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How can singing foster our relationships with strangers? And how can singing not just foster relationships, but be a powerful means of hospitality? Dr. Helen Phelan draws on her ethnographic work with a Congolese-Irish choir to show the potential of “sonic hospitality” through singing together.
About Dr. Helen Phelan
Helen Phelan is Professor of Arts Practice at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, Ireland. She is an Irish Research Council recipient for her work on singing, ritual and new migrant communities in Ireland. Her most recent book, Singing the Rite to Belong: Music, Ritual and the New Irish, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. As a singer, she specializes in chant from global religious ritual and is the co-founder of the female vocal group Cantoral who released the much acclaimed CD recording Let the Joyous Irish Sing Aloud! in 2014. She is also founder of the Singing and Social Inclusion research group at the University of Limerick.
About Dr. Joshua Kalin Busman
Thanks especially to Dr. Joshua Kalin Busman, this episode’s guest interviewer! Josh has been on Music and the Church before discussing Virtuosity, Amateurism, and Amateurishness in Evangelical Worship. Joshua is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina – Pembroke. He teaches music history and music theory in the Department of Music and serves as Interim Assistant Dean of the Esther G. Maynor Honors College.
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Transcript of Singing, Hospitality and the Sacred Stranger, with Helen Phelan, on Music and the Church with Sarah Bereza, Ep. 45
Helen Phelan: My name is Helen Phelan. I work in a place called the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. It’s at the University of Limerick in Ireland. The Academy was set up in 1994. And it was quite experimental at the time because it was trying to create a space where you would bring together the academic study of performance with theory. And I came into that as a ritual scholar. And so the two areas that I work in mostly are medieval singing – medieval music and chant – and then the kind of work that I was presenting on this morning, which is music and migration. So what are the different kinds of ritual practices that have evolved around new migrant groups in Ireland, and what role is music playing in creating spaces of welcome or hospitality or the opposite?
Joshua Busman: One of the themes of this conference has been the the study of religion – especially the study of congregational music – is already interdisciplinary right from the beginning. But I’m curious, what are your interdisciplinary backgrounds.
Helen Phelan: I was I began my education as a musician. I am a pianist, I have a background in musicology and ethnomusicology, and I moved into liturgical music through ritual studies. I was teaching music, and I was really struck by how much the teaching of music relies on the theory about music, and the big divide between being a musician, making music, singing, playing an instrument – and the way we theorize about it. And at the same time, I was just, you know, earning my keep as a young student, as a church organist, and working in the church. And I really became fascinated by ritual because I think ritual has this kind of holistic sense. It uses the mind the body, it uses all of our senses, our sense of smell…. And I thought, that’s a space that brings all of these together. And I wanted to try to understand that better. So that’s what brought me into studying ritual, and the way in which music works in ritual to create these spaces where people interact in different ways from the way we do in our normal day to day life.
Joshua Busman: Yeah, I think I remember when I was an undergrad, talking with the professor and talking about my certain interest in religious music. And I said, I thought it primarily consistent in the fact that I could find myself reading Plato, or theology, or literature, or playing an instrument, or listening to a record, and all of it seems productive in some way. Like this could all be part of what I do for a living – that would be amazing!
Helen Phelan: Exactly. And in all my work I really try to, as much as I can, bring those strands together. And I have a huge interest in postmodern philosophy and theology, because I think it’s asking some of the really important questions about being in the world. You know, how do we try to live well in the world? And that’s a loaded sentence in itself. But how do we try to do that? Asking those kinds of questions. And then also, you know, the experiential world of making music, or singing in a choir. And then there’s the real political world that we all live in. And I’m particularly interested in – we live in a time of absolutely unprecedented migration. There have never been as many people going as many places as there are now. And the reasons for doing those can be shocking, and difficult, and full of danger. And is there a way to bring those worlds together, you know – the world of ideas, the world of music making, and the contemporary world that we live in. And what relevance do they have to each other? So in all my work, I try to create this kind of weave between those ways, because I think that’s how many of us actually experience the world. We think a lot about it, we live in it, and we perform it. And it’s really bringing those together, I think, that allows us to live, you know, as holistic life as we can.
Joshua Busman: So the way that you laid it out there, basically, I think what I would like to do now is is sort of unweave it for a second. I like the idea of taking it sort of in that order of starting with a little bit of the high theory as it were, right the philosophy, and then moving in a little bit to the musical practice, and then the sort of broader implications. So two terms which are crucial to understanding some of what you’re doing, are hospitality, which you talked about the beginning, and then the idea of the stranger, the other. And, as is often the case in postmodern philosophy, these are words that we use in our everyday language that are being sort of queered in their use in the academic context. So if you could start maybe with hospitality and talk a little bit about how you’re using that term.
Hospitality
Helen Phelan: Yeah, I like to keep an ear out for recurrent language. You know, when you see a word reappearing like a little trope in literature, in conversation, newspapers. And this word hospitality, I noticed really over the last 10, 15 years, it comes back again and again. I become really interested in it, and particularly in Derrida’s work around the word, because it seems to me that what it was trying to grapple with, was the complex nature of human relationship. I think very often when we try to say how can we live together in the world, we tend to emphasize the things we have in common – community – and Derrida says, well, hospitality is a little bit more complicated than that because – and I love etymology, I love going back to the meaning of words. And he reminds us that that word has this double history, this double heritage. It’s related, of course, to words of nurturing, like hospice and hospital, hospitality – but it’s also related to hostility and the enemy. And he makes that point that hospitality is a much bigger challenge than, say community. The community very often emphasizes being with people that we have something in common with. Hospitality says, you know, we need to welcome the person that we fear, welcome the person that creates anxiety in us. And he goes on further to make the point that that anxiety is often created by the fact, of course, that the Other that we see in this stranger, throws up the Other in ourselves, the Other that sometimes we don’t want to see. So hospitality is about coming to terms with what we fear in the other. So all these issues like xenophobia and that. But also grappling with why that button gets pushed in us, because very often, of course, it has something to do with how we understand ourselves.
Joshua Busman: Right? Yeah, I think the summary of Derrida line is, “first we encounter the other as monstrous, then we encounter ourselves as monstrous.” And so yeah, I think that that is so huge. And I love too, the way that you brought in this idea of sort of risk. Which is so crucial to Derrida’s notion of hospitality. You know, he uses that that Joycean “the gift,” the gift poisons, as a way to get – you’re opening the door at two in the morning, you don’t know who’s at the door, but you open the door anyway. That’s hospitality, right. It’s this, being hospitable at the moment of the complete unknown, right, the wholly other.
Helen Phelan: Exactly right. And I teally appreciate that nuance that Derrida brings between what he calls the conditional and the unconditional. And he uses this, not only with hospitality, but with concepts like forgiveness or, you know, the big conceptual words around relationship. How do we forgive the unforgiveable? How do we welcome that which we abhor? And I think he suggests that we can do it conditionally, which means we do it with limits. We do it to the limits of our legal or political system. But we must always strive to also do it on unconditionally. We must always try to do the impossible, the unforgivable, the unimaginable. And the space of possibility resides between those two, between the conditional and the unconditional. And what I was trying to say in the talk today, because it’s something is a conviction that I have come over the years, for many, many years of working with choirs, with new migrant groups in Ireland, with new ritual communities – is that that space of hospitality, I have most frequently encountered it, with groups who are singing together.
Joshua Busman: Yeah. Which is a great transition. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you see singing playing into this, and maybe what it was that caused you, or made you gravitate towards singing as a way to explore these themes.
Singing as a Way to Explore Hospitality
Helen Phelan: I have to be honest and say I really kind of stumbled into this understanding. I stumbled into it, experientially, first. I think so many people who are sing with others, have an intuitive sense that they’re being with others in that experience of singing, is somehow different. It somehow transcends the way in which we normally are with each other in the world. So I had that experience many, many times, as I’m sure many singers do. And at the same time, I was reading a lot of this literature. I was excited conceptually by these ideas. And at a certain point, those kind of theoretical ideas, and this intuitive feeling around the experience of singing began to coalesce. And I began to ask myself – because one of the things that really interests me – we have these ideas like hospitality, but like, well, how do we ground it? How do we live it? How does it manifest itself? And I began to think about that. Is it possible that singing is a manifestation of that? So I burrowed back into the literature, and found some wonderful material. Kristeva, for example, has a lot of wonderful material about sound and silence, and the relationship between these, and how moving beyond ourselves involves – you mentioned risk – the risk of silence, the risk of unknowing, not knowing, having no language. And she says in one very beautiful passage, what comes after silence: song. So the two worlds began to come together for me. And I suppose the other piece of that is, you know, nearly 20 years of working with choirs. And I work a lot with people who came to Ireland initially as asylum seekers who have come to live in Ireland, who have set up musical groups. And I have 20 years of ethnographic interviews, which have convinced me, have really persuaded me that there is a real world value in these ideas. That there is something very persuasive, as I experience it, and witness it in the role that that kind of music has played in helping people build new real lives in new parts of the world.
Joshua Busman: Yeah, I think, as you demonstrated really well, in the talk, that the great thing about singing in this context, is it sort of brings together a philosophical sort of idea that hospitality, but it’s also grounded in a kind of scientific physiological literature about compromise-oriented behaviors, being together, in particular ways, as well as, as you said, in this sort of narrative, anecdotal way that people move through the world. So it’s indexing together these different ways that we come to understand the world, and sort of taking something different in each box.
Helen Phelan: That’s right. Initially I came at this, as I said, kind of intuitively, experientially. I’m an ethnographer. So it was through narrative, people’s stories, and the accumulation of those stories saying, Yes, something’s happening, something’s happening. But then I said, What is the science of this? So we have all this anecdotal evidence that something’s happening, but what is the actual science? And I became really interested in that and, you’re absolutely right. The literature around the physiological effects of singing, the psychological effects of singing, and what my own work in particular is about, the effects of singing with other people. Because that brings a whole other area of research into it, you know, how our bodies literally start to attune with each other, what happens to your heartbeat, what happens to your breathing when you’re singing with other people. And you know, we’ve all this new theory on mirror neurons and what happens to the people listening, and the ability of that sound to create shared physiological and emotional experiences. There’s a huge literature on that. But it’s something I think that sometimes we underestimate in terms of its, as I said, it’s real world value.
Joshua Busman: I think a great deal of the either avoidance or fear or neglect of that scientific literature, I think probably comes more from our insecurity as humanists than it does from its lack of economic applicability, right? Maybe we’re in a PhD program in the humanities because in our undergrad, we didn’t do particularly well in our science classes. And we were feeling not really confident, but there are resources there.
Helen Phelan: Yeah. And I have to say, I have been very influenced by my colleagues in music therapy, because they live at that crossroads between the human performative experience of making music, but also the science then of how that can be applied usefully to various situations. So I think as people who are interested in music and ritual, as many of us are, it’s good for us to have a look at that literature, because in actual fact, it explains to us why the things we are doing are as effective as they are.
Joshua Busman: Yeah, right. One last bit of the sort of the framing, and then we’ll get into the great case study that you use. And that is you use this triad of content, context, and intent as a way into this conversation of talking about community, singing, and ritual. So I was wondering if you could just give us a quick sort of sketch of that.
Content, Context, and Intent
Helen Phelan: Yeah. I must say, I’ve always been drawn to models. Because I think a challenge for any of us who are working with music, is that there’s an awful lot we know, experientially and intuitively. But creating the bridge between that kind of knowing, and research, can be quite a challenge. What kind of methods can we use to frame the work we’re doing, to critically engage and analyze. And I think I’m influenced by mathematical theory here. I think models can often help us do that. Because models, really all they do is they create a kind of a theoretical frame that allows us to play with experience. And then that can open up possibilities of interpretation and analysis. And as I was saying in the talk, I have a lifelong interest in language around numbers, because I think numbers are themselves a really fascinating symbol system, aren’t they? Not least of which in Christianity, medieval Christianity, which is one area that I work in, and particularly around triads, because triads, in many world literature’s wisdom traditions, they are the number of divinity for various reasons. Because they emerge, they evolved as a way of representing the whole. So you had the what existed, you had dualities, which represents opposites and then triangulations, which represents the whole: beginning, the middle, the end. But also because they’re often used to represent the best, the superlative. Good, better, best. They have been applied to the divinity. So I became very interested in triangular models and there are a lot of really fascinating ones in ethnomusicology, in anthropology, and in liturgical theology, for talking about or framing musical processes. So I looked at those, I looked at the interviews that I had done over these last 20 years, and it seemed to me from all of those, I could glean three primary preoccupations. There is the issue of context. You know, we say music is a universal language, which is true as long as we remember that it is present in the entire universe, but it is not singular. So, the context, the cultural context of music where music comes from is critical.
Joshua Busman: I always tell my students, music is universal language – that isn’t true, but it not true because it’s actually two different true statements. Music is universal. And music is a language.
Helen Phelan: So cultural context is key to understanding any musical expression. And then there’s the content. What are we actually singing, repertoire, improvisation. This comes up again and again when people start talking about their music. And then the third one, which struck me as hugely important, and maybe less discussed is intent, motivation. Why? Why are we singing? Why are we singing what we’re singing? And the way in which people articulate their music. And so many of the interviews I do around that – What is your music? Why do you sing it? Where do you sing it? Who are you singing for? And what is purpose? – fall into that model of context, content and intent. So something that struck me over the years of using this model, and looking at the way people talk about their music is, yes, the three of these keep coming up as tropes or motifs in the way that people talk about their music. But, fascinatingly, when they perform the music, there’s often a lot more blurring of the categories that appears in the language. And I thought, it’s in that malleable space, that we find the hospitality. That’s where that that searched for unconditional, that thing that goes beyond what we can do, we can only aspire to, that hospitality happens in that blurred performance space.
Helen Phelan: I appreciate it, you know, the Derrida idea of both/and. It’s something that I have always found really helpful, because sometimes it seems to me, that in attacking past ways of understanding the world, we kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I think Derrida is always saying that, it is something new, it is something different, but that does not erase what has been. That’s the both/and. And so it struck me that these categories are there because they’re extremely helpful. We don’t eradicate them. But we are enliven them, and we transform them through the performance.
Joshua Busman: Right? I’m forgetting where, but I remember Derrida saying deconstruction is giving something a future. It’s de-sedimentation. imagining that it might be otherwise. and it might have a future that is unknowable.
Helen Phelan: Yeah, absolutely right. And sometimes those little prefixes like “de” or like “post” can create a sense of something – sometimes we make the mistake of thinking somebody that comes after has no reference point with what came before it. While in fact it can’t exist unless the thing has happened. You know, so it standing on the shoulders of that past experience. So it’s our ability in a way to embrace – and this is the again the kind of holism that’s referenced in triangulations – to embrace the whole, not to reject what has come before, but to enliven it, to animate it through – I think there’s of course many ways to do that. But a particularly effective way to do that is to enliven it through performance.
Joshua Busman: Right, that’s a nice sort of connection right? We’ve been in a fairly sort of lofty theoretical space. Let’s bring it to ground and talk about this case study using Elikya.
Elikya
Helen Phelan: Elikya – a work for hope.
Joshua Busman: Oh, fabulous. So tell us about Elikya. Who are they, where do they come from, and how did you become connected with them?
Helen Phelan: So if I start with actually how I got to know them, because as I said to earlier, my early work was around medieval music ritual. My own doctoral work was about the post Vatican II changes in Catholic liturgy in Ireland, so when, you know, other musical forms and expressions came into the Catholic liturgy. And I finished that work in 2000, and so you come to the end of a PhD journey and I said, I really have to do something else. I have to take my head up out of the books. And at exactly that time, the year 2000, we will come into the end of this kind of post-Celtic Tiger period in Ireland. And for the first time, you know, we’re a country of immigrants in Ireland – you know, since the Great Famine did in 19th century really up until the latter part of the 20th century, proportionally speaking we have the highest rate of immigration of any country in Western Europe. People weren’t coming to Ireland, they were leaving Ireland. That changed in the 1990s for the first time, with significant number of people coming into Ireland, including a number of asylum seekers. Most of them tended to come to Dublin, the capital city until the year 2000. The government introduced what they call the policy of dispersal, and people were literally put on buses and sent around to different cities in Ireland. So I work in a place called the University of Limerick. And I heard of a group setting up in Limerick city, a support group, because asylum seekers were going to be coming to our city. They were looking for English language teachers. So that’s something I could do. I had a TOEFL qualification. And I went in, and I started working with the groups. And I was only there a couple of months, when four gentlemen from the Democratic Republic of the Congo came up to me, they had heard that I worked in music in university and said, “We have an idea. We want to start a choir.” And that was the beginning of it. For me, that was the beginning of our interaction. And I thought, this is this is terribly interesting. These people are barely in Ireland, and their first idea, they’re living in a direct provision accommodation, they don’t have a home, they haven’t engaged with education – and they want to start a choir. So we did that. And that was the beginning of a 20 year relationship, I started a project called Sanctuary, which was to provide cultural support for new migrant groups who wanted to set up culturally-based projects. So Elikya, which is the Lingala word for hope, started almost 20 years ago in Limerick city. It’s gone through many manifestations. But what’s really interesting now, I think, is that they are a choir and a group of musicians who help new migrants who are coming to Limerick who may be interested in setting up similar projects.
Joshua Busman: As you said, the thing I also love about Derrida is this remarkable attention to words, etymologies, and things. And so I found it interesting, especially when you showed the clip [of Elikya]. You see, percussion, you see piano. It’s interesting that they chose the word choir instead of band. And this choice to go with a more sort of clearly participatory style of music making rather than a presentational one. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that: their conception of what this group might be from the beginning.
Helen Phelan: Yeah. It’s a very interesting point in terms of the model. Because iif you ask the choir what they are, they would say, we are a choir when we sing in church, we are a band or an ensemble when we go to festivals or we do workshops. Do they will use different language depending on where they’re singing, but very often, the musical forces are the same. That particular video just showed a small number of people, and sometimes when you have the full complement, it is more like a traditional choir. But they will sing equally with instruments or without instruments, just a vocal presentation. So the the language of it tends to say, a particular presentation of the music aligns itself to a particular word like choir, or band, or ensemble. But in actual fact, the musical performances are much more mixed. It’s harder to pin down the presentation of the music to the languages around it.
Joshua Busman: I think that’s interesting. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this song you chose to have us all sing together. And a little bit about maybe why you chose that song or why that song you think is a good example of the kind of thing that you’re talking about.
Helen Phelan: I sang myself with the Elikya for many years, and learned so many fabulous songs. And I love the music. But that one in particular I like, because it was one of the first songs we learned, it’s on their first album. And it’s just a great example of the kind of thing I was trying to get across, which is that even though we might describe music, as Elikya does, as liturgical or sacred or secular – I’ve heard this song sung in all of those contexts. I’ve heard it sung at a Catholic Mass, at a Pentecostal service, at a African Day festival. And the nature of the song, the lyrics of the song – the text means if God is calling, if God is calling you, don’t wait until tomorrow to answer, answer now. And it was very unproblematic to bring this to all of those different environments. And again, that makes me think about how music works. You know, the articulation that we often do of these different styles or repertoires, can be completely undermined by the way in which we perform it. And that performance can be so much more inclusive and all-embracing. Some of the people who came up to talk to me, after the presentation, were making this point. The number of people who will sing sacred music, no problem, but would describe themselves as atheists. So there’s something about music that overrides our insistence on definitions, you know? Are you a Christian? Are you not a Christian? Do you believe? Do not believe? What do you believe? Music is probably less interested in the answers to those questions, and far more interested in the experiential beingness of relationship. And that’s what I think comes across.
Joshua Busman: And so perfect that the lyrics have this idea of call or solicitation – this insistence that we’ve talked several times. Okay, so we’ve gone through the sort of the framing, the philosophical bit, and now the singing bit. And so I want to broaden out a little bit, and talk about the political possibilities. There are obviously some, you know, direct political possibilities, and the way this is interfacing with community building and migrant communities So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the broader potentials of the research you’re doing, of talking about singing and compromise-oriented behavior and politics.
Implications of the Research
Helen Phelan: One of the things that strikes me increasingly – you know, we live in strange times, maybe we always do. But you know, we live in particularly strange times, I think, in terms of some of the big existential questions like, What is truth? What is true? What can we believe? What we hear in the media? Can we trust politics? Can we can we put our faith behind the institutions of the church, or of our political world, or of our health systems? There are a lot of questions around trust, around power, around abuse. And a sense of disenfranchisement, I think, from our abilities sometimes to make a difference in those worlds. It seems to me sometimes, that in grappling with those, we limit ourselves by dealing with them primarily through the world of cognitive logic, thinking that the language of politics, even the language of policy, of advocacy – that that will be sufficient to bring about real change. And I think what we have learned is that, it’s sufficient in terms of changing structures. But you know, to change hearts and minds is a bigger job of work. I am increasingly convinced, through, as I said, a couple of decades of this work, that we we limit our toolbox to our own detriment. We have crippled ourselves by not embracing the full potential of the skills, and the tools, and the talents that we have available to us. And maybe because I’m a musician, I’m particularly interested in the skills and talents around singing. So much of the research says that this can make a difference. This can help people learn to live well together. And I think in the time that I have left in my academic career – I’m a mother to a young teenager – in thinking about his future, and thinking about my students, and thinking about the world that I want to hopefully leave behind me – I want to spend my time thinking about, and engaging in activities that help us live well together. And I think singing has a very significant role to play in this.
Joshua Busman: I want to ask briefly about this idea that you raised in the beginning about the gift. So singing is a gift, but it might also be a poison, right? But singing can be used to unify around noble causes and evil causes. Right? And so I wonder how can we be mindful, attentive, vigilant to the use of singing to create communities that are oriented towards justice and inclusion?
Music and Wellness
Helen Phelan: That is a great question. And I actually have a PhD student, she’s from Palestine, and she’s working on music and conflict. And a lot of her work is around when music doesn’t help. And this is particularly relevant to issues of migration, post-conflict trauma, and the many situations that migration is just one example, but it could be any kind of trauma, homelessness, bereavement – there are situations where music is not helpful, is not useful in those contexts. And you’re absolutely right. I always say, music isn’t good, music is powerful. And we need to be very cognizant of that power and use it with care. But it is worth saying that when we say that music contributes to our well being – being well, does not necessarily mean being happy. It doesn’t necessarily mean that things are good. It means that wellness is linked to holism. It means that we are ontologically trying to be our fullest selves, in this world, at this time. And the only way we can do that, is to embrace that full story, to embrace our trauma, to embrace our bereavement. Again to circle back to Derrida, to embrace the Other in ourselves, the part that is difficult and challenging. So I think when we say music helps us, sometimes that help is about, as Kristeva says, knowing when to be silent, knowing when silence is the music that we need. So you’re absolutely right. It’s a very complex relationship, the relationship between music and wellness. And that’s, again, where I think ideas like hospitality can help us, because it’s being open to the darker side, as well as, the other.
Joshua Busman: Right. I think if if there’s a sort of simple way to draw that connection, right, it’s that singing together and hospitality share in common the fact that we can be surprised. And putting ourselves in positions to be surprised is a huge part of what you’re talking about.
Music and Surprise
Helen Phelan: That’s a lovely way of putting it because it’s the unknown that forces us beyond. It’s not that I don’t like the word community, but I increasingly feel its limit because it’s because of its emphasis on commonality. And as you said, the thing that surprises us is the thing that – one of the speakers this morning was quoting Seamus Heaney, who has this lovely line: the thing we never think to look for. And that’s the surprise, as you said, that’s the encounter with the stranger. And if we want to live in a world where we’re not locked down in an inability to be in relationship with something that doesn’t conform to our understanding of the world, we have to be able to experience surprise, and what is the nature of that experience? Just ask any teenager who listens to a piece of music for the first time, and it changed their life. How many of us have had that experience of literally changing our lives, because it is the music we never thought to listen for. We can say that as an actuality, we can say it as a metaphor. But being open to that space, and also creating a world where those experiences are common and not exceptional. That’s one of the places where we can think about things like ritual. The more we create those spaces in our world, the more we allow for the possibility of that surprise. And when we live in a world that is, as I said, efficient and oriented towards getting a task done, towards completing a job, an employment, an entrepreneurial relationship, we don’t allow ourselves as much space for that kind of surprise. So it’s very interesting to look at societies where ritual plays a really important role in the day to day life of that world. It’s something I think that would help us if we could enhance the availability of that kind of space.
Joshua Busman: When you were talking, for some reason I was thinking of another Seamus Heaney poem, one my favorites, called The Skylight which is in the second Glenmore cycle – the idea that, so often that surprise when we cut open, the roof and “extravagant sky enters,” as he says. That surprises often coupled with a kind of permeability and openness, right, which is so much of what you’re talking about.
Helen Phelan: That’s right. And you know, I think that one of the things that’s always struck me through a lifetime of trying to study music is, you’re studying something so ephemeral, so fleeting and transient. I love that image of the scholar Christopher Bannerman, he says, it’s like trying to study the butterfly on pins. You’re studying something in flight. And that makes it very difficult to do. But that’s what makes it worthwhile. Because it’s preciousness is a link to that transience. And that again, that’s a very interesting metaphor for being in the world, that we can’t hold on to stable senses of who we are, of identity, of nationality, of beliefs, or creeds. We fool ourselves if we think that they’re stable, they’re constantly changing. And being open to that change,and living in a way that develops the muscles to cope with that change and to be open to awe, to be open to extravagance and wonder – we need to develop those proclivities, those ways of being in the world. And I think ritual and the activities of ritual, singing, gesture dance, and movement can be real aids to that way of being in the world.
Joshua Busman: And then on that journey, it’s almost like the sort of songs and dances, become companions that go on a journey with us, right? We hear the song differently, five years down the road, and 10 years down the road, 15 years down the road, but it still is with us through all of those changes.
Helen Phelan: That’s right. That’s a lovely aspect of you know, the research on singing. There’s a whole section on singing and memory, because one of the really important functions of singing is that it helps us to recreate experiences. We’ve all had this experience, you know, you hear a piece of music, you know, that you heard for the first time for your first kiss. And the whole experience opens up again in your life. And yes, in the context of many of the groups I work with, that can be traumatic. But it can be cathartic. It can be healing. And it can also be extraordinarily pleasurable to revisit, and remarry, and reconfirm our story. And if we think about the ways in which our world allows us to do that, they’re limited. They’re limited. So you know, every time every time you sing a song, you recreate yourself, and you recreate a part of your own story. And moreover, you share that.
Joshua Busman: Do you have any final parting thoughts or anything you feel like you wanted to be asked about that?
Helen Phelan: No. I’m terribly grateful to be able to share these ideas in this context, because what I sense from some of the other presentations that I had the privilege to hear, is that there is an open-hearted grappling with the big questions of the role of music, the purpose of music, and how that can dialogue with the way in which we live, understand, experience the sacred in our contemporary world. So I’m grateful to be part of that conversation.
Joshua Busman: Well, thank you so much.
Helen Phelan: Thank you, Joshua.
