Sacred Sound Choir

[Ken Reels]

In a city accustomed to flash and noise, once holy place was brought to silence. It was the silence of a love that unites, as the spiritual authors have written over the centuries. The quiet music seemed to come from within each person hearing it, evoking prayer and reflective attention, instead of overwhelming them from an exterior noise.

As minds and hearts adjusted to the atmosphere and experience they were in, a change came over the audience. They were still, many with gazes that told of their introspective focus on the touch of the music in their souls.

From Magnificat to Miserere to Exsultate, the choir did not just perform, but led each person to be touched by God himself. Many came to be entertained, but found themselves somehow slightly changed in a deep way. Their faces turned away from the busy streets, the cell phones, the concerns of work and social life, and toward God who arrested their attention with quiet beauty. For many, it was like hearing music from childhood long forgotten, although they may have never heard it before. The sound and the feel of the sacred music brought out something in who they were, created as sons and daughters of God. Like a heritage long forgotten, but embedded in their sub-conscious memory.

Sacred art, including sacred music, brings us to see the face of God, who reaches out to us to unveil a new glimpse of who He is, to show us the gift of His love and how beautiful it is, and to touch us and bring us to life, like in the famous mural by Michelangelo in the same chapel the Choir is named after. And our gift to him is to receive it. With open hearts, silently, gratefully, letting it take root in us so that He may live in us and we may truly live, bringing that beauty to the world we return to outside the doors of the Cathedral.

Memorial Church is closed for University holidays, University closures, services, and private events. Windhover Contemplative Center is currently closed. There is no expected re-opening date at this time.

Join us weekly in community at Stanford Memorial Church at 11 am as we celebrate in worship with curated sacred sounds of joy. The Sacred Summer Music Series invites choirs from around the Bay Area to Stanford Memorial Church each year to share their gifts and talents in a town and gown worship that celebrates the rich cultural heritages of the Bay Area. Each week we will host a different choir with sacred readings and prayers in worship and rejoice together in our Summer of Sacred Joy!

I wonder about what the Jewish congregants in Pittsburgh were singing when their synagogue was attacked by a gunman in 2018. What did that music sound like? Were they singing the same melodies sung by my great-grandparents who also lived in Pennsylvania?

Judaism was always about singing for me. Singing the prayers before lighting the candles. Singing with the congregation on Saturday morning. Learning to read tropes. Singing the Torah and haftarah portions at my bar mitzvah. Singing around the table on Passover. Singing at Jewish summer camp. Singing at Sunday school. Everything we did was a lesson in Jewish musicality.

I hope you have read it as my modest contribution to the conversation about decolonization within music programs in the United States. My aim has been to offer another vantage point from which to observe the exclusionary workings of music within higher education and within insitutionalized American education more broadly. Just as I am interrogating the meaning of the dominance of Christians and Christianity in choir, we should all be asking about the meaning of the dominance of white people and whiteness in our music schools and departments more generally.

[1] A couple important points: First, not all Jews are white. Second, many American Jews, like Italians and other Southern and Eastern Europeans, came to be seen as white primarily in post-WWII America, initially thanks to repercussions of the G.I. bill, which excluded Black Americans and others who continued to be seen as racial minorities by mainstream white American society. See Brodkin, K., & Sacks, K. B. (1998). How Jews became white folks and what that says about race in America. Rutgers University Press.

Hip hop, a contemporary form of oral culture created predominantly by African-American and Puerto Rican youth of the South Bronx, finds expression in the Christian rap ministry of Brothers Inc. 4 Da Lord.

Reflecting the widespread and growing public awareness of and interest in religious beliefs and spiritual meaning in everyday life, the 1997 Festival of American Folklife program Sacred Sounds: Belief & Society features a variety of religious and spiritual traditions. Through performances and discussions with Festival visitors, Festival participants from Old Regular Baptist communities in Kentucky, hip hop Christian worshipers from The Bronx, New York, African-American gospel choirs and quartets, representatives of South African indigenous-Christian blends of worship and popular music, and practitioners of Islamic and Judaic traditions in Jerusalem, among other religious and cultural communities, will share their perspectives and feelings about the intrinsic nature of their sacred cultures and the musical extensions of their faiths into the secular world.Throughout world history sacred sounds have served as a medium for human cultures to raise queries, advance beliefs, give praise, and inspire others to join in exploration of the mysteries of earthly existence and the greater universe. These sacred sound traditions encompass a broad range of expressive forms: melodic and repetitive vocalizations called chants; sharp, passionate, emotion-filled hums, groans, shouts; percussive, rhythmic hand claps and foot stomps; and extended song, sermon, and instrumental arrangements. Instrumental music, sung prayers, and mystical chants have been used to communicate with the divine, to unite religious communities, and to express moral, political, social, and economic aspirations. Sacred sounds in many traditions are the central means for invocation of the spirits. The utterance of particular sounds is thought by many cultures to form a connection to all the elements of the universe. In some belief systems music and sound vibrations are pathways for healing body, mind, and spirit. Among the wide range of human expressive behavior, the capacity to infuse the joys, sorrows, and humility that characterize religious and spiritual beliefs into oral poetry, chants, songs, and instrumental music is certainly one of the most powerful and inspirational ways all peoples and cultures acknowledge the spirit of the Supreme in their lives.Although secular and sacred are terms used to distinguish worldly and temporal concerns from the realm of the universal and the eternal, sacred sounds are not necessarily restricted to formal settings in which religious rituals are performed for followers. Civil rights struggles, national democratic liberation movements, and union picket lines are a few of the non-sacred spaces where religious music has been consistently and meaningfully incorporated into worldly affairs.In the United States the predominance of Christianity and its related sacred text may readily bring to mind familiar references to sacred sounds: "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord"; "Come before his presence with singing" (Psalm 100: 1-2); "My Lord, He calls me by the thunder... the trumpets sound within my soul..." (from "Steal Away" [African American spiritual]). Inside and outside of the United States many other religious and spiritual traditions in diverse cultural communities also express profound beliefs through sacred sounds. For example, the Upanishads - Vedic sacred treatises of ancient India - teach that "the essence of sacred knowledge is word and sound, and the essence of word and sound is OM." Although the languages of many religious texts and spoken rituals may be inaccessible to different cultural communities, sacred sounds are generally well received and understood as a means by which all cultures acknowledge higher states of wonder, consciousness, and order that transcend everyday thoughts, actions, and activities and connect one and all to the deeper recesses of the universe. Plato referred to "music as moral law ... the essence of order, [that] leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form."Physical migrations and telecommunications bring the world's religious cultures into new mixed worship spaces: increasingly, different religious services are held in the same place of worship at different times, and diverse religious services and styles of sacred music come into homes via radio and television. New encounters that bring previously isolated community worship traditions face to face sometimes challenge Plato's "essence of order" and literally jar the religious and spiritual assumptions, and the very ears, of those of us unfamiliar with other sacred traditions and expressive cultural behavior. For example, according to a recent Washington Post report, one of the long-time parishioners of Calvary Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, Virginia, took offense at a "particular African-style service" in which Ghanaian immigrants in the congregation brought forth "offerings with song and swirling dance, accompanied by drums, synthesizer and electric guitar." On the other hand, the spiritual awareness of one of the church elders was expanded through the observance of a different cultural community's approach to his faith: "I never felt the spirit so strongly."Festival visitors will meet a variety of religious practitioners and sacred sound performers whose religious and spiritual doctrines are quite similar in their acknowledgement of human existence in a grander scheme of organization created and ruled by a Supreme power(s). They will learn that each group (American Indian, Islamic, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Santera, Judaic, Mokhukhu of the Zion Christian Church of South Africa) may exhibit multiple variations on the sacred sounds of the same religious or spiritual doctrine. They will observe that in communities defined by religious denomination, racial identity, cultural style, age group, and gender, sacred sounds are expressed through a rich variety of artistic forms, with a wide range of emotional intensity, in a broad spectrum of meditative tenors and creative participatory dynamics between performers and audiences.Festival visitors will learn how the lined-out singing of the Old Regular Baptists from the coal-mining country of the southern Appalachian Mountains reflects a multicultural history of English/Scots/Irish-based American melodic traditions. They will witness the intensely expressed belief of the Zion Christian Church of South Africa - the largest Christian church on the continent of Africa - and hear how it melds traditional native religious beliefs and the teachings of Christian missionaries. Through intimate conversations with participants, visitors will learn about Asian Pacific American sacred traditions, which are increasingly visible, audible, vibrant elements of new and old communities across the United States. Performers of Santera, a synthesis of West African Yoruba Orisha worship and Catholicism practiced in Cuba, the United States, and areas of South America, will demonstrate and inform visitors how cross-fertilization between culturally different worship traditions can lead to what is generally referred to as syncretism. In the case of Santera, song, instrumental music (orus), and dance are as central to the basic character of the religious ritual as the spoken word is in other religions.The narrative stage in the Sacred Sounds program is the setting in which visitors can pursue such questions as how the age-old process of passing different religious traditions and styles from one generation to the next interacts with the ever-changing popular music scene. Young visitors and adults can jointly inquire about hip hop, a highly popular music form among youth around the world that is a creative way for some of today's youth ministries, such as Brothers Inc. 4 Da Lord, to express their Christian faith - despite the fact that hip hop is roundly criticized for promotion of violence, misogyny, and vulgar language.There is no substitute for direct experience with the vast array of sacred musical traditions that make up the human family. As sacred belief systems from around the world become more mobile and their musical traditions more evident in our home communities, we are afforded opportunities to visit different worship services and community festivals, make new acquaintances, and learn and appreciate first-hand the wondrous worlds of sacred sounds and beliefs. Sacred sound performers from throughout the country and around the world are also well documented and preserved in the archives of Folkways Records, a veritable museum of the air at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife Programs & Cultural Studies.

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