Making Sense through Music

Perceptions of the Sacred at Festival Musica Sacra Maastricht

Event
Mon, 2016-09-12 14:00 to 15:15
Department of Culture Studies - Tilburg University
Tilburg University Cobbenhagen building, Auditorium (access via Koopmans building) Warandelaan 2 Tilburg - The Netherlands

Church buildings are increasingly the decor of cultural activities, like concerts and festivals. This is not necessarily an indicator of the demise of institutional forms of religion, rather it may be seen as a valuable transformation. Especially in places where music and religion meet, they merge into new and meaningful platforms for sense making. PhD candidate Lieke Wijnia argues this in her dissertation, for which she conducted research at the annual arts festival Musica Sacra Maastricht. As music has received an almost religious status, while religious music and rituals are increasingly regarded as art and heritage, new frameworks for meaning making emerge. These provide traditional forms of religion a new place of meaning in secularised contexts and emphasize the ritual qualities of music and concert attendance. 

Due to the fact the Maastricht festival takes the notion of  ‘the sacred’ as departure point, many visitors regard it as a special place of value and meaning. As only festival in The Netherlands it programs both religious and non-religious music, within a range from Gregorian chant to contemporary art music. This framework of sacrality makes the festival transgress the socially strongly embedded binary between religion and secularity. It rather creates due attention to the multiplicity of sense-making practices that exist in current times.

Additionally, the study of the festival contributes to the argument that the notion of sacrality has great theoretical potential. This way the values and meanings come the fore that people attribute to the, whether it is religious or non-religious, music themselves. Wijnia argues for a theoretical broadening of the concept sacrality, which then focuses on the attribution of ultimate, non-negotiable value. The attribution of this ultimate form of value to music mostly results from experiences which connect between ordinary, everyday life and the non-ordinary reality of the musical performance: when it evokes special memories, a feeling of recognition or home-coming, or rather a feeling of discovering the unknown.