All music is praise music

A 40,000-year-old flute, the world as sound, and a central London church's devotion to transformative music

Kandinsky, “Composition VIII”

We’re in a cave, 40,000 years ago. Outside, ice. The year’s coldest moons are closing in. We are hoping to survive, you and me and our families, though we know some of our tribe won’t. As night draws in, as the cold draws in, we crouch in the cavern, around the fire, to eke out some meat. A woman stands. She is holding a hollowed vulture’s bone. She puts it to her mouth and she blows. The flames flicker as the flute’s notes take flight and become a flock of birds, circling us in the cavern. Stitching us together in the cavern. Skin dissolves. We sing, we chant, we dance, one into another into another. The cave calls back to us, returning our own voices and the flute and the flock of birds it has become and another voice, the voice of the cave itself or perhaps of something older and larger still. We are hoping to survive, you and me and our families, and for something more, too. To know each other. To be truly alive, together. To let these voices stitch us to ourselves, to one another, to life, to what comes after life, together, tonight, forever.

What makes us human? Is it our advanced reasoning skills? Our ability to use language? Our capacity for cooperation? For nurturing and sustaining complex social structures? Or is it, in fact, music?

A hollowed vulture’s bone used as a flute, found in a cave in what is now southern Germany, is the oldest known human instrument, dating back 40,000 years—but even that is predated by another flute, this one made by Neanderthals and dating to 60,000 years ago. The archaeological record tells us that humans have been making music since before we were born as a species. It tells us that music preceded and even created the conditions for all the other qualities we think of as quintessentially human. It kept us alive by training us to hunt, since a hunt was originally a form of collective dance, a targeted synchrony. It was the precursor to language. It taught people in their bodies, in their bones, in their blood, how to live together in larger groups; how to resonate with each other such that a community was more than a collection of individuals. 

In almost every conceivable way, music made humans what we are. Looked at from one angle, a human is simply a living, breathing musical instrument.

Why might this be so? Many faith traditions and cosmologies suggest an answer: that before humans, before the primordial ooze, before there was matter at all, the world itself was sound. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Or in Sanskrit, “Nada Brahma”—God is sound, the world is sound—and “the earth is the body of speech.”

Hopi mythology tells of Palöngawhoya, a spirit embodying a quality like echo, who was created by the mythic Spider Woman to call into the Earth, bringing it into being through sound.

The Ancient Greeks held that the cosmos was governed by the laws of harmony—that music held the universe together. 

If the world is sound, what is the nature of that sound? It is beauty itself. This primal, primordial music is the definition, the very essence, of beauty. And beauty is not inert; it always requires a response. The philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien writes:

The Platonic tradition, from antiquity to the Renaissance, has thought beauty to be, in its very manifestation, a call, a vocation and provocation. Nor is calling superadded to beauty, as though accidental: things and forms do not beckon us because they are beautiful in themselves, for their own sake, as it were. Rather we call them beautiful precisely because they call and recall us.

Meaning: beauty is always dynamic; an appeal; a spur to respond—and so what could humans possibly have been, if not living, breathing musical instruments? Born as we were into this world of inconceivably beautiful music, music that calls to us, we were born to breathe in its beauty and sing it back as praise song.

Praise: a flute singing out clear as a crystal stream, clear and long and true till it shatters into a flock of birds that wing around a cave in Ice Age Germany.

Praise: a gong’s low hum, hugging meditators into a single, stable note, in which they will sit until all else disappears.

Praise: a techno beat thrumming through a hillside on a summer dawn, vibrating hundreds of feet and spines and souls as the sun rises. 

Praise: a Baroque violin concerto; a silken braid of voices in choir; the belly hum of hymns; harps and cellos and flutes and tubas, all soaring through a church in central London—through a church in Trafalgar Square that for hundreds of years has sent ripples of music out into the city and beyond. Singing—at the very heart of this rushing, thrilling city—a constant song of praise. 

Music has always been central to St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and this is no accident. The world-famous chamber orchestra the Academy of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields was founded here in 1958, before later becoming independent. And with 350 concerts a year, plus a programme of musical talks, we offer the fullest concert programme in the UK. These concerts—the night after night of soaring Vivaldi and Handel and Bach, the music by candlelight and moonlight, the carols and the jazz and the forever song that rises from the church—are a pulse of praise that we send into the city and, too, the wider world, through our international visitors. 

Because we know that music changes, rearranges us. It touches the spirit and reminds us of the primal, primordial beauty of the world. It attunes us to that beauty and shows us, in our hearts and our bodies, how to sing back our gratitude and our praise. It reminds us, through even the hardest, darkest moments in the human story, that there is a harmony somewhere; that before and beyond all the discord there is, in fact, nothing but harmony, if we can just listen well enough to hear it and sing it back.

And this, this stepping into the joy and solace of song, of being an instrument of praise, is one of the stories you say yes to when you say yes to St. Martin-in-the-Fields.