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Welcome This website introduces Experience
of Music, a new research exercise which aims
to gather data regarding emotional, psychological and spiritual responses to
music. To go directly to
the surveys, please select Congregation >
or Concert Audience > About Experience of Music, from Jonathan
Arnold, principal investigator
This study will seek, through sociological methods, to find out the views
of audiences and congregations and discover who is listening, and why, to different
styles of classical music. This will involve canvassing the opinions of large
numbers of people who attend concerts or services by means of a survey, as
well as more in-depth interviews with some. The methodology for this study is
outlined below
> With experience
of nearly two decades as a professional singer with choirs such as The
Sixteen, a contributor to the BBC TV documentary Sacred Music and
as a distinguished author, Senior Research Fellow and ordained Anglican
Chaplain, I propose to offer a new and challenging work for the general
reader and specialist alike asking why Christian sacred music, perhaps more
than ever, appeals to such a wide and varied audience, of both religious and
secular listeners. About
Jonathan Arnold
Praise for Sacred
Music in Secular Society ‘As both a sacred musician and a scholar of historical
theology, Jonathan Arnold is uniquely qualified to write this lucid and
informed book. He tackles one of the most mysterious and fascinating
questions in the area of theology and the arts: what is it about music that
still appeals so vividly to modern people's sense of the spiritual? He
explores this question in an engaging, open, accessible and enthusiastic way,
bringing his own insights into conversation with some of the best-known
composers, performers and theorists of sacred music at work today.’ Ben Quash,
King’s College London, UK
John Scott,
Organist and Director of Music, St Thomas Church, New York City, USA
Ralph
Allwood, Director, Eton Choral Courses
Stephen
Layton, Trinity College, Cambridge, UK
Music and
Liturgy
Church
Times The basis of research will be a wide-ranging
social survey, which will gather findings from audiences who attend concerts
of western classical music, as well as congregations who attend cathedral and
church services. Attendees at a number of classical music events will be
invited to take part in the survey, which will be available in paper form as
handouts as well as online, via this dedicated website and the websites of
those organisations involved. In order not to confuse different types of event
and different styles of music with each other, the context and repertoire
will be closely monitored. The questions will aim to discover several
demographic aspects of the audience or congregation, such as age, gender and
religious background; they will also aim to ascertain how an individual
responded to a particular concert, piece of music, or music within a church
service, and thus build a broad picture of trends in audience perception and
reception. Each survey will also give individuals the opportunity to write
down how they felt or experienced the music in their own words. In addition to this social survey and the
resulting statistics, I will also undertake some in depth interviews with
individuals, in order to gain a sense of how listeners articulate their
experience of music. These interviews will not be with professional
theologians, musicians or performers, but, as far as possible, ‘ordinary’
members of the audience or congregation with no
particular specialism relating to these fields of study. Once the information has been gathered, both from
the survey and the interviews, I intend to place the findings within a
framework of theological reflection. In order to achieve this aim, I shall
engage with recent scholarship on the theology of listening, by authors such
as Jeremy Begbie, in his Music,
Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening (OUP, 2013), in which he argues
that ‘Music … is capable of providing a kind of ‘theological performance’ of
some of modernity’s most characteristic dynamics.’ I will also relate my
findings to the theology of Joseph Ratzinger on music and theology, an author
with whom I did not engage in my previous work, as well as the theological
reflections in a new volume of essays, edited by Ingalls, Landau, and Wagner,
Christian Congregational Music:
Performance, Identity and Experience (Ashgate, 2015). In order further to contextualise and analyse the
data found, I shall also be relating the material to ritual studies, such as
the Experience of Worship Project, headed by Prof. John Harper, www.experienceofworship.org.uk.
Such studies combine a rigorous analysis of how people experience worship and
how liturgy in performance is as ambivalent and polyvalent for both those who
deliver it and those who receive it. This ritual study will be compared and
contrasted to the experience of attending a concert, and all that it involves
for the audience. About
Music and Theology at Oxford Experience
of Music is one of the research
activities being pursued under the aegis of Music and Theology at Oxford, a
group convened by Jonathan Arnold, Matthew
Cheung Salisbury (Lecturer in Music),
and Carol
Harrison (Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity) within the University of
Oxford. There is a regular seminar series in
Oxford which attracts students and senior members alike who are interested in
connections between the disciplines: subjects discussed range widely, from
historical studies to contemporary perspectives. Music and Theology at Oxford
is part of the International
Network for Music Theology. |
