ABSTRACT
One conviction which I have tried to articulate so far is that there is no specific music that can bring us into contact with the spiritual. There are no intrinsic qualities which would legitimize ascribing the adjective ‘spiritual’ to the noun ‘music.’ It is difficult, if not impossible, to compile the characteristics or parameters that would ensure the spiritual dimensions of certain music. In Modern Music and After, Paul Griffiths asks himself rhetorically
… whether music can be divided at all into the spiritual and the non-spiritual, or whether spirituality does not rather reside in the music’s texts (Pärt and Tavener, for instance, have set almost exclusively sacred texts, often in sacred languages) and – most of all – in how the music is heard. (Griffiths 1995: 276, my italics)1
What takes place here is a shift from regarding spirituality as an objective condition towards understanding it as a relationship between a subject and an object, which could be called ‘spiritual’:2 not spiritual music, but a connection between two vibrating bodies, the sound producer and the sound receiver, described discursively as ‘spiritual.’ With this shift, the distinction between profane and spiritual music can, as a last resort, be traced back to the way music is listened to, and, subsequently, how this listening experience is articulated in language.3
