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Notes -
I’m pretty sure all the potency of music is “longterm memory association of sound with emotions and physical states”. As we get older, we experience emotions and physical sensations which have sounds associated to them. The Western music scale is mnemonically optimal because of the “seven plus or minus two rule” of memory (we can only remember about seven things, in short term memory). There is also “natural” proportion in intervals which probably plays a part. IMO it must have to do with longterm associative learning because: (1) children are born with primitive music taste and understanding; (2) not everyone has a good or sophisticated taste in music, and this seems unrelated to general intelligence, so it can’t have to do with mathematical pattern recognition per se; (3) the best songwriters are not the best theorists, meaning there is something different from theory at work (social-emotional awareness likely); (4) listening to more music young seems to enhance taste in music, probably acting as additional training in the recognition of aural-emotional association
Right but music is made up of constituent things (pace, texture, melody) and all of these small things are associated with experiences. Your own emotional experiences and those of others. So if you take Mozart’s famous Lacrimosa in d minor, you can isolate each constituent element and then see how they form together a cohesive experience that expresses something: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zvnNh04qoGw
The pace is slow, with slowness of heart rate associated with emotional spaces like contemplation or depression (or in happy moods: peace, relaxation, etc). The beginning notes of the higher violin connotes the human cry or weep, in that it literally sounds like both the “melody” of a cry and the texture of a sad human voice. Whereas the lower violin inherently connotes the human groans of regret. When the actual singing begins, if you try to imagine the voice occurring as if it weren’t following a musical pattern, it would connote a loud sound of anguish and plea. And then comes foreboding.
And, well, that emotional space is exactly the text:
The reason liturgical music hits hard is that the emotions underlying it hit hard, but are not often expressed today with the same sense of existential significance, reverence, and profundity. “Timeless” negative emotions of guilt, regret, sorrow, profundity in the face of the personified Eternal… it is an intrinsically serious emotional space and so it sounds serious.
anyway this is just my theory but I 100% believe this is what is going on. I remember “Wa habibi” by fairuz came on in the background after a family friend spoke about a near-death experience involving her son, and the friend literally stopped the conversation to say how beautiful the song was and how she needed to know the artist. This was from someone with no interest in choral, Christian, or Syrian music. Well, the song is literally about a death experience of a woman’s son, and the vocals connote that through imitating human regretful anguish — with vocal texture, pace, vocal pattern
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