Abstract
Julian Perlmutter has produced a fascinating and carefully argued examination of the relationship between sacred music and the way in which an individual can experience a longing for knowledge of God arising in the heart. He begins this exploration with an account of a student who wanders into her local cathedral and encounters Gregorian chant, which seems to provoke within her an emotional response that results in an experience of prayer. As a precentor of a cathedral for seven years, I have personally heard stories of this type again and again from people who have found themselves in the cathedral for one reason or another and have experienced, facilitated by the Western choral tradition, a profound response that they were not expecting, but which seems to draw them into a desire for knowledge of the divine. It is that experience that Perlmutter is interested in.
This book covers a huge amount of ground in a relatively short volume, and it is impressive for the way in which Perlmutter introduces questions first of all of philosophy and epistemology, then of musicology and of spirituality in a consistent and well-argued narrative. What is particularly engaging about this book is that, despite its diving quite deeply into several disciplines, it never loses track of the heart of the question, which is how it is that sacred music operates upon, or within, the hearer, deepening desire for knowledge of God. Perlmutter notes at the outset that ‘sacred music – and specifically choral music in the Christian, Western classical tradition – has a peculiar capacity to strike a chord even in non-believers’ (p. 1). It is the category of ‘interested non-believer’ that the author focuses on.
Perlmutter’s argument is that, ‘engaged with in a particular way, sacred choral music has the capacity to shape profoundly a person’s journey of religious enquiry’ (p. 1). The book then explores this argument, taking in a philosophical exploration of desire, and what desire for God might look like. Particularly interesting, and central to the argument, is the setting up of a model that allows for someone to desire something or someone without having to be convinced that that something or someone actually exists. This is at the heart of the response of the interested non-believer to sacred music: it can set up a desire to know what God might be like, without yet being convinced that God actually exists. Then follows an exploration of the relationship between music and emotion through a fascinating examination of pieces by Purcell, Rheinberger, Stanford and Howells, which form the examples used in the developing argument. The exploration climaxes in the introduction of Thomas Merton’s writing on contemplative prayer as a potential outworking of the desire stimulated by music.
This book has important things to say to church musicians and worship leaders and to all who wrestle with trying to interpret what it is that sacred music ‘does’ to people. It deserves a wider readership than that; it will fascinate anyone who would be engaged by a rigorous, academically robust, but always pastorally motivated exploration of why it is that the choral tradition does what it does.