on five domains that can be identified in accounts of the musicking experience, the way the phenomenon is reviewed in research traditions, how it appears in the literature, treatises and textbooks and how it has been handled in different cultures. It approaches music through the experiencer rather than the music itself. It seeks to re-establish a notion of spirituality as relationality within the musical experience based on Buber's notion of the I/Thou experience,2 drawing on theorists such as Dewey,3 Maslow,4 Turner,5 Csikszentmihalyi,6 Jackson,7 Hay and Nye8 and practitioners s...
... Swanwick explored a spectrum between accommodation and analysis, and intuition and assimilation, with these lying along the outer edges of the spiral (Swanwick, 1994). Boyce-Tillman, on the other hand, considered interlocking circles as though viewed from above and encompassing spiritual elements (Boyce-Tillman, 2006). Spirals have also appeared in a musical context in the work of Fautley and Daubney (2015;2019) and in the outputs of commercial providers of music education (Charanga Musical School, 2015). ...
... The future of musical development The Swanwick/Tillman spiral has already been developed into different formulations by the original authors themselves (Swanwick, 1994;Swanwick, 1999;Boyce-Tillman, 2006). Spiral formations have also been reimagined and reinterpreted in musical development contexts Daubney 2015, 2019;Charanga Musical School, 2015) and it seems likely that this will continue. ...
... These tendencies hold true cross-culturally and across religions (Bohlman et al., 2005;Friedmann, 2010;Gabrielsson, 2011;Weinrich, 2019). For some people, music itself holds transcendent qualities that are inherent to our responses to the well-crafted sound waves (Boyce-Tillman, 2006). However, according to surveys, a transcendent experience is rather something that emerges from our active mental engagement with the music and not something that is intrinsically or extrinsically present in the tonal structures (Atkins & Schubert, 2014). ...
... A pilgrimage centre, from the standpoint of the believing actor, also represents a threshold, a place and moment "in and out of time," and such an actor -as the evidence of many pilgrims of many religions attests -hopes to have there direct experience of the sacred, invisible or supernatural order, either in the material aspect of miraculous healing or in the immaterial aspect of inward transformation of spirit or personality (Turner, 2004). This work on experiencing music brought together my thinking on music and on spirituality (Boyce-Tillman, 2006b;Boyce-Tillman, 2007;Boyce-Tillman, 2009a). It has led to considerable work on the development of spirituality which is an exploration into where the intuitive might fit in contemporary society. ...
The article discusses a model first described in a Keynote and revisited to reflect how certain ways of knowing have become subjugated by the power structures of Western society and need to be brought into relationship with the dominant culture. The original keynote did not examine all the polarities which were developed in Unconventional Wisdom (Boyce-Tillman 2007a). The article explains how I have developed these in my theology, performance and professional practice. The article shows how I have used the thinking in a variety of contexts and forms bringing together the arts and theology to produce a practical theology for my ministry as a Christian priest and a composer/conductor.
... Previous studies have shown a similar association between such experiences and a variety of secular triggers or contexts such as sport and exercise (e.g., Murphy & White, 1995;Parry, Nesti, Robinson, & Watson, 2007), sex (e.g., Wade, 2000Wade, , 2004), music (Boyce-Tillman, 2006;Sinnamon, Moran, & O'Connell, 2012), contact with nature (Sharpley & Jepson, 2011;Terhaar, 2009) and wild animals (DeMares & Krycka, 1998). Collections of experiences by Hardy (1979), Laski (1961), Johnson (1960) and Hoffman (1992) provide many examples of awakening experiences induced or triggered by natural surroundings, art, music and general relaxation. ...
Awakening experiences are temporary experiences of an intensification and expansion of awareness, with characteristics such as intensified perception, a sense of connection and well-being. Ninety awakening experiences were collected and thematically analysed to identify their triggers and characteristics, and also their duration and after-effects. Four main triggers of awakening experiences were found: psychological turmoil, contact with nature, spiritual practice and engagement with spiritual literature (or audio or video materials). Characteristics were found to be positive affective states, intensified perception, love and compassion, a transcendence of separateness, a sense of revelation and inner quietness. The duration of the majority of experiences was from a few minutes to a few hours. The most prevalent after-effects were a desire to recapture the experience and a shift in perspectives and values. The study confirms the importance of psychological turmoil in generating awakening experiences, and that most awakening experiences occur spontaneously, outside the context of spiritual practices and traditions. Introductory Discussion The term awakening experience refers to a temporary expansion and intensification of awareness, in which our state of being, our vision of the world and our relationship to it are transformed, bringing a sense of clarity, revelation and well-being. We perceive a sense of harmony and meaning, and transcend our normal sense of separateness from the world, experiencing a sense of connection and even unity (Taylor, 2010, 2012b). The term awakening experience is preferred to the similar term spiritual experience partly because it emphasises research findings that such experiences most frequently occur outside the context of spiritual traditions, and without being induced by spiritual practices such as meditation or prayer (Taylor 2012b). In addition, the term awakening experience depicts the expansive nature of these experiences, the sense that one is transcending the limitations of our normal state and gaining a more intense awareness (i.e., an awakening). Another reason why the term is preferred over spiritual experience is the wide range of interpretations of the term ''spiritual.'' As reported in Taylor (2012b), the original study initially requested reports of spiritual experiences, but some individuals offered reports of psychic experiences (for example, visions of recently deceased relatives) or experiences of an overtly religious nature (for example, a vision of 45
June Boyce-Tillman and Keith Swanwick’s article on musical development is the second most widely cited paper in the history of the British Journal of Music Education. It appears in many discussions of musical development. A selection of the diverse domains where the paper is cited includes: instrumental teaching, Special Education Needs, primary school teaching, the development of learning for professional musicians, secondary school teaching, musicians’ skill development, adult music teaching and jazz improvisation. However, the background to this work, which was conceived for June Boyce-Tillman’s PhD thesis, is not always so well known. This article presents a research interview with June Boyce-Tillman conducted in August 2017. It explores her musical background and music education experiences, and seeks to enable further discussion of the characteristics which were described in the spiral model. The interview focuses on the concepts of Materials, vernacular, and musical Values, in particular, and the implications of these modes of understanding for classroom practices, including curriculum design.
This paper reports on the findings of a study with 14 music therapists, exploring how they experienced (a) the interface/overlap between their own religious and/or spiritual beliefs and those of their clients; (b) the navigation of this interface/overlap within music therapy practice; and (c) whether/how they used empathy when engaging in this navigation. Four main findings were identified through thematic analysis of in-depth interviews. Firstly, according to these music therapists, spirituality and/or religion frequently play an important role within music therapy sessions. Secondly, these music therapists described cognitive and affective empathic experiences with clients as well as experiences of spiritually resonant empathy and transpersonal empathy. Thirdly, they identified relationships between their own religious and spiritual journeys, their experiences of identifying and/or not identifying with their clients, and their experiences of empathy. Fourthly, the intersections between what they felt they “should” do as music therapists and what they felt they “should” do in light of their religious/spiritual orientations informed their styles of practice and elicited challenges in the therapeutic process which they used particular strategies to navigate.
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