Listening to Beethoven, the mood became, I suppose, more creative, and rather suddenly I understood what the anthology should be—the story it should tell—the deep significance it might have. I suppose I can never explain it in words, but I think you understand without words. It was a mood of tremendous exaltation, I wept.
Music has “deep significance”; it illuminates “patterns of life,” in the words of philosopher Susanne Langer, whom you will soon meet. Music teaches us about love, and suffering, and justice, and power, and with whom and where we find our community. How does this work, though, that a pattern of sounds might lead us to understand, in the case of awe, the vast mysteries of life? By listening carefully to the symbolic meaning of sound we shall discover how.
Finally, we should not forget how social music is, that for 100,000 years, and most likely longer, we have been listening to and performing music with others. In music, as a community woven together in sound, we find a shared identity—Darwin’s “taste for music.”
Cashmere Blanket of Sound
In the autumn of 2019, I visited Yumi to hear her play music conducted by John Adams, a Pulitzer Prize–winning American composer. Fifteen minutes before the performance, I found my seat with 2,000 other symphonygoers, all buzzing in sounds of collective effervescence rising above curving waves of red velvet seats. Yumi strode onstage and waved, then sat down with the 100 members of the orchestra, all playing different notes. It was a cacophony. An acoustic assault. In one instant, though, an oboist played an A, and all musicians joined. Music. An orchestra exists.
During the performance, Yumi sat upright, her body erect and arms at disciplined angles, as if listening to her cello breathe. Her face moved through expressions of concentration, determination, ferocity, absorption, and bliss, when her eyebrows lifted and her eyes closed. Yumi seemed to drift into an invisible space surrounding her. I had seen that face earlier that day at the Rodin Museum, in Rodin’s Gates of Hell, his Dante-derived, awe-inspiring sculpture of swirling bodies hovering near the doors to the afterlife.
The next day Yumi and I enjoyed a cup of tea at an outdoor café near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. It was a fresh, sparkling fall day of changing maple leaves and urbanites walking with newspapers tucked under their arms and city-friendly dogs on leashes. I asked Yumi what it was like to play as part of an orchestra for two thousand people. She told me of how challenging Adams’s composition was technically, and recalled her daily practice of exercising her forearms, biceps, wrists, and fingers.
Her tone then shifted. She talked about what it feels like in her body to play. She feels the vibrations of her cello. The wood touching her arms. When she is playing, her thoughts travel to new spaces, soaring and floating, not knowing where she is going. As she spoke, her hands rotated outward with fireworks-like twinkling movements of the fingers. She continued:
When I receive the score of a piece to play, I see my part, one of many dozens of parts that make up the piece of music. I have the sense that I am connected to the past of our species, of our history of making music that is tens of thousands of years old. And to our present and future. It’s so humbling. When we perform we put something out there in the space . . . some pattern of notes of our instruments. . . . I think all the notes that have ever been played in the hall are still there. I mean, if the roof was taken off of the symphony hall, where would the notes go? When I play, I feel the vibration in my heart. Those patterns go out into space. They envelop people. Surround them in texture. It is beyond language. Beyond thought. Beyond religion. It is like a cashmere blanket of sound.
We find awe in playing music with others, as part of a history of music making that is tens of thousands of years old. The awe that music moves us to does seem beyond speech, a new kind of thought, and, for many, more powerful than religion (and for many who are religious, a pathway to the Divine). But what are we to make of Yumi’s metaphor that the notes she plays surround listeners in a “cashmere blanket of sound”?
When Yumi moves her bow across her cello’s strings, or when Beyoncé’s vocal cords vibrate as air moves through them, or when Gambian griot superstar Sona Jobarteh plucks the strings of her kora, those collisions move air particles, producing sound waves—vibrations—that move out into space. Those sound waves hit your eardrums, whose rhythmic vibrations move hairs on the cochlear membrane just on the other side of the eardrum, triggering neurochemical signals beginning in the auditory cortex on the side of your brain.
Sound waves are transformed into a pattern of neurochemical activation that moves from the auditory cortex to the anterior insular cortex, which directly influences and receives input from your heart, lungs, vagus nerve, sexual organs, and gut. It is in this moment of musical-meaning making in the brain that we do indeed listen to music with our bodies, and where musical feeling begins.
This neural representation of music, now synced up with essential rhythms of the body, moves through a region of the brain known as the hippocampus, which adds layers of memories to the ever-accreting meaning of the sounds. Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible, spatiotemporal journeys that can be awe-inspiring.
And finally, this symphony of neurochemical signals makes its way to our prefrontal cortex, where, via language, we endow this web of sound with personal and cultural meaning. Music allows us to understand the great themes of social living, our identities, the fabric of our communities, and often how our worlds should change.
Recent studies reveal how music shifts our bodies to the neurophysiology of awe. Melodious, slow music reduces our heart rate, a sign of vagus nerve activation, and lowers our blood pressure. Faster, louder music—in one study, music by the Swedish pop group ABBA—increases our blood pressure and heart rate, but lowers levels of cortisol. Even more energetic, edgy music, then, will arouse us, but without the sense of peril that accompanies elevated levels of cortisol. When we listen to music that moves us, the dopaminergic circuitry of the brain is activated, which opens the mind to wonder and exploration. In this bodily state of musical awe, we often tear up and get the chills, those embodied signs of merging with others to face mysteries and the unknown.
In our history, music has most often been enjoyed with others, and when people listen to the same music together, their brains synchronize in regions involved in ascribing emotional meaning to the music (the amygdala), delight (caudate nucleus), and language and cultural meaning (prefrontal cortex). In one imaginative study in this vein, participants, all wearing brain-recording caps, listened to a live band together in a club rented out for the study. As they did, their brains synced up in the delta band, a brain wave frequency associated with bodily movement, inclining us toward moving in unison. Importantly, the degree of this shared brain activation predicted how much the individual was moved by the music and felt close to other people listening. Music breaks down the boundaries between self and other and can unite us in feelings of awe.
In his book How Music Works, David Byrne charts the history of this idea, that the sounds of music shift our bodies to a shared experience of awe. Some 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras proposed that the solar system emitted perfectly harmonious sounds that are the origins of the rhythms of life—of weather, seasons, cycles in nature, waking and sleep cycles, love and family life, our breathing, the beating of our hearts, and life and death. When we play and listen to sacred music, Pythagoras reasoned, these celestial sounds synchronize the rhythms of our lives, which fold us into what the Greeks called communitas, or social harmony. When we listen to music with others, the great rhythms of our bodies—heartbeat, breathing, hormonal fluctuations, sexual cycles, bodily motion—once separate, merge into a synchronized pattern. We sense that we are part of something larger, a community, a pattern of energy, an idea of the times—or what we might call the sacred.