On Being Blog

The Elemental Force of Music and the Human Voice: A Place Where Grace Can Come In with Bobby McFerrin

by Krista Tippett, host

Years ago, when my children were young, we danced around the house to Bobby McFerrin’s Hush album. I’ve followed his adventures with magnificent orchestras and with the jazz great Chick Corea. I’ve heard his setting of the 23rd Psalm, addressed to a female deity, played in churches. And I’ve watched him leading thousands of strangers in the “Ave Maria” — singing notes they did not know they knew to sing — to their own deep delight.

Bobby McFerrin is an explorer on frontiers of the human voice; he sings the territory between music and the human spirit. I knew this when I sat down to speak with him, but I couldn’t guess how beautifully he would be able to put it into words or how theologically he does so. As an interviewer, I’ve learned that words can be unfamiliar and blunt tools for people whose principal mode of expression is art.

As we first begin to speak, this famously hyperkinetic performer is very quiet. He tells me that as a teenager he considered becoming a monk, because of his love of quiet. He tilts his head upward, with a thoughtful smile, and says he was fascinated by the monastic rhythm of life that brought one, compulsively and predictably, back to an awareness of the presence of God.

Bobby McFerrin instead took up art as a measure of his days. His way of making music — “catching songs” as he describes it — points at the elemental force of music, especially the human voice, in what is human and what is sacred.

As I was preparing to interview him, I found an online review struggling with the spirituality that is never far from the surface in Bobby McFerrin’s music. “He may be spiritual,” the blogger wrote, “but he apparently knows the world of the flesh as well, and has a very wicked sense of humor.” Here’s the truth as I see it: spirit, body, and playfulness are of a piece in Bobby McFerrin’s music and his person, as they are in all of us when we’re getting the complexity of our being halfway right.

But he takes it a step further. He uses music, as he tells me, to lean into that place where flesh and spirit are in tension. He sings the Psalms, pacing back and forth for his morning prayer. He loves that they mine the sweep of human experience, from gratitude and delight to rage and self-pity. He even proposes singing in moments of temptation — singing, before saying a word or lodging a critique that you know is unkind, or that you know would be best kept for another moment. Singing as an ethical discipline.

I begin to wonder if this is a subtle part of the reason that we find music and musicality of wondrous variety at the very heart of our many religious traditions. As breath has a power to join body, mind, and spirit, so too and more passionately does music. Bobby McFerrin’s projects across the years — including his “instant opera” Bobble, inspired by the biblical Tower of Babel story — have incorporated Tibetan throat singing, Qur’anic recitation, and liturgical chant. He attends an African-American church sometimes, he tells me, and it cannot help but be soaked in energy and beauty, because the worship service is a kind of addendum to hours of singing together.

In recent years, Bobby McFerrin has taken the mysterious and life-giving delight of singing together to rooms full of strangers. On a stage with neuroscientists at the World Science Festival, he moved his body and the audience saw and sang the pentatonic scale. Science is now able to study what is happening in our brains in this kind of musical moment. And at the same time, we rediscover the primal joy and homecoming in the simple act of singing together with a bunch of other people. There’s a parable of our time in there, one that I like.

Near the end of our conversation, he tells a remarkable story of an ethnomusicology student who came to one of his concerts and approached him backstage with some urgency. She had been unearthing and cataloguing dead, extinct languages in Africa. How, she asked him, do you know some of these languages? He was, she said, singing their vocabulary and syntax when he was ostensibly improvising.

We are “embodied memories,” Bobby McFerrin says. Music may be one key (the only key?) to unlocking some of those. For me, this story also makes me wonder, “Is music older than language? Is song at least as elemental to what it means to be human as words?”

Bobby McFerrin says, “This is what I want everyone to experience at the end of my concert … this sense of rejoicing. I don’t want them to be blown away by what I do. I want them to have a sense of real, real joy from the depths of their being. Because I think when you take them to that place, then you open up a place where grace can come in.”

Grace came in to my conversation with Bobby McFerrin. And it’s left me humming.

Photo by Trent Gilliss.

Bobby McFerrin’s Daily Singing Exercise

by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer

Bobby McFerrin at TED2011. (photo: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr, cc by 2.0)

The musician Bobby McFerrin describes the art and act of improvisation as “simply motion, just the courage to keep moving.” In the audio above (from this week’s show “Catching Song”), he offers a three-week challenge for building improvisational muscles and describes how it works. Here are the steps:

1. Set a timer for 10 minutes.
2. Open up your mouth and sing.
3. Don’t stop for 10 minutes.
4. Do this every day for three weeks.

Sounds pretty simple, right? McFerrin, however, warns that every inch, atom, and molecule of your being will want to bail. Self-judgment will creep in. But don’t falter. Keep going. McFerrin holds open the tantalizing promise that, in a few short weeks, you’ll see a change.

So, who’s up for the challenge?

Once you’ve tried McFerrin’s improvisational workout, we’d love to hear what it was like. What surprised you? Delighted you? Share your reflections here in the comments section. You can even record yourself and send in your improvisational vocal creations here at (612) 326-4044. If enough people participate, we’ll produce an audio montage and post it to the blog.

Are you in?

Tuesday Evening Melody: “The Birth and Death of the Day” by Explosions in the Sky

by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

This evening’s melody is recommended by Mila Vecore, a listener who heard our call-out for song suggestions on the radio and made her way to our submissions form. This is exactly the kind of story we were looking for:

“My mind (and soul) went straight to a song by an instrumental band, Explosions in the Sky, called “The Birth and Death of the Day.” It is amazing how much emotion it evokes without a single word being expressed. In fact, I chose this as our wedding march and, as if the weather seemed to conspire with the music, an unexpected and very temporary rainstorm hit our outdoor ceremony, only to dissipate shortly thereafter with beautiful sunshine.

This song captured that moment, but every time I listen to it I can tell it would be memorable for many others, for their own reasons, if they just were exposed to it.”

I hadn’t heard this track before. But, after listening to it, you’ll madly long to have attended Mila’s wedding!

A big thanks to exposing us to this album! We’re glad you wrote.

The Closest Thing to Oprah Winfrey in Early 20th-Century America

by Krista Tippett, host

I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it: Pentecostalism is one of the great underreported and misunderstood “religion stories” of our time. This faith with a strong egalitarian, populist instinct has always empowered people on the margins of society, culture, and religion itself.

And so it is not remarkable — yet this memory surprises nevertheless — that one of the most influential women in American religious history was Pentecostal. Aimee Semple McPherson was a famous preacher and worship leader decades before the most liberal denominations in the United States ordained women as ministers. She was the first woman to obtain a license from the FCC to run a radio station. She helped to feed 1.5 million people in Los Angeles during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Among other things her commissary, it is said, “kept the Mexican community alive” — the lowest rung on that city’s Depression-era socio-economic hierarchy.

Sister Aimee, as she was known then, also generated controversy to rival her accomplishments. She was not just a powerful woman when women were not generally powerful; she was sexual when women were not supposed to be sexual — or, rather, only women of a certain kind. She had a famously tumultuous personal life, was accused of staging her own kidnapping in 1926, and created an extravagant worship style replete with lavish costumes, moving sets, and live animals. We heard from one listener who remembered his mother’s account of a Sunday service where Sister Aimee came down the aisle of Angelus Temple — the 5000-seat church she built in Los Angeles — atop a white horse.

I confess that it is probably easier for me to admire Aimee Semple McPherson from a distance of several decades. The journalist Dorothy Parker called her “Our Lady of the Loudspeaker.” For those who were not captivated by her, her love of the limelight seemed to defy the very spirit she preached. I might have had the same reaction. Her preaching voice, heard in this show by way of archival recordings, is by turns moving, alarming, and histrionic. Some recent scholars and documentarians have called her a precursor to modern televangelists like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, or a harbinger of the brand of highly politicized Christianity that has garnered so much attention in our time.

I can’t say those analyses are wrong, but they are certainly incomplete. Unlike many televangelists, she amassed no great fortune and fed many hungry people without strings attached. Unlike the politically mobilized Christianity of our time, her life and message always returned to the simplest themes of Christian faith, presented most effectively to people without clout. In the U.S., Pentecostal women have become less prominent in ministry as Pentecostalism has entered mainstream culture. But “Sister Aimee” is a source of hope for women now embracing charismatic faith in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Anthea Butler says that what was viewed as scandalous in her time — her volatile family life, her failed marriages, her evident humanity — makes her more inspiring, not less so, in ours.

In not wanting to reduce Aimee Semple McPherson to analogy or analysis, I find myself in company with one of her more unlikely recent chroniclers — the novelist John Updike, who reviewed a spate of new biographies about “Famous Aimee” for The New Yorker in 2007. Here is how he ends that essay:

“The reality of her, gone from the scene for most of a century, emerges affectingly not in sociological boasts but in anecdotes that take her as she came. In 1927, a month after the charges against her were dismissed in Los Angeles, she arrived in New York in furs and a yellow suit, and was taken to a prime watering spot of the Roaring Twenties, Texas Guinan’s speakeasy, on Fifty-fourth Street. A reporter called out, with whatever sardonic intent, that she should be invited to speak. Guinan agreed, and, as Epstein tells it, ‘Aimee, demure, dignified, stone sober … left her table and stood in the center of the dance floor, smiling until everyone was quiet.’ Then she said: 

‘Behind all these beautiful clothes, behind these good times, in the midst of your lovely buildings and shops and pleasures, there is another life. There is something on the other side. “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” With all your getting and playing and good times, do not forget you have a Lord. Take Him into your hearts.

‘And that was all — a miniature masterpiece of the evangelist’s art, silencing a boozy crowd in no mood to hear it. Epstein writes, ‘All at once they applauded, and Tex put her arm around Aimee. The clapping went on for much longer than her speech had taken.’”