ETHN 100

Maira Clancy
February 22, 2009
Ethnomusicology 100-01 Fraser
Assignment 3: Music and Religion

Throughout my entire life, religion has played a confusing role in my spiritual development. We were the family who would only show up to Catholic mass twice a year, on Christmas and Easter day, because my dad is non-believer. However, to please his Irish Catholic mother, my father enrolled my sisters and me in Sunday school classes (oh how guilt-ridden-Catholic of him!). And so, instead of praising God at Church, I learned how to fear Him from the propaganda that Nuns fed me for an hour every week (unless my sister Caitlin and I chose to skip Jesus class and go to the bagel shop around the corner).

When we were dragged to church – say in the instance that Grandma Clancy was visiting – I always found the music selections and sing-alongs to be somewhat terrifying. In the Catholic Church, the music is usually composed of an old Priest belting out ominous phrases, while an organ haunts the air with minor chords and the Congregation chants along (by the sound of it, I used to think that the audience was a bit tone deaf). It wasn’t pretty.

For centuries, the Catholic Church has been infamous for claiming members and maintaining their support by using fear tactics, which, over time, have seeped into the music written for their cause. This did not work on me. The threatening songs about how God was my only option only made me want to push away the concept of God that they were singing about. In elementary school, I was so afraid of being a slave to Jesus Christ and this Catholic God that I threw out a crucifix that hung on my bedroom wall (you know, the realistic, Catholic exhibitions of their dying Savior). Although I felt terrible for days and had nightmares about going to hell, I realized that I did not have to feed into their methodology and that if I did not agree, I wouldn’t pretend to out of terror.
When my grandmother died, we abandoned church altogether and I was slowly realizing where my spirit belonged: not in the realm of religion, but in the realm of music. I understood the love that Catholics felt for God; I only felt it for something completely different; the joy of an art form filled my heart. So in the end, the music of God (which should have been my most enjoyed church experience given I’ve always been a music lover) made me reject Him. I could see through the transparency of their lyrics.

To briefly compare these songs with the Islamic “music” (or the prayers in Muslim music that used instruments and voice to convey a message), both practices used music in similar ways to praise their respective Lords. They all sing about how their God is the only God and how their prophet is the only true prophet to believe in. However, the interactions between the audience and the performers are vastly different in these two cases. In the case of Islamic “music” in religion, the members experience a divine connection to God that leads to a feeling of elation and ecstasy. They dance and chant the words by heart, some even foam at the mouth from excitement, while the musicians improvise and play. In the Catholic Church, the sing-alongs are much more cold and calculated. The congregation reads right out of the song books, no one dances or claps, and the music is always played right out of a music book onto an organ. It is a much more formal process, and thus it implies a greater distance from the Catholics to their God.