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Is there such a thing as "religious music" (not including works in which the lyrics or libretti deal with relgious subjectes, such as Händel's Messiah, or Bach's various oratorios), beyond looking at something through hindsight and deciding that it satisfies whatever the listener thinks "religious music" should sound like?


Well, that is one way to look at it. Somebody once asked me to give a talk on 'religious art' and I deftly chickened through by hosting it as a discussion of whether the topic was a valid one! (That's the trick with public speaking: somehow get people to participate. People are more anxious to GIVE than receive opinions, and they'll think you're a top orator if you just let THEM do the real talking!)

But it's a question of whether you invoke the kind of emotions that religious experience pulls up, or if you bypass emotion and somehow try to, through sound, wake something in people. Some Vedantists and Buddhists of course think that musical frequencies 'tune in' to certain 'divine' aspects of people ... as in 'Ommmm' etc.! Then again, Sufis dance to get themselves in the mood. Who knows? There are though, certain passions that have more to do with the erotic than anything else, and erotic music tends to something not thought of as 'spiritual' in the West ... unless you're a Tantrist! So they might avoid that element. In some Christian traditions there's a real fear of that.

Take the opening intro to Rozsa's 'King of Kings' Prelude, separate it from the rest of the piece, and it's as 'chthonic' or earth-erotic, even pagan, as it's possible to get. I'm sure Rozsa knew it. I like the way he put these things together, quite naturally, and it's actually quite a unique thing to try. He may not even have thought of himself as DOING it. He picked up something there, something you find in places like the Book of Revelation, that just never turns up in church music. I think it SHOULD at least sometimes, but it never does.

But I agree that Hollywood's 'religious' music is really just dramatic evocation of religious emotions in people. And that CAN be very kitsch and fake of course.