Final Paper
Songs For Survival: Music and Religion
Ken Langer
The Ambient Church: Seeking The Spiritual Through The Power Of Music
With original work: The Sea of Reflection (music and video)
Introduction
In the progress of our course on music and religion, we have studied a variety of songs written and performed to enact social change. I have often wondered if the texts of the songs were the driving force in seeking change rather than the music itself. Certainly, the music provides a framework for the words and adds emotional strength and appeal to those words but I wanted to consider if music alone, without a text, could also encourage social change. Kun’s use of the word audiotopia reflects well the intention of the Ambient Church movement when he states that, “We should be thinking of pieces of music… as ‘audiotopias,’ small, momentary, lived utopias built, imagined, and sustained through sound, noise, and music.” Such a musical space can create a place to reflect on spiritual growth and understanding. This is the intent of the music and performance of the relatively new phenomenon known as the Ambient Church movement. This movement is relatively new and, to date, little research has been done on it but the little that is out there points to the development of a musical subculture that appeals to those who want to have a different kind of religious experience from their past. What they desire is a spiritual experience without direction, without dogma, without words.
History
The concept of the Ambient Church began with producer Brian Sweeny from New York City. The first performance he booked in 2016 had few takers but the event was a success and drew ever-larger crowds to a variety of church venues across the country. “When Sweeny booked the first Ambient Church performance in New York in the summer of 2016, he sold 100 tickets. At the last shows he had in New York and L.A. before the pandemic shutdown, he drew almost 2,000 attendees.” As to why people showed up for the events Sweeny stated, “Some are into sound meditation, and it’s really powerful to be there and feel the energy of hundreds of others in complete silence. And some just want a show that’s really something special.” On Sweeny’s website for the movement, he describes Ambient Church music as “a nomadic experiential event series dedicated to working with artists to bring new ecologies to architecturally unique spaces through transcendent audio and visual performance.”
Description of the Events
An Ambient Church event consists of a live or recorded performance of electronic music set within a church and usually includes a light show. The show is meant to be a full-bodied performance with sound, lights, and sometimes even incense and food. The use of the church setting is to instill a sense of spiritual connection by employing its acoustics and using lights to highlight an atmosphere of sacredness. The goal is to “activate sacred buildings in alternative, but equally spiritual, ways.” The overall concept is to create a truly ambient experience.
The goal of the Ambient Church movement is to create a different kind of religious experience within the setting of a traditionally sacred space. It is meant to be more than an electronic music concert. The music written and performed in these events is done so with a spiritual goal in mind. “There is a decidedly spiritual element to the approach of the artists who perform at Ambient Church events.” Rather than include a service with texts and music with words, the Ambient Church experience focuses on the abstract qualities of music without text or the use of any spoken words at all. Listeners (or perhaps participants) are encouraged to make a more direct connection to their own understanding of the divine. This type of spiritual connection may be an even more direct experience because “the subjective forms evoked by light and sound, in combination with other factors, can be a language of God: that is, a way that the very Soul of the universe speaks to and within them as they seek to make sense of their lives and take a step forward, in community with others, for the sake of people, other animals, and the earth. The sounds and sights are themselves, in the moment at hand, sacred texts, albeit in aural and visual form.”
All events take place in churches rather than in concert halls or open-air venues. The church is an integral part of the experience because of its sound qualities as well as the religious symbolism it embraces. The church is meant to be a sacred space and is designed to hold the people within it in sacred hands. The requirement of the use of a church for all events signals that the event is meant to be a spiritual experience. Brian Sweeny has remarked that. “Music is spiritual, and if you come with an intention of finding transcendence, you’ll experience it...churches were built for transcendence.”
The Subculture
In the few years since the Ambient Church movement began, it has developed its own religious subculture or community without the requirement of an adherence to any particular faith practice or tradition. The Ambient Church is “clearly filling a longing in human beings for religion and worship, but it is attempting to pursue tangible experiences of worship without any defined spiritual object for that worship.” In large cities like New York and Los Angeles, it is easy to feel lost and disconnected from others in daily life. For people with busy lives sitting in an atmosphere of calm reflection can feel like being in a different world. City dwellers have always “yearned for a ‘spiritual’ space—a place where they could be quiet and alone with God in the hustle and bustle of a metropolitan city like New York. A relaxing, reflective, and meditative space may be regarded as an exotic and a far-away place.”
The Ambient Church event helps bring people together into an atmosphere of spiritual exploration and reflection. It “makes the best of post-modern technologies to help us reclaim our sense of connection with others and, truth be told, with ourselves.” The abstraction of the music allows people of different faiths to experience the event together. There is no need to argue about whose creed, prophet, or principle is more correct. Jay McDaniel has called the music happenings “Electronic Quaker meetings with a shamanic overtone.”
The Ambient Church as Surrogate Religion
Some musical subcultures have become what Francis Elizabeth Stewart has called a ‘surrogate’ religion. Stewart’s study was on the music of the Straight Edge punk scene but the same could be said for the music of the Grateful Dead and, I would argue, the music of the Ambient Church movement. Concerning the musical concerts of Straight Edge punk Stewart writes, “Straight Edge has become, for many of its adherents, a surrogate for traditional religion, one that has enabled its proponents to engage with spirituality as a part of their overall identity in a manner that is not constrained through traditional religious practices and borders. In other words, a new model for understanding religion within modern Western societies.”
Robert Sardiello makes a similar argument about the creation of a surrogate religion through the concert events of the Grateful Dead. “Concert rituals promote a liminal atmosphere which symbolically separates individual participants from ordinary social life so that they may more fully participate in the dramatic enactment.” The creation of a liminal atmosphere is one of three stages of ritual Sardiello claims is necessary to create a religious type of ritual. The three stages are separation, liminality, and reincorporation. These three stages are present in many types of musical subculture concerts including the music of punk, Grateful Dead concerts, and the music of Ambient Church events. Through staging, lights, setting, and the unique music of each, participants are separated from their daily life, bonded together as a subculture and a community of people who share an enjoyment of the music, and reincorporation to daily life at the conclusion of each event.
In its role as surrogate religion, each of these Ambient Church musical productions encourages the participants to seek their own understanding of spirituality without creeds or dogma. Sardiello points out this fact in relation to punk music but the same can be said for any subcultural musical concert such as that of the Ambient Church. “Resultant from that combination then we find many Straight Edge adherents rejecting traditional religious institutions and beliefs, opting instead to search for their own way to answer the mysteries of life. Instead of adherence to one particular traditional religion, we see a strong movement toward reliance on the self with a concurrent acknowledgment that it requires an understanding and engagement with an authentic self.”
It is my contention that the same qualities of a surrogate religion seen in Straight Edge punk music and the concerts of the Grateful Dead as well as many other musical subcultures are true for the music of the Ambient Church, maybe even more so. The church setting for the music makes the atmosphere sacred from the start. The electronic music and the lights encourage personal reflection and connection to the spiritual. The music is designed to carry people away to a different space (an ‘audiotopia’) yet it is still a shared experience that creates a community of listeners pulled from the audiences of raves, techno concerts, and new age music who seek an escape from the drugs and spiritual vacuity often associated with those events.
“It can be concluded that music, in this case, electronic dance music, has now become an ‘authorised’ sensational form for some... to convey a sense of the ‘spiritual’ in Anglo-American contexts. With aesthetics understood simply as ‘sense perception’, music has a key role to play in the embodiment of religious experience, i.e. materializing ‘religious emotions’ in the bodies. Also, music is seen to play a very crucial role in transmitting an aura of the ‘spiritual’, ...not just in terms of mediating a ‘sacred’ atmosphere for the subjects but also [in] creating a religious community that helps consolidate the transcendental ethos of the worship event.”
My Composition
I wrote an original piece of music designed to fit the model of the music of the Ambient Church movement. I named the piece “The Sea of Reflection.” It is a title with a double meaning in that the work is meant to promote spiritual reflection but it is also a comment on the harmonic movement of the work itself. The music begins mostly in the D Dorian mode but then works its way down to a tonality of C major. The word ‘sea’ also represents the resolving tonality.
Like most music of the Ambient Church, the progression of changes is slow and contemplative. The digitally produced sounds evoke a large reflective space like a church. There is no text or vocals though some of the sounds have voice-like textures. The music is merged with a video showing the inside of a large church with an organ in the center. The scene is meant to give listeners the feeling of being in a church but without specific religious symbols. The organ is symbolic of the music itself. A layer of colored lights in sync with the music has been added to provide the effect of changing lights that is important to Ambient Church events.
The music was composed in three sections. Section one introduces the first tonality in constantly rising and fading tones. Occasional sets of flourishing pitches move the music forward. The second part is signaled with a low bass sound. Sets of repeated rhythmic motives are introduced and repeated and set the mood for a short two-part melodic phrase. After several repetitions of the phrase with slight variations, another low sound introduces the third section. This final section contains a repeat of the rising and falling pitches of the first part but is now focused on the tonality of C major. Several pitches blur the tonality but gradually all resolve to a C major chord at the very end. The last several minutes of the piece is filled with a long fade out of the music.
The entire piece with video can be seen on YouTube at this address: