Gilbert Rouet, in his monumental book, Music and Trance, discusses these phenomena at length. I have not encountered music-induced trance in the course of clinical practice, but it has been documented by countless films, and experienced by many thousands of people, whether in concerts, drum circles or meditation-and it has been used by various religions for millennia. Trance-ecstatic singing and dancing, wild movements and cries, perhaps, rhythmic rocking, or catatonia-like rigidity or immobility-involves both motor and gross emotional, psychic and autonomic effects, culminating in profoundly altered states of consciousness and whilst it can be achieved by a single individual, it often seems to be facilitated in a communal group. One of the most dramatic effects of music's power is the induction of trance states, which have been described by ethnomusicologists in nearly every culture. It is easy to be overcome, for better or worse, in a communal setting. In such a situation, there seems to be an actual binding of nervous systems, the unification of an audience by a veritable ‘neurogamy’ (to use a word favoured by early Mesmerists). One has to go to a concert, or a church or a musical festival, to recapture the collective excitement and bonding of music. This primal role of music is to some extent lost today, when we have a special class of composers and performers, and the rest of us are often reduced to passive listening. People sing together, dance together, in every culture, and one can imagine them doing so, around the first fires, a hundred thousand years ago. But these effects, the overflow of music into the motor system, can easily go too far, becoming irresistible and perhaps even coercive.Īnthony Storr, in his excellent book Music and the Mind, stresses that in all societies, a primary function of music is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together.
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Yet all this may occur without our knowledge or volition.Īll this is normal, and may be seen as a half-conscious resonance to music, a sort of involuntary personal expression as the music works on us. It is evident in all of us-we tap our feet, we ‘keep time’, hum, sing along or ‘conduct’ music, our facial expressions mirroring the rises and falls, the melodic contours and feelings of what we are hearing. Music, for him, was an embodiment of pure ‘will’-but this is not a notion that goes down well in a neuroscientific age.Īnother passionately musical philosopher, Nietzsche, said, ‘We listen to music with our muscles.’ This, at least, is something we can see. These, indeed, are the very issues Schopenhauer raises in The World as Will and Representation-and Schopenhauer himself was passionately musical.
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Yet it has no concepts, and makes no propositions it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language.
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This so-called ‘music,’ they would have to concede, is in some way efficacious to humans. We may imagine the Overlords ruminating further, back in their spaceships. They, themselves, as a species, lack music.Ĭlarke likes to embody questions in fables, and the Overlords' bewilderment makes one wonder, indeed, what it is about music that gives it such peculiar power over us, a power delectable and beneficent for the most part, but also capable of uncontrollable and sometimes destructive force.
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They cannot think what goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music, because nothing goes on within them. Curiosity brings them down to the Earth's surface to attend a concert they listen politely and patiently, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his ‘great ingenuity’-while still finding the entire business unintelligible. What an odd thing it is to see an entire species-billions of people-playing with listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call ‘music.’ This, at least, was one of the things about human beings that puzzled the highly cerebral alien beings, the Overlords, in Arthur C.