Original subtitles

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

My name is Stewart Copeland.

I make noise for a living.

I hit things with sticks.

But I also compose,

listen to

and have pretty much built a life

on the strange phenomenon that we call...

..music.

My first recollection of being captivated by music,

being enslaved by music,

was sitting in a darkened room, aged seven,

listening to Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

Something powerful took hold.

Some seriously strong mojo which never let me go.

It led me through a career in bands including The Police, and beyond.

What was going on was that the heart of a seven-year-old was being

lit up like a bonfire of emotion!

But why?

How did music ignite this flame?

Wonderful oneness.

I want to explore its transcendental, almost supernatural

power, to take us ever higher.

From the humble human voice...

CHORAL SINGING

..to the most hypnotic rhythms, we want music to lift the soul,

to set us free.

But how does it do this?

What is it about the uplifting gospel of CeCe Winan,

the mesmerising minimalism of Steve Reisch...

We rule!

..or even the shiny pop of Kylie Minogue,

that can turn the everyday into a truly altered

state of consciousness,

all with a little help from music?

BELL RINGS

It may be surprising, given how I talk, that I spent a large

part of my childhood at boarding school here, in darkest Somerset.

And it was in this imposing building,

the magnificent Wells Cathedral,

that I first witnessed for myself the celestial majesty of music.

CHORAL SINGING

I had been raised by very fastidiously observant atheists.

And so when I got to boarding school, was sent off to church,

I got a little creeped out by it,

I did not identify with this church experience.

It was very alienating until it got to the music.

CHORAL SINGING

Now, most people would consider a church

the place where they can go and commune with our Creator.

But for me, it's a

place where music really takes off and achieves its full majesty.

CHORAL SINGING

The most important of the songs that really stuck with me,

decades and decades later, is Jerusalem.

The music takes you up and out of here, into a beautiful,

sacred place.

It wakes you up to the cosmos being a lot bigger than you think it is.

# And did those feet

# In ancient time

# Walk upon England's mountains green

# And was the Holy Lamb... #

William Blake's poem Jerusalem may not be particularly religious,

but in Sir Hubert Parry's 1916 musical arrangement,

something miraculous happens.

# And did the countenance divine

# Shine forth upon the clouded hills... #

The words take on a new, uplifting power.

# And was Jerusalem

# Builded here

# Among those dark Satanic mills. #

And it still reduces this flinty eyed, septic tank to

a blubbering fool.

STEWART SNIFFS QUETLY

Take me now!

I get it!

It's just so beautiful.

I am overcome by this. Why?

You'd have to ask a neuroscientist, I expect.

But you're absolutely right.

There's nothing more moving than a full cathedral

with 1,000 people singing a hymn in unison.

It is one of the most moving experiences you can have.

Something that this music does, like the building,

the building causes you, your neck, to do this.

Which I suppose is where you might find God.

The music also takes you up.

What sense do you have about how that works?

The elevating, transcendental, uplifting part of taking us

out of this mortal world?

Well, cathedrals

and churches were designed to give something of the power

and majesty and mystery of God, and the best music does the same thing.

Church music began as plainsong, which is one line. Um.

And then, it developed into what we call polyphony, which is

lots of lines happening at the same time.

You can't really hear every single line going on.

But that's part of the mystery

and it's conveying the mystery of God, in some way.

So, you're sitting quietly contemplating or praying while

surrounded by this beautiful music.

SACRED CHANTING

Gregorian chant is the best-known form of Christian plainsong,

introduced in the sixth century.

It began with the word, or words,

recited in ever more rhythmic fashion.

CHANTING CONTINUES

But then, in the eighth century,

restless composers began to innovate,

adding extra layers of melody to eventually create choral polyphony -

music that was less about the words of the sacred text,

and more about the effect on the gathered faithful.

Have you got a piece of music that you can show us?

We have, we've got a piece by Robert White, who was a Tudor composer.

It's called Christe Qui Lux Es, and I can show you now

the plainsong line that it's based on, which is sung by

the baritones and then we'll build up, adding a part at a time.

Yeah, let's hear the foundation of it. So, here's the baritone line.

THEY SING IN LATIN

And then, if we add the bass parts to that.

BASS PARTS BEGIN IN LATIN

Great. And then we'll add the tenor line to that.

TENORS SING IN LATIN

And now we'll add the alto line on top.

ALTOS SING

And then, we'll add the icing on the cake, the trebles on top,

singing the highest line.

TREBLES SING

500 years after this piece was composed, Tudor polyphony

can still induce a transcendental state in 21st-century listeners.

To me, this is music at its most powerful.

When it frees prayer from the mysterious ancient texts

and embraces the magic of melody,

worship becomes physical,

bypassing the linguistic, rational processes of our brains,

to work on a deeper, instinctive level.

Beautiful. It is really complicated.

Not just the notes they're singing,

but the rhythms are complicated as well.

Yes, you're right, there are lots of cross rhythms going on,

there's also dissonance, a lot of notes which clash with each other

which then resolve, which creates, sort of internal conflict,

I suppose in the music,

and it also creates a sense of beauty and of it moving forwards.

And because it's based on plainsong,

it hearkens back to a tune that people would probably

know from the ninth or tenth century, when this piece was first

written, they would recognise that plainsong because they had sung it.

Singing together is something that's happened throughout

the ages in all cultures of the world, and we do it

here in our own particular way in the Church of England.

And the fact that we're all singing the same thing combines

to be a very powerful thing.

Tudor polyphony helped to direct congregations towards the divine...

..with melody and the pure joy of singing.

# When a' the seas rise high, my dear

# And the rocks melt with the sun

# Will the memory of us...

Caroline Shaw is one of the most exciting composers in the new classical scene.

# ..tune our violins

# Will we still sing of roses?

# Will we exist at all...

Caroline's compositions draw heavily on choral arrangements

of early Christian music and voices.

# That I suppose is all we were

# And all we'll be. #

And her distinctive vocal style can be heard on numerous

collaborations with Kanye West.

An artist who never shies away from sacred gravitas.

# Got to love you

# Found you, found you

# Right now, right now

# Right now, right now... #

Music and faith go really well together.

And music can take you from this dark, complicated world

full of sin, and lift us up to the heavens, where everything

is beautiful. Or, it can bring the deity down amongst us.

Is there any aspect of that in your music?

Well, I'm an atheist, so...

That's OK. But, yes.

I grew up going to an Episcopal Church. Music and religion

and spirituality, and this idea of God, were so tightly linked.

So, I think they will always be tightly linked in some way for me.

Although you're an atheist, it seems your music also

has that uplifting, "take us to another, better place".

When I'm sitting down to write music, I'm trying to

score it for someone. If something only works halfway,

the harmony is only sort of medium there, it's not convincing me...

..it's totally worthless. That's like my idea of hell.

The idea of transcending something, and sort of going,

reaching to something beyond feels like the only reason to do anything.

The ultimate goal is creating an environment where that

kind of transcendence is going to happen.

What is it about the human voice that is different?

That hits our heart with more impact?

For about three years, I used to sing in a choir in New Haven,

Connecticut - Christ Church - and every Sunday night, we would sing

a 10pm service in a loft that was hidden from the nave.

In the dark...the church was completely lit with candles.

And every evening ends with this one chant...

SHE SINGS IN LATIN # Salve Regina

# Mater miseri cordiae

# Vita, dulcedo

# Et spes nostra salve. #

So, like, the way that it... That's very harmonistic.

It enters, and then curls, and then goes back to where it was.

I like that it's in Latin, cos it almost takes the language away.

It takes the sort of semantic content of whatever the song

is away, and it's just about, erm...

Just about the melody, and just about the sound.

And you can use the syllables and the consonants

and those artefacts of language, like...

# Salve Regina...

So, all those things... SHE VOCALISES

THEY VOCALISE TRILLS

..is it really super spiffy, yeah! I love that.

But they aren't actually, for me, saying anything particular,

but they are hinges to getting to the next note.

And that was one of the most powerful musical experiences

I've ever had. Of everything I do now, try to write,

it's almost trying to achieve that same kind of...

..somewhat spiritual shift.

And I don't know what it was.

Interesting that you had that epiphany in a religious space...

In a religious space. ..with a lot of religion going on. Yeah!

But the anaesthetic of it was so beautiful that it transcended God.

"This is better than whatever the hell they're preaching about."

Yeah.

Caroline draws on a legacy of religious music in a wholly

secular way to invoke the same feelings of escape as the most transcendent sacred music.

But while some modern atheists draw inspiration from the oldest churches,

some Christians have gone the other way...

..using rock and roll to get to heaven.

Welcome to New York City, and Hillsong.

All these people may look like they're queueing for a rock concert,

and in a way, they are.

Bring it over here, what have you got to tell us?

You going to do some singing tonight? I'm going to sing

my lungs out! This is my family, I love you guys.

Hillsong is a multimillion dollar megachurch that borrows

the blueprint of anthemic rock to bring Jesus to a millennial crowd.

And it works.

They've won a Grammy.

And their back catalogue of songs gets as many streams

as Justin Bieber...who happens to be a prominent member of the church.

Every week, their songs are sung by an estimated

50 million churchgoers worldwide.

Each of them searching for transcendence through music.

Are you going to be doing some singing tonight? Yes, sir.

Excellent. That's why we've come.

How much do you think music is part of this? A lot. A lot.

Yeah, the singers are amazing. Works for you, that lifts you up? Yeah.

When I first started coming, I only wanted to hear the sermon,

and now, I like the music more. Right. Yeah, the worship.

Well, you get to do it as well. Well, it's a connection, yeah.

To me, music is worshipping to God. Right. It's like you're worshipping

to the higher power, and the songs are for that.

Are you in good voice, are you going to be doing some singing tonight?

Yes, singing, dancing, cheering...

Dancing and cheering? Yes. All right, OK, I think I'm going to do

some dancing and cheering too. What's your name? Stewart.

Stewart, Jason. Jason...

Now, as you know, I'm not sure if our creator was intelligent or not...

..but I am sure about the power of music and its ability to move us.

To inspire us.

And, if we let it, to offer us an escape from this world.

CROWD JOINS IN SINGING

While the words being sung...ah, go over my head, so to speak...

..I can't deny that this is all rather moving.

I get it. I completely get it.

But what's going on with this music for it to make me all so gushy?

Is it God?

Or a songwriting secret, known as the four-chord progression?

# Every breath you take

# And every move you make...

This technique was pioneered in the 1950s, and perfected

during the '80s - the era of stadium rock...

# I'll be watching you...

..something I know first-hand from playing alongside Sting and Andy in The Police.

# Every word you say

# Every game you play...

And it's essentially a riff constructed from a sequence

of four chords that ascend and descend in a loop.

And it's in the DNA of nearly all of Hillsong's music,

with the very same intention of elevating audiences

to that magical, fist-pumping moment.

This is music designed for mass participation.

And by joining in, we're all lifted up...

..even this cynical heretic.

Well, I'm not that religious,

but I believe in what's happening in there.

There is absolutely no doubt that everybody in that room

is being improved, is being cleansed, is being uplifted.

It's really moving.

Music does that to people.

That is powerful juju.

Melody and harmony have long dominated Christian musical worship in Europe and America,

but elsewhere, it's rhythm that plays a more prominent role

in the pursuit of transcendence through music.

In Morocco, complex rhythmic patterns provide the soundtrack

to daily AND spiritual life.

Marrakech is a thriving, bustling city, full of mopeds and traffic

and the noise of people interacting with each other.

But these folks do have a way of finding their own little piece of heaven.

And it turns out, their idea of heaven is a lot like mine...

..full of drums.

MAN SPEAKS ARABIC

STEWART: Yeah...

My friend, Abel, has brought me deep into the medina

for full immersion in the rhythms of Moroccan music.

And between my broken Arabic and Abel's expert tuition,

I am deemed worthy of public display.

Oh, you have a signal? Boom, boom, bang!

The secret signal of the maalem!

RAPID OVERLAPPING PERCUSSION

This is Gnawa, a form of trance-inducing music

developed by the Gnawa people.

An ethnic group thought to have descended from folks

originally from Mali, Senegal and Chad.

The Gnawa use complex rhythms like these to induce spirit possession

and commune with a higher power.

DRUMMING INTENSIFIES

Yeah!

CLAPPING AND CHEERING

STEWART EXCLAIMS IN ARABIC

That's a lot of fun, and very tricky.

It's actually very persnickety, what they're doing.

They're not just holding a down beat.

They are doing little extra rhythms, triplet rhythms within that.

The tempo rises and falls.

But the master holds it all together,

and everybody's watching him out of the corner of their eye.

Rhythm is a key feature of worship in Sufism, a mystical form of Islam,

that is followed by many Gnawa musicians.

And there is as much musical variety in Sufi music

as there are Sufi orders.

For over 700 years, the Mevlevi Sufis of Turkey have harnessed

the power of rhythm and dance to induce an altered state

of consciousness in a unique meditation style...

..the Sema ceremony.

It's a ritual of spinning anticlockwise to a rhythm of

percussion and chanting that empties the mind of all distractions.

PERCUSSION PLAYS

Like the Mevlevi Sufis, Gnawa master Maalem Mahjoub also uses song

and dance to reach an altered state.

But in the Gnawa ceremony known as the lila,

musicians play through the night to harness the power of polyrhythms,

which are percussive patterns played simultaneously.

As in the layering of different melodies in Tudor polyphony,

the complexity of polyrhythms is beguiling.

Inviting us to surrender control of our bodies to a communal throb,

while our minds ascend to points unknown.

CLAPPING AND CHEERING

CHANTING IN ARABIC

Yeah!

THEY EXCLAIM IN ARABIC

What can you tell me about the Gnawa?

When they make music with rhythm, particularly the rhythm

which builds up in speed, it brings God alive.

It brings God to us, or it brings us to God.

The repetitiveness of the rhythm, you know, elevates you towards

the divine. And the rhythm gets built up and built up and built up

until, you know, people sometimes go into trance, which we call jedba.

In jedba, you get into spiritual drunkenness.

So, the spiritual music has this thing which starts out very calmly,

and then it builds up, and then it builds up to a frenzy,

and that's the part which really is the magic part. The trance.

We don't have drugs.

You know, we don't need to use drugs to go into a trance.

We don't need to have alcohol to drink to be merry, and jump,

and go to, you know, and go into trance.

It's the drunkenness, alkhamriyates, that happens.

It's a spiritual drunkenness.

It's a pure, spiritual drunkenness.

It's the natural elevation towards the divine, you know, where you can't stop yourself.

CLAPPING AND CHEERING

Gnawa's ability to induce a state of near possession by music

is a quality it shares with other cultures all over the world.

In the 1940s, French ethnomusicologist Gilbert Rouget

began to explore mystical absorption through music,

and what he termed "trance".

For Rouget, a trance state was achieved through the overstimulation

of our senses through sound, sight, and even smell.

In Bali, music is a big part of most religious ritual.

From the dense percussive layers of gamelan,

which provide the soundtrack to births, deaths and marriages...

..to the group chanting of the Kecak ceremony.

Likewise in the Caribbean, where various island cultures

use percussion to induce transcendence.

From the followers of Pocomania, in Jamaica, who combine intense

breathing, dancing and drumming to bring about trance states...

..to Haiti, where the bula drum is used for spirit possession and followers of voodoo worship.

Used like this, music has the potential to affect us

physically on a neurological level.

Something scientist Daniel Levitin has devoted his entire career to exploring.

When someone is in trance, what's happening,

both mentally and physically?

I would say a trance state is an altered state of consciousness.

We have many altered states.

We can be asleep, we can be half-asleep, half-awake.

We have altered states when we drink caffeine or smoke cigarettes

or drink alcohol. Trance is an altered state of consciousness.

It's one that, I think, is most similar to what the psychologist

Csikszentmihalyi has called "flow".

You've been in flow.

As an artist, I've seen you in a flow state.

The flow state is where you're not overtly conscious

of the time or the place or the surroundings. You are just in the zone.

It's the basketball player who has a hot hand.

It's the musician who's totally in the moment and in the groove.

And everything's firing on all cylinders.

A trance state is like that, not necessarily that you're at a peak performance.

You become only peripherally, if aware at all, of time and place.

You kind of lose yourself into others and into the experience.

That's a trance.

When you listen to music with any kind of a pulse,

your neurons fire synchronously with that pulse.

There has to be enough going on in the trance music

to keep you minimally aroused, mentally.

About challenging you to burst the bubble?

Yeah, exactly.

And, of course, such music is readily available.

Just listen to this...

..Music for Airports, by Brian Eno.

Released in 1978, this was the acclaimed producer's first album

in a series he called Ambient Music.

MUSIC: 2/1 by Brian Eno

A style designed to cut the ties between us and the physical world.

So, I can't help wondering if ambient music like this could

transport me from New York City to nirvana.

Amid all the noise of the Big Apple here, there is a man,

a musician, who allegedly can take us up and away from all this chaos.

This is Laraaji, a pioneer of ambient music

and collaborator of Brian Eno, whose sound merges music

and meditation, to hopefully induce an altered state in listeners.

MUSIC: Laraajazzi by Laraaji

I've come to the studio above a dry cleaner's in Harlem

to experience my first ambient sound bath.

Hey, Stewart.

Yeah, come on in.

Looking for a little tranquillity here... Yeah, I think...

..from the hurly-burly world out there.

I'm thinking you might feel comfortable here,

with your head this way. OK.

Head here, feet there? Yeah.

OK. Sounds good to me.

Let go, let flow.

Breathing is relaxed.

No thinking, no language.

In a sound bath, melody and rhythm are stripped away

and replaced by tone and timbre.

Laraaji assembles a collage of tonal frequencies

that remove us from the stresses of everyday life...

..and induce a state of calm.

HE SINGS

# Ram, ram, ram, ram, ram, ram, ram...

Hmm... Ahh...

That was beautiful.

Going to address them upwards, to wherever that bell went up there.

Mm. And to wherever that gong went down there...

Mmm. ..and in here. Oh!

The deep bells, combined with the breathing, that is a place.

Yes.

I can feel that.

You know... I'm enjoying hearing this.

It's very beautiful.

How would you equate this transcendental experience with

music, and how much is the music aspect of this part of what happens?

Well, I think of music and sound and tone as a flashlight,

in a dark room.

Music can make one aware of the details of that room.

Tone can shine a flashlight on the transcendental space,

can make you aware of timelessness.

Mm-hm.

It occurred to me, as you were explaining that, that in a way

rhythm and melody are constraining.

They are a ride, whereas this is an observation.

Yes.

The term transcendental intrigued me when I first heard it,

and my take on it was to transcend the apparent world,

to go above the apparent world.

And at the beginning I was trying to go above,

until I started to realise what I'm doing is I'm just coming

back to the self that isn't out there... Mm-hm.

..out there, but it's here. This is where the mystery is.

Maybe that sensation of rising above is the things that are holding

you down are the "not here". Mm-hm.

They're the external factors, but to be released from them is

a feeling of elevation.

But maybe I think what you're explaining is it's not

necessarily going somewhere.

It's getting the other stuff out of here.

And staying present. Mm-hm.

Yes.

This to me is the transcendental abode.

MUSIC: Let There Be More Light by Pink Floyd

From frenzy to calm, there is more than one way to

arrive at the transcendental abode.

In the late 1960s, fascination for Eastern mysticism

and hallucinogenic drugs took music to a new psychedelic frontier -

forging an alliance between sound and stimulants that has lasted

into the current era of dance music.

The movement fuelled at least initially by MDMA, a drug that

offers a short cut to hedonistic and transcendental escape.

But music has always had the power to intoxicate,

even without dance floors and drugs.

GOSPEL SERMON

This is Hunter Chapel, down in Como, Mississippi.

The perfect place to experience an all-American art form

the way it was meant to be heard.

# ..still small boys Yeah!

# Go on, my child Yeah!

# Go on, my child... #

Gospel music was born in African-American churches through

the meeting of sacred hymns and spirituals infused with the blues.

# Even though I may have to cry sometimes! #

From the emotional delivery of the preacher's sermon...

# Throw your arms around us! #

..to the all-male choir and the backing band...

# Keep us together! #

..this weekly ritual shows how powerful music can be.

And when it comes together with belief,

and hope, it is an unstoppable force.

Repeated call-and-response phrases add power to the words.

Ramp up the energy of the room, and it releases what these folks

believe is the Holy Spirit itself.

# I'll be serving the Lord... #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

As one of the biggest selling gospel stars on the planet,

CeCe Winans knows all about how this music can transport us.

# Precious Lord

# Take my hand

# Lead me on

# Let me stand

# For I am tired

# I am weary

# I am worn

# Yeah, yeah!

# Lead me home. #

I think we all just elevated about 20 feet up right there.

SHE LAUGHS

It does bring something special down here amongst others.

Oh, yes, it brings heaven on Earth, it really does.

I mean, but just hearing that lyric, you know,

you hear the desperation, you hear the pain, but it brings in hope.

Yeah.

That's why music is more than entertainment.

It's a message that goes to the heart.

It's a message that ministers to the soul.

And therefore it's powerful - it brings in the supernatural,

it brings in the power of God, you know?

Can we hear a little bit of Swing Low?

A little of that? We can try it a little bit.

# Swing low, sweet chariot

# Coming for to carry me home... #

Gospel music traces its roots back to the birth of Negro

spirituals in the late-18th century.

Songs like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot are a testament to the power

of music to help people transcend pain.

# I looked over Jordan... #

And for 400 years African-Americans have had a lot of pain to transcend.

With truly beautiful, uplifting songs like this one...

# A band of angels coming after me

# Coming for to carry me home... #

Come on, everybody.

# Swing low, sweet chariot

# Coming for to carry me home

# Swing low, sweet chariot

# Coming for to carry me home. #

Yes, yes! Beautiful.

The hope of a home.

Yeah. A great home.

A better place. A better place, yes.

What is it about music that takes us out of here?

You know, when we go back to the Negro spirituals,

I mean, music was a way...

It was an escape for us. Mm-hm.

And it's still an escape, it really is.

I mean, you could be going through the worst day

and get lost in a song, and be reminded that there is a life

after this life and that God is with you, so it's through music

that people - and not just people but definitely African-American

people, the black church, the gospel church - is where we escape.

I mean, it's the message, it's the lyrics, it's the words.

It's taking your mind from where we are to where we're going, you know?

Mm-hm.

It's putting hope into a hopeless situation.

And that's what the gospel does,

that's what Negro spirituals did and they continue to do.

It pulls you out of the darkness into the light.

How do you suppose it is that music, these chords,

and you raise your voice and, you know, to the Lord,

how does the music work to lift as up?

Well, first of all, music was created by God.

Mm-hm. And so... He obviously loves it.

Yeah, he loves it! He loves it.

And it's powerful, really, both ways.

It's powerful - Juan knows. It's powerful when it's positive,

and it's powerful when it's negative.

In the hands of Satan! That's right, that's right.

But when we express ourselves, because it was created by Him,

it transcends all barriers, you know?

It tears down walls, it brings people together,

it carries love, it carries healing.

It carries the things that we can't see, you know?

And I don't know if any of us can really articulate how that happens,

except God made it happen that way.

It's not hard to see how suffused with faith gospel really is,

because gospel offers the faithful the chance to surrender

themselves through song.

But it also relies on another more specific technique.

Repetition.

# Home

# Let me see home

# Home!

# Home!

# Let me come home... #

You can hear it in the foot-stomping beat of the band...

# Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

..the handclaps of the congregation...

..and in the repeated cries from the pulpit...

# Home, home... Oh, yeah, oh, yeah! #

MUSIC: Symphony No.5, 1st movement by Ludwig van Beethoven

As a drummer, of course, repeated patterns are my thing,

which has served me well over the years,

because it turns out as humans love repetition.

Beethoven knew this only too well.

As does Prof Elizabeth Margulis of Princeton University's

Music Cognition Lab,

who has directed extensive research on the effect of repetition

on the listening experience.

What is it about repetition?

Why do humans get...aroused by repetition?

So, repetition is really quite powerful.

It's really pushing people down into a different

kind of orientation with the sound that is not ordinary.

Listening to something again and again either pushes

you down to hear something more subtle about it that wasn't

available on first hearing, or up to hear something more structural

about what's going on.

So, people have known for more than 100 years about the semantic

satiation effect, where...

The what?

Semantic satiation.

So, semantic, right, is the reference of a word, right?

If I say "table", right, it's hard not to just have that be

a transparent portal to imagining something like the object before us.

But if I sat here and said "table" repeatedly

for 60 seconds straight... Table, table, table, table, table,

table, table, table, table, table, table, table. It starts to turn

into something else. Yeah. One of the things that happened

to me even just now when you were saying "table" repeatedly is,

instead of thinking about this object, I was very, like,

"'Bl' - 'bl' is a weird sound," you know, "Hmm."

And this repeated gesture is moving your attention toward that domain,

or to something that's not in the ordinary.

This is something that we see musically as well,

so we can track how people's attention shifts across

repeated hearings and see that it's changing

and either moving up or down, sort of in the...

Down sometimes, into the grain of the sound.

MUSIC: Can't Get You Out Of My Head by Kylie Minogue

Repetition heightens the listening experience and reveals yet

another way that music can possess both body and mind.

# La la la

# La la la-la-la... #

Its explicit use is found in many memorable compositions.

# La la la

# La la la-la... #

From classical heavyweights to those exasperating earworms...

# I just can't get you out of my head... #

..that burrow their way deep into our subconscious.

And Elizabeth has a way to demonstrate how musical

repetition can profoundly alter our perceptive awareness.

# ..more than I dare to think about... #

I wonder if you could just talk to me

about some of your favourite music.

What do you love in music? What's your favourite kind of music?

I don't know. My favourite kind of music usually involves

some kind of rhythm...

Ah, a tune that even I can sing, but not necessarily.

There's lots of music that I like that I cannot even sing,

because I'm a crap singer.

OK. I think I can do it...

RECORDING: Ah, a tune that even I can sing, but not necessarily.

There's lots of music that I like that I cannot even sing.

Even sing. Even sing... Sorry. ..that I cannot even sing.

..that I cannot even sing. ..that I cannot even sing. ..that I cannot

even sing. ..that I cannot even sing. ..that I cannot even sing.

So, for many people, over the course of listening to this repeatedly...

I mean, most people can't drum like that to it,

but they can tune into the pitch contour more.

Yeah. "Da da DA da da da." Yeah, such that it seems musical.

And you saw that this wasn't particularly tricky, right?

As you just said a few things I went in and I clipped some out

and this effect... Yeah.

So, I think this is a very vivid demonstration of how our percept

changes across repetition, because then what's most striking now,

if we go back and listen to the whole excerpt...

Because a lot of times that one that we heard repeated a lot...pops.

Let's see if it pops.

RECORDING: My favourite kind of music usually involves some

kind of rhythm. Ah, a tune that even I can sing,

but not necessarily.

There's lots of music that I like that I cannot even sing, because...

"Cannot even sing," "That I cannot even sing,"

"That I cannot even sing."

The only thing you've changed about what was normal prose... Yes.

The only thing you've changed - you haven't changed the pitch,

you haven't changed the melody - all you've changed is the repetition.

And that turns it into music. Yes.

As a behaviour is repeated, your attention does get drawn down,

or up, to some timescale of event segmentation that is not typical.

And that this is sometimes experienced as highly

pleasurable, right?

Because we saw how as we kept listening

we were hearing something, you know, more in the sound.

You take a totally normal sound or statement... Yes.

..loop it, and you start to hear new things in it.

Right. So, the idea is that, you know, this is really taking you

into a bit of an altered state of perceptual awareness that then,

if you have this kind of cultural setting

and these kinds of traditions, can be related to this kind of

trance condition, this trance state.

MUSIC: Music For 18 Musicians by Steve Reich

Repeated patterns have the ability to intoxicate in the same

way that the polyrhythms of the Gnawa lifted me in Morocco, and

certain chords and melodies turned me on to music in the first place.

So, maybe it's no surprise that my favourite living composer

is Steve Reich.

A master of utilising these different elements to create

hypnotic works of beauty like this one, Music For 18 Musicians.

Hey, Stewart! Beautiful day.

It is a beautiful day, in this beautiful house.

And I'm sure many mysteries are created in this place.

I can't wait to explore it. Come on in, find out all about it.

All right.

Music For 18 was a big breakthrough.

It starts with a series of chords,

a harmonic structure that would support this long piece.

The essential element is the pulse, and the pulse is maintained

primarily between two pianos and two marimbas.

That has a certain energy, but what's really interesting is

if you've got one guy going, "Bam, bam, bam, bam,"

and the other one going, "Mbah, mbah, mbah,"

doing the offbeats... Yeah.

..that produces a levitating experience. Yeah.

It's precisely this levitation quality that powers Steve's music,

an invitation to escape through sound, that I first discovered

in church as a kid.

And it turns out that Steve's approach to making

transcendental music owed a debt to Christianity too.

I was living in San Francisco and someone told me,

"There's this fantastic black Pentecostal preacher in Union Square

"in San Francisco." ..too much a big shot, his hand is too clean...

I had a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder.

I went down, recorded his voice, fantastic.

He going to take our time!

I was listening to everything that he said.

I was trying to notate his speech, because it

kind of hovers between singing and speaking.

It's neither singing, it isn't speaking.

Steve took a short snippet of the preacher's words -

what we might now call a sample -

and looped it, and the repetition of this loop created a rhythm

and a new kind of music.

It ain't going to rain!

I made these two loops as close to identical as I could

and I pressed both the start buttons.

Before I did, I put on headphones with one plug going into this one

and the other plug going into that one, and I pressed the start

and the sound happened, you could say, by chance or by divine gift,

to be in the centre of my head.

It's going to rain. It's going to rain. It's going to rain.

It's going to rain. It's going to rain.

And it seemed to be sort of rocking

and then gradually it moved over to the left side,

and then down my shoulder and down my leg and across the room

and started to reverberate, started to come apart and finally I hear,

"It's going to, it's going to, it's going to rain."

It's going to rain. It's going to rain. It's going to rain.

It's going to rain. It's going to rain.

I'm transfixed. I'm just listening to this unbelievable thing going on,

not moving at all.

And then it goes what we would call retrograde. It goes backwards

and comes back together again.

It's going to rain. It's going to rain. It's going to rain.

By playing two almost but not quite identical loops,

Steve discovered a technique that has defined his work - phasing...

It's going to rain...

..two similar patterns that fall in and out of synch to create

an evolving hybrid rhythm...

It's going to rain, it's going to rain...

..in mesmeric works like this one, Drumming,

a piece that blew my mind when I first heard in the 1970s.

When Drumming came, a new effect was achieved

and the effect was this transcendental feeling

of lifting you out of this harsh, cruel world into a heavenly state.

A feeling of a dream state.

And I don't want to get weird here, but looking at this library here,

it's similar to what prayer does.

It takes you out of this world into a higher place,

and here's a loaded question.

Do you think your music would be appropriate for sacred use,

as part of a liturgy or as part of worship?

I guess a have religious gene that needs fulfilling.

So, I got into physical yoga.

I got into Pranayama, which is breathing exercises.

Made me stop smoking without even trying.

And by 1973, '74 I was coming back to New York and I felt,

"Something's missing."

SINGING IN HEBREW

Steve's yearning for spiritual meaning led him in a new direction.

SINGING IN HEBREW

Tehillim was his first foray

into music that spoke to his own Jewish upbringing.

SINGING IN HEBREW

He takes the original Hebrew of the psalms

and sets it to his unique rhythmical devices.

I wanted to challenge myself, to set a text,

and I'm really interested in...

I can read some Hebrew and I've studied some Torah, I'm getting more

and more committed, practice, beginning to adapt to Sabbath

and... Well, what text? You know, there's a lot of text there.

The psalms. The psalms were meant to be sung.

We in the West have no idea how they go. There's no tune.

SINGING IN HEBREW

Why would melody add more power to the text?

The text says what you need to know, intellectually,

about the reason for the cosmos.

It's obvious, I mean, you can speak words, but if you start to sing them

they just become something living and with emotional intensity

and affect people in a completely different way.

Is Tehillim performed in synagogue? Is it used in that sense?

No, no, cos here comes the punch line.

There is no place in the traditional orthodox synagogue

for concert music.

Of any sort. The place for Tehillim is a concert hall.

I'm writing concert music. OK.

And I'm using a sacred text which means a lot to me

and maybe to a lot of other people.

And that's the beginning and that's the end of it. Well,

nevertheless, your music does transport,

whether or not you're in a synagogue or sitting in a living room

listening to a recording or in the concert hall.

It has a very similar feeling of bringing

the divine into our hurly-burly world.

Do you have a theory about why you lift people with your work?

What makes them so happy?

I just work here.

I write the music that I finally get to the point where I love it,

and I hope you will too.

Steve Reich's work, and so much of the other music that I really love,

proves the possibility of transcendence in both the sacred

and the secular..

..simply because certain music elements help us

reach for something profound, whether you are a believer or not.

Music has its own special kind of divinity.

And while I may not be religious, I'm ready to kneel right down

and pray at the altar of music.

CHEERING

It's striking that in all these ceremonies,

whether it's the ceremony of a rave,

or the ceremony of a service down in Mississippi,

or the Sufis in a circle, it's a common language

and anybody can understand.

As I sit there with these people doing their thing,

I understand perfectly what's going on.

And what's going on is the magical power of music.

Whatever language they're making the music in doesn't matter.

It's a common language that transports us unto heaven.