We Are All Religious Now: Holy Music In A Secular World
Ahead of the Quietus writers' list of favourite religious and spiritual records, published later this week, Rev. Rachel Mann explores the many roles that holy music continues to play in an increasingly secular society, and explains why it remains an important and affecting force
Rev Rachel Mann, April 15th, 2014 06:16
If there's one aspect of life vicars know a lot about, it's death. While many people dread death, funerals and the posthumous wishes of the recently deceased, vicars often find fulfillment in their ministry amongst the grieving and the dead. In an age when the professionally religious seem to be neither use nor ornament, vicars find a place where we can still richly serve people.
With The Quietus this week publishing a list of its writers' favourite religious and spiritual records, funeral talk may strike the casual reader as a curious way in. But I reckon the changing nature of funerals and death rites is one of the key guides to the shifting relationships between music, religion and faith. Indeed, despite many claiming that we live in the most secular age in history, never has the relationship between taste, the religious and music been more deliciously poised. While plenty of unthinking young clever-clogs try to 'out-secular' each other and act as handmaids for the New Lord Dawkins, music has never been more significant as a location for those practices we classically label 'religious'.
This is where funerals come in. Funeral music choices matter because, in short, our rites and practices around death have become focal points for the newly dead's ultimate personal jukebox. As funerals become more personal, individualistic and celebratory - marks of post-modern consumerism perhaps - what gets played during a service becomes just as, if not more, important than the readings (Biblical or otherwise). The music that's chosen, which is not usually religious in a traditional sense, takes on a religious hue: in this context the music is not, for example, about entertainment, but an attempt to sum up a person's life and give the living something to ponder. It aims to invite a congregation to consider life, death and all that jazz. People often want music that goes beyond just what the deceased 'liked', into the realm of capturing their significance for the world.
Here secular meets sacred, and what might be seen as 'the profane' or 'the worldly' – a rock or pop song – is recast by the context of death into a vehicle for attempts to capture the value of a life. Ok, many might sneer at the banality and obviousness of many funeral music choices, but only a git would doubt their sincerity. Queen's 'You're My Best Friend' might be sentimental balls, but in a world where many people just don't know quite what they believe about death, life and the beyond, I can understand why someone might try to deploy it in a quasi-religious way. So often these choices resolves themselves into a vision of Hell, where a desiccated, repeatedly resurrected Frank Sinatra is forced forever to croon 'My Way'. However, sometimes the bringing together of religious language ("You are dust and to dust you shall return"
, sublime church music and rock & roll produces moments that can touch the most cynical souls. I've been reduced to a blubbering wreck in funerals by the careful juxtaposition of Biblical poetry, the 'Adagio' from Schubert's Quintet In C and lo-fi Americana.
http://thequietus.com/articles/15010-religious-spiritual-music
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Feasts are good too. 
--imm
--imm
And there was no rock n' roll. 
--imm
