Acknowledgments

By the time one reaches my age, there is no pretending that one has original
ideas, that my words have sprung virgin from my mind, or that 1 can lay pro-
prietary claim to whatever thoughts and ideas appear in this book. As the Aus-
tralian historian, Greg Dening has said, we cannot plumb the depths of our own
plagiarism. We live in a milieu of ideas that surround us, that permeate us, and
that lay claim to us in ways that we can never fully comprehend. My words are
only partially mine; my thoughts are probably even less my own. The bibliog-
raphy of this book is one indication of the debts owed, and this short acknowl-
edgment is another. Neither even begins to recognize the many, many thinkers
who have influenced me so much that 1have internalized their teachings and
believe them to be my own.
That said, there are people who may not appear in the bibliography who llave
helped me in various ways. In New Delhi, I was given support and encourage-
ment from the Khwaja of the Nizamuddin shrine, Hasan Sani Nizami and Dr.
Ausaf AH,then chancellor of Hamdard University. I also was given a place to
work at the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology of the Ameri-
can Institute of Indian Studies, and was warmly received by its director, Shubha
Chaudhuri and her staff. Meraj Ahmed, qawwal, and his extended family were
also gracious and generous at all times.
In Sri Lanka, I was taken under the wing of Edin, adura, who patiently but
firmly insisted that I learn to dance in order to understand the drumming of
Yak Tovil ceremonies. He gave me lessons and arranged for me to see many Yak
Tovil ceremonies that I would not have heard of had it not been for him.
In Bali, I was the beneficiary of the generosity and helpfulness of Wayan
Aryati and her extended family, especially her husband, Thomas Hunter. They
made my stay in Bali not only productive, but intensely pleasurable as well.
Visiting Pentecostals churches in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, I have always been
overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the welcome I have received. While knowing
full well that conversion is on their mind, there is no doubt that Pentecostal
communities exude a hospitality that is, in my mind, almost unparalleled.
Any number of my colleagues, academics from around the country, have
helped in various ways. To David Huron, Ali J. Racy and Iaak Panksepp, the
readers provided by Indiana University Press, I am extremely grateful for the
careful and rigorous readings they provided of my manuscript. Each challenged
me in fruitful ways and pushed me to work harder to make the manuscript both
more coherent and more readable. I am also grateful to another set of readers,
Nicola Dibben, Elizabeth Tolbert, and Steven Friedson who were solicited from
the University of Michigan Press before I had settled on Indiana University
Press. Their comments also helped me to produce a more coherent book. 1 have
been blessed with two sets of conscientious outside readers who were more than
usually well- versed in my topic and willing to share their knowledge with me.
My friends, Lorna McDaniel and Rhys Isaac also read the manuscript and, as
humanists, helped me to see the ways in which I had not succeeded in conveying
the scientific aspects of the manuscript. If I have still not succeeded, it is not
because they didn't try. Ani Patel has consistently encouraged me by his abiding
personal and professional interest in music and neuroscience. Gayle Sherwood,
my editor at Indiana University Press, was quick to respond to my manuscript
submission and since then has put up with and assisted with my interminable
queries about the labyrinthine process of getting permissions.
1am grateful to the School of Music at the University of Michigan for grant-
ing me a semester's leave in order to complete a manuscript that was seemingly
never to be finished. Also, at the School of Music, I am grateful to Greg Laman
who was always ready to help with any technical problem in preparing audio
materials, and to Mary Huey, who always responded instantly to my many,
largely self-induced, computer problems. The School of Music is lucky to have
on its staff such talented and generous people.
Tú the Fulbright Foundation, I am grateful for the grant that allowed me to
taketime off from teaching to be able to go to New Delhi, to Sri Lanka and to
Bali, Indonesia during my sabbaticalleave. To the University of Michigan Office
of the Vice-President for Research, I am grateful for a publications subvention
that made possible the inclusionof a CD with the book.
Everyone thanks their spouse; it has become atrope of acknowledgments.
But everyone does not have a spouse who is an authority on Southeast Asian
languages and cultures, who is a mine of information about things not only
Southeast Asian but also about writing, about intellectual history in general, and
is the best reader imaginable (not just my opinion) who never pulls his punches.
It has been our great good fortune to have been a couple, happily vexing each
other for half a century. Thank you Pete.

xii Acknowledgments
Deep Listeners
BIANKPAGE
 Introduction

The interpenetration of music with trancing is ancient and universal. 1suspect

that most, if not all, societies have sorne forrn of institutionalized, religious
trance ceremonies that also indude music.' Trancing is often, in northwesteril
Europe and the United States, associated with developing world countries. The
explosive worldwide growth of Christian Pentecostalisrn, in which trancing ac-
companied by music is a core feature of religious practice, belies the popular
association of trancing with peoples from underdeveloped or developing nation-
states only.
Trancing can be empowering for all concerned, attesting to the divine pres-
ence in one's midst, legitirnizing the religious beliefs and practices of the com-
munity, and often bestowing deep satisfaction on the individual trancer. Tranc-
ers are always active and often dance-a response in part because of their deep
emotionality. They welcome emotion, they offer themselves to emotion as they
enact emotion. Musical immersion stimulates emotion and facilitates their spe-
cial attentiveness, their special consciousness.
The connection of this kind of trancing to other phenomena such as hypno-
sis, multiple personality disorders, dissociative disorders, somnambulism, fugue
states, catatonic states, and perhaps many more are not examined here. There
may or may not be relationships and resonances with these other phenomena,
but the most striking differences are the sensual richness of trancing within the
context of religious ceremonies, the strong emotions of the trancer, the physical
animation of the trancer, the high value placed on these events by their partici-
pants, and the enveloping musical saturation. Of all the phenomena that one
might inelude within the category of trance, religious institutionalized trancing
ranks as the most aesthetic, most widely practiced, and the most highly valued
of all trances.
Meditation presents a very different complex of characteristics than do the
trances presented here. Meditation is generally practiced in solitude, stillness,
and silence. Trance is practiced within a comrnunal framework, is usually ac-
companied by music and often involves strenuous activity on the part of the
trancer. Institutionalized, religious trancing takes place within a context of sen-
sual overstimulation; the trancer is bombarded with arresting sights and sounds.
The meditator seeks to still the barrage of incoming perceptions. Trancing is
emotional, while meditation aims at transcending emotion (see Rouget 1985:
6-12).
Whereas the sciences of biology and neuroscience are central to explaining
the phenomenon of trancing, trance as inner experience cannot be understood
entirely within a scientific framework. My object is to make trancing compre-
hensible within a secular humanistic framework, within a biological orientation
while simultaneously acknowledging the special gnosis of trancing that cannot
and need not be explained. In this way, I hope to "save the phenomenon."
"Deep Listeners" is a term I have adapted from the composer Pauline Oli-
veros, who uses "deep listening" as a term for her own practice of listening. On
her Web site, she offers this definition of deep listening.

Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard and also expand-
ing to the whole field of sound whatever one's usual focus might be. Such forms
of listening are essential to the process of unlocking layer after layer of imagina-
tion, meaning, and memory down to the cellular level of human experience.
(<[Link] )

In my own definition, deep listeners is a descriptive term for persons who are
profoundly moved, perhaps even to tears, by simply listening to a piece of music.
Everyone knows such a person: the roommate for whom the "Moonlight So-
nata" provokes quiet sobbing, or the aunt who cries at Iohn Lennon's «Imagine."
These folks, I believe, experience a nearness to trance. Deep listeners are very
emotional and often have near-religious transcendental experiences. 1 suspect
that in cultures in which trance is not marginalized, as it is in the United States
and Europe, deep listeners also might be trancers. Deep listening is a kind of
secular trancing, divorced from religious practice but often carrying religious
sentiments such as feelings of transcendence or a sense of communion with a
power beyond oneself. Deep listening may be attributed to personal psychology
as in the United States, or may be culturally situated. So closely are music and
deep listening associated in Arabic cultures that the term tarab-which means
to be moved, agitated, while listening to music (to the extent that one may cry,
faint or tear one's clothes)-can also simply refer to a musical style (Racy 2003:
75). Secular musical ecstasy is the goal of performers and listeners alike for a
certain segment of the urban, educated Arabic community (Racy 1991). Like
tarab,"deep listening" conjoins musical expression and the emotional impact of
musical expression. Music, trance, and emotion are, 1believe, imbricated in both
trancers and in deep listeners. In certain situations, the only salient distinction
between the two that is obvious to an observer is the generally richer sensual
and imaginary context of religious trancing.
Trancing is challenging to an objectivist epistemology, it resists representa-
tion. Within a strict objectivist view of the world, there is no way to describe
trance as experience, as a first -person eventoLike pain, for one who experiences
it, nothing is more. certain, whereas for one who does not experience it "even
with effort, one may remain in. doubt about its existence or may retain the
astonishing freedorn of denying its existence; and, finally, if with the best effort
of sustained attention, one successfullyapprehends it, the aversiveness of the 'it'
one apprehends will only be a shadowy fraction of the actual 'it'" (Scarry 1985:
4). Nor have we had, until recently, a way to imagine the neurophysiology of
trance, nor a theory of consciousness that would provide a framework to begin
to study the neurophysiology of trance. Trancers are spectacularly in motion
from the onset until the completion of the trance, ruling out electrodes, PET

2 Deep Listeners
(positron emission tomography) scans, and MRIs (magnetic resonance imag-
ing). Neurobiologists study dreams (Hobson 1994), meditation or pathological
states of consciousness resulting from illnesses or injuries, situations where sub-
jects can be examined and talked to (Squire 1987; Alkon 1992; LeDoux 1996).
Trancers are on the move and not amenable to simultaneous interviews. Trance
consciousness remains opaque, unstudied, and suspect as the domainof reli-
gious fanatics and the mentally unstable.
Many firsthand accounts of experienced and skillful trancers testify to the
catalytic role of music in the transition into trancing, in the sustaining of tranc-
ing, and in the transition back to normal consciousness (Rouget 1985: 72; Kap-
ferer 1991: 264; Friedson 1996: 6). But the "why" of all this remains, from a
physiological perspective, largely speculation. How can one integrate richly hu-
manistic, first -person descriptions of musical trancing with biological and neu-
rological theories concerning consciousness?
As of today, there is no simple way of bridging the gap between the firing
of neurons within the central nervous system, or the transmission of endor-
phins to an adjacent cell, and the complex motivations, memories, and self-
understandings that we all richly inhabit. One cannot pinpoint directly any
neuronal firing or chemical transmission to the experience of a Balinese trancer
who, while hearing the gamelan play. faster and louder, looks at a mask of the
witch, Rangda, and sees fire coming from her eyes. Neurophysiological explana-
tions are as yet primitive when dealing with human action, human perception,
and human motivations. The bridge between the physical embodiment of the
brain and the phenomenological experience of being-in-the-world has not yet
been built.
An exploratory article written by Elizabeth Tolbert in 1992 posits sorne fun-
damental questions concerning the feasibility of integrating neurobiology, psy-
chology, and music cognition studies within the discipline of ethnomusicology.
Tolbert recognized what may be a basic incompatibility between ethnomusi-
cology and those other fields, based as they are on scientific methodology.
The issue of reductionism is of central concern, i.e., can one determine any-
thing about musical meaning by reducing musical experience to an explanation
of perceptual and cognitive processes? From the point of view of most ethnomusi-
cologists, the nature of musical meaning is considered to be inapproachable by
empirical studies, especially in light of ethnomusicological work that demonstrates
the close relationship of musical meaning to its cultural and historical contexto
(Tolbert 1992: 7)

From the hard science side of the epistemological divide come similar ques-
tions and similar aspirations to bring together scientific methodology and hu-
manistic exploration.

One provocative possible extension of the view of cognition as enaction is to the

domain of cultural knowledge in anthropology. Where is the locus of cultural
knowledge such as folktales, names for fishes,jokes-is it in the mind of the
individual? ... Great leverage for anthropological theory might be obtained by

Introduction 3
 considering the knowledge to be found in the interface between mind, society, and
culture rather than in one or even in all of them. The knowledge does not preexist
in any one place or form but is enacted in particular situations-when a folktale is
told or a fish named. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991: 178-79)

It seems clear to me that a common ground may be explored between the

more humanistic, cultural anthropological approach, and the more scientific,
cognitive psychologicalapproach. 1 see the bringing together of the scientific
and cultural approaches to the study of music and emotion, and music and
trancing as one of the great challenges of our [Link] the styles of ar-
gument and the criteria for evidencemay remain distinct, the conclusionsneed
to be comparable and not incommensurable. Both disciplinary areas may have
to giveup some of their established scholarlypractices.
1seek a theory of music cognition, of consciousnessthat can help in under-
standing the complex interrelationships between trancing and music, in corre-
lating the eye-and-ear visions and gestures of individuals in religious trance
who are simultaneously being musicked. How are the outward characteristics
of religioustrance (dance,prophecy,speaking in tongues, speaking in voicesof
spiritual beings) correlatedwith inner physiologyand what is the role of music
in facilitating these events?
The prevailingmodels of researchin music cognition, the envelopingframes
of music theory do not seem adequate as starting premisesfor exploration into
the musical cognition of an ecstatic. 1 wish to outline what 1 perceive as the
limitations of musical cognitive studies as now practiced, not with the intent of
restating the traditional humanistic opposition to scientificmethodology but in
the hope that compromise and integration can be worked through.

Problems with Traditional Paradigms of Music Cognition

Theories of the mind as reflected in studies of music cognition have a
venerable history in Western intellectual traditions. In 1637, Descartes formal-
ized a system of thinking about our minds, the elegance,simplicity, and per-
suasivenessof which rarelywas challengedin Western intellectual domains un-
til well into the twentieth century (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1988; Flanagan 1991:
1-9; Damasio 1994: 247-52).2 Cogito, ergo sum, "1 think, therefore I am," suc-
cinct1ysummarizes a complicated theory of being that took issue with the pre-
vailing doctrine of the church that knowledgedepended on a disembodied soul.
Descartes postulated that the soul was embodied, a function of the brain and
the nervous system. Except for the more arcane aspects of Descartes's theory,
such as the belief that the soul resides in the pineal gland, the broad tenets of
the theory still influencethe waywe think about music and cognition. Descartes
was a dualist who believedthat our bodies were comprised of two essences,res
cogitans and res extensa. Res extensa is the human body,which he thought of as
a physical reflex machine. Res cogitans is the realm of the mind, the realm of
reason, of imagination, of beauty, religion,and the arts. Descartes'stheory al-

4 Deep Listeners
lows for the richly human activities of religion, philosophy, history, and the
arts while proclaiming a strict dualism and preserving from any scientific re-
ductionism the essential human qualities of forethought, emotion, moral judg-
ment, freedom of actíon, and personal responsibility: all those qualities that
give meaning to our lives. The system is elegant, and was in its day liberating.
Thinking about musical meaning, before and after Descartes, centered around
issues of representation, of musical referentiality, of emotion, or of divine in-
spiration. Musical thinking was clearly within the realm of res cogito, inten-
tional, imaginative, cognitive, in the brain. Music became something "good to
think with," but the physical body was excluded. The field of music cognition
emerged in the mid -twentieth century with several distinct yet sometimes over-
lapping areas of investigation. 'One was learning to map musical perception
within the brain, locating where melodies, harmonies, and pitch recognition
were taking place (Borchgrevink 1982;Weinberger and McKenna 1988; Petsche,
Lindner, and Rappelsberger 1988; Peretz and Morais 1988; Wallin 1991; Tramo
2001). Early studies led to the popular but vastly reductive idea that music was a
"right-brain" activity. Those scholars for whom music cognition is the study of
perception are necessarily involved in micro-musical studies within the brain,
how a phrase is imaged, how intervals are understood, how pitches are heard
and classified, or how musical phrases are parsed (Deutsch 1982; van Noorden
1982; Vos and Rasch 1982; Dowling and Harwood 1986; Fales 1998,2002).
With the development of computers in the mid -twentieth century, studies
in music cognition gained a powerful tool for thinking about musical meaning
(Terhardt 1982; Piszczalski and Galler 1982). Music cognition as practiced by
many music theorists is derived from models in which music comes to be sym-
bolically represented in the brain and then is subjected to formal processes, or
algorithms, that tell us whether what we are hearing is a first theme, an elabo-
ration of something heard earlier, a theme that is totally inappropriate for this
particular context, and so on (Meyer 1956; Minsky 1982; Lerdahl and [acken-
doff 1983; Sloboda 1985; Dowling and Harwood 1986; Serafine 1988; Narmour
1990; Raffman 1993; Imberty 2000; Scherer and Zentner 2001). The shift of
emphasis in all cognitive studies, especially but not exclusively psychological
cognitivism, was from the "construction of meaning" to the "processing of in-
formation" (Bruner 1990: 4). Often called an objectivist approach to musical
meaning, this approach to music cognition does not seem to need a body, nor
does it seem able to deal with the body. Music is disembodied, able to be reduced
to a string of musical symbols on which algorithmic operations are performed.
Traditional music cognition as a theoretical construct is as elegant, as simple and
as powerful as Descartes's formulations. Many music cognition studies also in-
voke universal models, making them yet more generalized and more compelling
(Lerdahl and Iackendoff 1983). Structural, generative linguistics on the model
of Noam Chomsky (1972) is the language corollary for both computer studies
and many studies of music cognition. Grammatical structures in the brain are
subject to algorithmic operations to produce the sentences of living languages.
Work based on this theory in music cognition may be significant for unraveling

Introduction 5
syntactical meanings in music but not in helping to understand why Sufis in
New Delhi can be brought to tears, rise up, turn in slow circles, and feel they
have reached a nearness to the Divine in response to a particular poetic phrase
sung over and overagain. Nor does it help in trying to understand why a wor-
shipper at a Pentecostal service gets caught up in repetitious actions of shaking
her head from side-to-side with a ferocity and persistence that is almost fright-
ening, subsequently feeling relieved, refreshed, and inspirited. How do we bring
together these disparate kinds of studies of musical experience?
To those who use the traditional models of music cognition, the idea of in-
corporating a much messier, much more complex, and uncertain model based
on biology and phenomenology can seem like a giant step backward, away from
scientific elegance, away from empirical controls, away from universality. Yetwe
experience music with our skins, with our pulse rates, and with our body tem-
perature. To subscribe to a theory of musical cognition which cannot deal with
the embodiment of music, of the involvement of the senses, the visceral system,
and the emotions is to maintain a Cartesian approach of mind/body dualismo
A number of scholars have written about the inadequacy of the cognitive
model for the study of language, and have pointed out that cognitive models
based on computers cannot handle sorne of the most basic elements of language
such as metaphor and metonymy, not to mention vagueness, polysemy, or shift-
ing meanings that are integral to allliving languages (Lakoff 1987; M. Iohnson
1987; A. L. Becker 1995; Searle 2002). Furthermore, there is an increasing aware-
ness within cognitive science of the importance of culture and embodiment. A
growing number of cognitive scientists have stressed the importance of study-
ing cognition as the interaction of a person with a milieu, the relevance of sen-
sorimotor activity for cognition, and have questioned the primacy of represen-
tations in the brain as the basis for cognition. Studies of "distributed cognition"
(Hutchins 1995), "embodied cognition" (Keijzer 2002; Ziemke 2002), and neu-
ral net models (Todd and Loy 1991; Griffith and Todd 1999) may offer ap-
proaches to the study of music cognition that are far less hostile to biological
understandings than earlier paradigms. But the traditional cognitive model ex-
tended to musical matters as "music cognition" remains the dominant para-
digm. In a highly praised book that follows a strictly formalist theory, Steven
Pinker states his understanding of what a language is. This is also the model of
what, for sorne, a musical system is.

The way language works, then, is that each person's brain contains a lexicon of
words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that
combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar).
(Pinker 1994: 90)

Language consists of a set of words and a set of concepts located in the brain
and a set of rules to make sentences that express concepts. The terms that are
used to describe the processes of thinking are "representations" and "preces-
sors." The senses provide the representations, the mind provídes the processors.

6 Deep Listeners