University of Birmingham’s Can Beauty Save the World – Singing and the Human Spirit project invites you to an unusual concert-research event.
On Thursday 17th September at 7pm, the project is hosting a performance by the acclaimed vocal ensemble Ex Cathedra at St George’s Church in Edgbaston. The concert will explore themes of beauty, meaning and spirituality through music.
What makes this event unusual is that audience members will also be contributing to ongoing university research into singing and aesthetic experience. Our research team is interested in learning more about how people respond to beautiful musical experiences and the ways in which singing and listening can shape our sense of meaning and connection.
Anyone who sings in with a choir could be an especially valuable participant, because of their experience of engaging with music both as performers and listeners.
Find out more about the research project.
Book tickets for the concert. £25 (students £15)
Do Quakers Sing?
The University of Birmingham study asks:
Is singing a form of ‘spiritual’ expression? What can singing tell us about the nature of spirituality or the human spirit? Can the study of spirituality tell us about how singing, and beauty more broadly, moves us to our core? How is singing fundamental to human identity?
For many programmed traditions of Quakerism around the world, singing is a central part of worship. However, most Quaker meetings in Britain are unprogrammed; while singing spontaneously in worship does happen, most programmed Quakers’ engagement with singing happens outside of Meeting for Worship. This article written by Peter Blood-Patterson in Friends Journal in 2002, reflects on his experiences of singing within the liberal unprogrammed Friends General Conference (FGC) tradition in the US:
“Quaker disciplines in the mid-19th century criticized instrumental and choral music as frivolous, “worldly” recreation that led Friends away from God. This viewpoint was abandoned by Hicksite as well as Gurneyite Friends [different historical traditions of Quakerism] by the beginning of the 20th century…
Most Friends enjoy singing and find it spiritually uplifting. I think it is fair to say, however, that many FGC Friends feel very uncomfortable with the idea of group singing as worship. Friends may acknowledge the possibility that an individual Friend may be led by the Spirit to sing a song during meeting for worship—and feel moved and uplifted when this breaks into the life of a meeting. Questions begin to be raised when other Friends join in a song during meeting. And probably most unprogrammed Friends would have real problems with calling out hymn numbers—even spontaneously—during meeting for worship.”
Finally, this video (again from American Friends) explores the idea of ‘Music as a Ministry’: