Flourishing together – the healing power of music.

How can the experience of music can help us learn more about what it means to be human? This is the question Gillian explores with Joe Fort in this episode of the GoHealth podcast.  

Joe is a conductor and a musicologist based in London. He has been the director of Music at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge since 2021, where he conducts a professional choir in the weekly services 

He is the director of the chapel choir and lecturer in music at King’s College, London. His performances indeed with that choir have been recognised, and I quote as ‘English choral singing as at his best, he has released multiple recordings, most recently these include work with the Britten Sinfonia, the English Chamber Orchestra and the Hanover Band. He goes all over the world, conducting, recently appearing in the Festival de Mexico, White Nights Festival in St Petersburg and the Montreal Organ Festival. His training – he holds a PhD in music from Harvard University and his academic interests focus on 18th century music and dance. 

• Joe outlines his many roles in the world of music and his journey to being a full time musician. 
• Joe describes and explains the process of conducting music and how it can become a more emotional experience over and above a technical one. 
• Music is in everyone! Music as a vehicle in worship. 
• ‘He [sic] who sings, prays twice’ Saint Augustine – music transports people towards the divine.  
• How music connects ourselves with ourselves. 

• Faure’s Requiem – the healing power of music 
• How music helps us to live in the world as it actually is right now. 
• Joe describes the brilliant Stroke Oddessys project he has been involved with. 
• Joe goes into the detail of the exciting ECLAS funded project at St. Paul’s Knightbridge researching the relationship between music in liturgy and wellbeing. 
• Joe gives his one bit of advice for flourishing. 

Links:

St Paul’s Knightsbridge 

Cowbridge Music Festival 

In Paradisum, Faure’s Requiem 

Brain Oddessys Charity 

ECLAS 

Go Health Community

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Introduction:

I am Gillian Straine and welcome to the Go Health Podcast.

The podcast is run by the team of the Guild of Health and St Raphael, which is a charity that’s been around for over 100 years promoting and resourcing the healing ministry of the Christian Faith.

So we are in season three of the podcast and we are exploring the topic Together We Flourish. In this season we are looking at all the positive ways that people combine health and faith, and we’ve chosen this topic as it is at the heart of the GoHealth Community and indeed all the work here at the Guild of Health and St Raphael, our vision is to see flourishing communities made up of flourishing individuals and the GoHealth community is a place of nurture, sharing, learning and practice where we all actively tend to our own journey towards health and wellbeing with the faith of Jesus Christ at the centre. 

In this episode, we are exploring that theme, the theme of Together We Flourish with Dr. Joseph Fort. Now Joe is a conductor and a musicologist based in London. He has been the director of Music at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge since 2021, where he conducts a professional choir in the weekly services. And there at St Paul’s he’s recently received a grant from ECLAS which is Equipping Christian Leaders in an Age of Science to investigate, get this, the role of music in liturgy as an agent of wellbeing and healing. Very exciting project. 

We chat lots about this in the podcast and Joe co-directs that whole thing. Like many musicians, Joe is also super busy. He is the director of the chapel choir and lecturer in music at King’s College, London. His performances indeed with that choir have been recognised, and I quote as ‘English choral singing as at his best, he has released multiple recordings, most recently these include work with the Britten Sinfonia, the English Chamber Orchestra and the Hanover Band. He goes all over the world, conducting, recently appearing in the Festival de Mexico, White Nights Festival in St Petersburg and the Montreal Organ Festival. His training – he holds a PhD in music from Harvard University and his academic interests focus on 18th century music and dance. We don’t talk about that much in the podcast, but he’s a really interesting guy and he is perfect for this season of the podcast and I really enjoy talking with him. 

He’s got a real passion, you know, for promoting the links between music and health and healing, very experienced in this area. And his new research at St Paul’s in Knightsbridge is potentially really groundbreaking and really one to pay attention to. But our chat chat was also really expansive. We dived into his background, his childhood, what drives him, and I think really interestingly, how the experience of music can help us learn more about what it means to be human. So, anyway, I hope you enjoy it, on with the episode. 

[MUSIC]

Gillian:  So Joe, thank you so much for giving us your time here on the Go Health Podcast. How are you today?

Joe: I’m very well, thanks and thank you so much for having me on that on the GoHealth podcast, Gillian, really great to be here.

Gillian: No, it’s our privilege. So Joe, tell us a bit about your day job, right, so I googled you and you’re like many, you know, high profile, successful musicians – you seem to do about a hundred different jobs. So tell us about your maybe day job or what your week looks like.

Joe: Sure. So during…let’s start with Sundays then and I work, and have done for the last just over a year, at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, where I’m the director of music and where we have a professional 8 voice choir and, and a couple of organists and some choral scholars as well. And there we do one Sunday morning service a week. And we also have started some mid-week services as well that we’ll probably talk about at some length later in the podcast. And then during the week itself, I’m…I work at King’s College London, and there I’m the director of the Chapel Choir and lecturer in music. And essentially I do two main things there. One of those is conduct the choir and the choir sings, they sing Evensong and Eucharist during the week. And then I’m as a lecturer in the music department, I teach performance courses and I teach on 18th century music in particular. And I…that’s one of my research areas is 18th Century music. And then yes, I do various other things, including running a little music festival in Wales, the Cowbridge Music Festival. And that’s, that’s pretty much, that’s pretty much me, there’s no sort of one week that’s the same, but that’s what I get up to mostof the time.

Gillian: Oh, fantastic. Musicians always seem so busy and energetic, you need to have a lot of energy, I guess if you’re doing all that conducting as well and leading and teaching and running around. Did you always know you wanted to be a musician as a child? Were you were you very musical and why did you decide to go down this path, Joe?

Joe: So when I was very young, I played the piano a bit but didn’t really have any formal lessons. I was just encouraged a lot by my grandfather and by my by my parents who are musicians. And then gradually in my teens, it just became the thing that you know, each year it would take up sort of 10% more, whatever of my time doing it, until I wasn’t really doing that much else. And, and it just became…it just sort of, it just became, I guess, the thing that I couldn’t imagine not doing and that that’s how I did that. And I, I originally I wanted to be a bassoonist. I played the bassoon in the National Youth Orchestra and, and that was the that was really the main thing. And then in my last couple of years at school, I got more serious about playing the organ and applied for an organ scholarship to Cambridge. I went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. And I got there and I pretty much never picked up the bassoon again! And just mostly, just spent most of my time in the chapel playing the organ.

Actually the thing to know I guess also about being an organist in this country in particular, you often, you call yourself an organist, but you spend much more of your time conducting the choir and that goes back 70 years or so. 70, until 70 years ago, the organist was also the choir director and they would sort of conduct the choir by bobbing the back of their head up and down. And the choir were would have to sing along with that. And that’s why lots and lots of pieces from that period always start with a big, a big loud note at the beginning. We call it a door knock, it goes boom and then everybody sings. So if you think of the hymn ‘boom’ ‘For All the Saints, that’s exactly what that’s doing. And so you sort of you train as an organist and then as soon as you’re doing well, you find that you’re actually conducting choirs much more than you, you’re playing the organ and that’s essentially what happened to me. And since then, that’s pretty much what I’ve done.

Gillian: Wow. That’s that’s really interesting. I didn’t know that about hymns, but it makes sense because it feel like two different skills as well. You’re playing the organ. I play the piano up to grade five, just get that in there, that’s my only musical talent. I’m now, I also my children are choristers. I’ve taken on this is a whole new thing for me, this part of our lives as well. So very much part of it. But they seem like two very different skills, playing with your hands, your feet on the organ. And I’m fascinated by conductors because and I often find myself, if I’m in a concert or somewhere with a conductor, how you wave your hands around and make things happen. But, you know, the people that are performing are individual humans making their own choices. There’s some…it feels like a really experiential thing. You’ve got to sort of get out what you’ve imagined on the inside through your hands to make them do it. It’s a really odd thing, isn’t it? 

Joe:  Yes, exactly. Yeah, I know, I know exactly what you mean. And when we’re rehearsing a piece, we talk about it with this metaphor. maybe, that’s pretty close to that of, I guess, a sculptor or something. We talk about this thing that you’re you’re making better and better, that is the music and the piece that’s being being sung. But actually, really what we’re doing is we’re sort of training people to do something. So it’s much more like training an athlete or something to, to do something highly skillful over and over again and making sure that in the, in the service or in the concert, it comes out in a particular way. I spent a huge amount of time before I stand in front of the choir just thinking I’ve got – here’s a piece that we’re doing at the church and it’s sitting on right by my desk and, and spending all this time thinking about it so that you have a kind of vision of the, of the piece, as you imagine it to sound in your mind. And then the job in the rehearsal is to get what you’re hearing closer to that. 

Gillian: So is it like an emotional experience for you rather than technical? If you see what I mean? Like I must get the C there and the base needs to come in there. I’m sure that’s the wrong thing to say, you’re thinking, I want this experience of the music and I’ve got to get them to do that?

Joe: Yeah, in many ways it is that, I think when you really know something well, that’s when it gets beyond a technical experience and becomes a more emotional one. And it’s actually it’s the same as, I guess any skill. You know, if you think about learning to drive a car, at the start of that, you’re very aware of what your hands are doing and what your legs are doing and and everything, everything the body is doing in order to get the car to move forwards or to turn a corner or whatever. Then gradually, when you get accustomed to the skill, you don’t think about any of that stuff. You just think, okay, I’m turning a corner here and you just you just do it absolutely without thinking about the, the body or any of the technique. And actually there’s a philosopher, Isabelle Le Grand, who talks about this, who talks about the body becoming more transparent as you become more accustomed to the skills that you’re trying to perform with it. And I think that’s actually a huge amount of what conducting is. You spend all this time learning what to do with your arms and what to do with your hands in order to elicit a good sound. But then actually, when you’re in the moment of the performance, you can’t be thinking about any of that. It has to be all about the music.

Gillian: So let me just swing back a bit to your childhood as well. And, and I just for people who are listening, be interesting and to know your thoughts, your spirituality and your, your faith experience with the church and how you describe yourself today?

Joe: I was raised a Roman Catholic and my parents…in fact, probably my earliest memory is being in church, which was just in Surrey, in Woking, and the church is now a block of flats. But my earliest memory is actually being there and at communion and being told by my parents essentially that whatever I was doing at any other time in the service, that was the important moment and I had to concentrate. Then I can remember sitting, we were always late, so we’re always right at the back of the church. I remember sort of peering between the pews to sort of try and see what was going on there. And also we went to, I couldn’t understand a word that was being said because we went to the Italian mass because it reminded my parents of the, of the Latin mass. So no idea what was going on for quite a long time. And then we moved to a different church when we moved to a village nearby. But then it was probably when I was 16, 17, 18 and taking the organ more seriously, I was accompanying my brother, playing for a little music competition at school and the adjudicators said…I was just talking to him before the…before or after the competition or something. And he said, Oh, oh, do you play the organ as well? I’m looking for an organ scholar to come to my church, and he was he was called Martin Ellis. He died a few years ago and he was at Dorking Parish Church. And he essentially took me, having played barely a note, definitely having played…having never played anything with that with a choir and he taught me the, the side of of organ playing that that is different to playing solo pieces, which is accompanying choirs and is and is so crucial. And so I that was the first sustained period of being in an Anglican church. From…and so for two years I was, I was effectively the organ scholar at St Martin’s Dorking and then I, I applied for an organ scholarship at All Saints, Margaret St, very high Anglican Church, and this was my first, my first glimpse of high Anglicanism, which was a I guess a sort of baptism by fire. And, and so I was the organ scholar there and, and I think probably around that time I’ve from then already I’ve kind of floated much more into the Anglican way of thinking about things. And, and I did take communion in the Anglican Church now. I spent a period in America during which I was the director of music at a couple of Episcopal churches, which is essentially over there, the equivalent of Anglicanism.

And so yeah, for the best part of 20 years now I’ve been working and, and worshiping in the Anglican Church. I’d say it was the music though, that that brought me there in the first place, because if I hadn’t happened to bump into that, that organist who said ‘do you want to come and play he organ at this church?’, life would have taken a very different route, I might even be playing the bassoon now.

Gillian: Nothing wrong with that. You’re going to have to say, in case there’s any budding bassoonists listening to us. Oh, well, broadly, what I’m going to not do and I’m desperate to do, Joe, is ask you the question that’s on my mind as an ordained priest who’s in charge, the organist or the vicar? But let’s not go there. This is one thing we’re not going to touch on because, you know, colleagues that we both know might listen. But, you know, that’s there. I’ll ask you offline about that because that’s a key question, obviously. But this season of the podcast, we’re looking at this theme of how to flourish and how do we flourish together. And the reason that I was keen to chat you in this podcast is we’ve got a research program, project going on at St. Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge around the healing power of music. But before we get there, and I do want to talk more about church music. I’d love to just talk a little bit more about music itself because it’s one of those topics, isn’t it, Joe, that everyone’s got an opinion on.  You know, we all did music at school, like we all had to learn the recorder at school and I was there, you know, I could have a conversation…I feel happy having conversation with you about music because I feel I know something, in a way that I feel more nervous about talking to a brain surgeon, ’cause I know nothing about brain surgery whatsoever. But music is something we’ve all got an opinion on and do you think it’s one of those…is that just because we’re exposed to it, or in your experience and in your work, do you think it’s something more fundamental about music in terms of who we are as human beings and how we might find, find flourishing and health?

Joe: I think that’s one of the best things about music, is that, yes, everybody has has a relationship with it of some sort. What I actually find in my line of work, though, is that people seem nervous about talking about music with me because there’s this sort of idea that whether a professional musician or musicologist sort of has the answers and kind of has this technical know how and people…the number of times people will say…will preface what they say with, ‘oh, you know, I don’t know anything about this really’. And then say something that’s actually very profound. You it happens every day pretty much. And, and but I really think that that is one of the truly great things about music, that everybody has is kind of…it is in everybody. And that’s actually why I think it is is such an important vehicle in worship because it can be the thing that that transports members of a congregation towards the Divine, I think. And, and it is often the choir’s job – you might have a text in a piece that’s trying to convey something, but the text itself can’t, can’t do that and it requires this sort of musical envisaging of the of the text to, to give this sense of it or just just to create a space in somebody’s imagination where this thing might exist.

The famous saying from Saint Augustine as well is, ‘He who sings, prays twice’ and, and there’s that sense as well with…with the singing but also just, with with the music in general that it can it can lift the concepts I guess that form the basis of faith and provide another window on them and and help to transport people towards them.

Gillian: I’m very intrigued about what music does to us. And like all people you search music reminds me of certain times of my life. And actually I was in preparation for chatting with you this afternoon, I start to listen to Faure Requiem, because full disclosure, I used to work at St Paul’s Knightsbridge when I was a pastoral assistant. It was one of my early experiences of high Anglo Catholic worship and then of formal work with the church. I did a lot of memorials and funerals and the choir, the choir there is beautiful. Quite often the funerals they chose that ‘in paradisum’ from the Faure Requiem and I listen to it today and I suddenly remembered a funeral we were involved in. And when I say I was involved, I was just holding the candle and holding the door – I was a pastoral assistant, not much more. But I remember the priest saying that the sister of the deceased hadn’t cried yet. He’d done all the pastoral visits, they had planned the funeral. It had been a really tragic death, a young person had died very tragically and very suddenly. And, and I feel emotional now remembering this story. I remember holding the door and I was nervous because it was a funeral, but also because of the situation. And as she came out, as the coffin left the church and St. Paul’s does it so beautifully – there were candles and there was smoke and there was water – going out towards the hearse we all started to move and the procession and In Paradisum began and she broke down and she did that thing that people…she didn’t just cry, she wailed that kind of, that deep, deep horror was coming out of her mouth and almost…I never talked to her, but in my imagination, I wondered – that was the moment where she connected with the suffering and the pain of everything she’d been avoiding in the run up to the funeral. She’d there and the priest afterwards said, that was great she’s begun the grieving process and everything, but it was music that did her. And I wonder…you called music, you said it helps us transport ourselves to the Divine. I wonder also if it transports ourselves to ourselves. It helps us connect with ourselves as well.

Joe: Absolutely. And I mean, it’s interesting that you, that you mentioned the Faure Requiem in particular, Gillian, because Faure, wanted that piece…he, he was…he loved the Brahms Requiem, I’m sure. And Brahms and Faure both wanted their Requiems to be agents of healing for the bereaved. So, you know, technically, really a requiem is, is meant to be, if you like, you know a prayer for the soul of the dead. You know, this this prayer that the soul will will arrive in heaven. But, you get the sense that Faure is much, much, much more interested in the people who are actually still on earth, the people who are still alive an,  and, and the bereaved and Faure actually, his original requiem that he wrote didn’t have two of the movements. He didn’t…he omitted the two with the scary texts the, the bit where they…don’t chuck me down into the pit or the tartarus and the jaws of the lion. He got he got rid of all of that and he just had this very, very serene peace initially that was, that was, it was really all about this, this sense of healing. And, you know, allowing, I guess, you know, as you said, allowing the, the people listening to be with themselves. And if you think about that, that beautiful In Paradisum at the end, it’s it’s all about you know, the soul you know that’s the moment when the soul is going to lift to heaven and he has these these beautiful rising phrases [JOE SINGS] ‘Dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee’. Each time, you know, musical phrases normally descend, fundamentally end at the very end. But these ones just lift in this absolutely beautiful way. And, and I think that there’s you know, there’s something going on there with it as well. The, the funny thing about the Faure Requiem is that the, the priest at the church – Faure, he wrote the piece and he wasn’t commissioned to do it. You know, normally composers write a particular piece of music because somebody asks them to and they say, if you write this piece for such and such a service or such and such a concert, I’ll pay you so, such and such amounts of money and they’re, they’re composers, business people like everybody else. But Faure wrote this piece because he wanted to, it was as if it was in him and he wanted to let it out. There was no other other reason for doing it. And he, once he’d written it, he just used it, there was a funeral – he didn’t even remember whose funeral it was, he was asked when it was first time, said, oh, some the funeral of some woman or other were his actual words about it. And he he did it, they had it sung at this funeral. And then the the priest at the Madeleine Church in Paris said to him, who, who wrote that that new Requiem you had the choir sing. And Faure said, ‘actually I did’ and the priest said, ‘Oh, we won’t have that again’. 

So but it is a beautiful bit of music. But as you say, it’s just it’s it it really is, it’s absolutely about healing, that piece, I think. And that’s why it works so well at that, that point in the service in particular.

Gillian: It’s fascinating. And I was watching Twitter over, over Christmas. We’re recording this in January 2023. And I did see some criticism. I don’t know if you picked up on this of of some of the church music, particularly the carols from King’s beautiful service on Christmas Eve that I always have on the TV, whether or not I watch it, that it was, this is sort of too middle class and exclusive and we shouldn’t be showing this. This isn’t what the Church of England is around. And there is some kind of, there is, there’s a bit of movement to that in church in church music around accessibility, isn’t there? And you said as a child you went to Mass in Italian and you described a fairly profound experience, indeed, your first memory. Is there something to be said around flourishing and accessibility and what music means and maybe something about the class system in England? I don’t know.

Joe: That, that’s really, that’s really, really interesting. And, and actually, I think, Carol, services are in themselves a very interesting one – we kind of get onto this topic because and it’s actually what started me thinking about things that that now we’re trying to realise with the, with the midweek services at St Paul’s, because at St Paul’s actually we do a lot of carols services, we do for various charities in the, during Advent in the run up to Christmas and we probably have about 10,000 people coming through the church for those services. And, and the question in my mind is often we have so many people coming, they aren’t, if you ask them why have you come, I don’t know that they would be able to give you a straightforward answer because I don’t think that they’ve necessarily come for, for the music. I don’t think they’ve necessarily come for God. They’ve come for this kind of overall experience. And I think, you know, and that experience could be different for everybody. It could…some of us might call that sort of a coming closer to the to the Divine. Some people might call it a spiritual experience. How, how you describe it, the, you know, is down to the individual person, but they’re there. They’re there for this sort of experience of some sort. And that’s actually, you know, if ,if we could bottle that, I think the church would have absolutely no, no, no problems with attendance because because that so, you know, we have so many people coming in for it. But that’s kind of what started, you know, us thinking about what we wanted to do for for the mid-week services in particular, because there’s surely…you know, there are people who say they want to come to church. But, you know, first of all, Sunday mornings isn’t isn’t a convenient time, especially if they’ve got commitments with their children and, you know, but they might still make the time for a yoga session or something like that. And so we’re trying to kind of tap into, into this idea that the Divine experience can also be connected with healing and with wellbeing. We’re trying to probe some questions around all of that in the hope that we can eventually bottle this thing and find out what it is.

Gillian: But just going back to music, music as transporting us to the Divine. Music as helping us connect with ourselves. Can you also say something around music and connection to the world that we happen to be living in? And what I’m thinking is, is protest songs or and you mentioned that there Faure took out the bits of the text that had difficult stuff like ‘going down to the pit…’ what about the difficult stuff in the world and how important is music in helping us connect with what’s going on the world? I’m thinking of protest songs when things are going wrong. The way that music can galvanise community together in order to, for whatever reason, make a difference in the world they see around them. Whether that’s formal lament that we have experience of in church music around the Psalms or other expressions of that, or new styles of music…things…I’m thinking of the Iona Community and some of the music they’ve been creating in response to injustice.

Joe: This is a topic that actually is, is really coming up more and more. And there’s a lot of there are a lot of musicologists starting to write about it now. It’s, it’s really one of the sort of hot topics. It’s definitely it can kind of speak to, I guess this comes back actually to what you were saying earlier about music speaking to individuals. So as part of the music festival, we had some musicians play music from Afghanistan and some refugees from down the road came to the concerts because it spoke to them. And I think it’s the same with these with these protest songs, they can be used to to galvanise a community and and as a sort of spur to, to action. It’s always had this tool to, to you know actually within a churches it’s…it’ll be in a procession whether in a funeral or in a wedding it’s, it’s it’s got this kind of locomotive effect and I guess you know that said a lot of my research is on music and dance in the 18th century and how audiences during that period also danced the minuet. And it’s this power of music, I think, to put people in motion. And actually this motion isn’t just locomotive. It’s not just about getting from A to B, but it’s also an emotional experience as well that I think is, is what’s so beautiful about, about music.

Gillian: Yeah, yeah. And I picked up from your bio, I saw your research is in a phenomenology of music, so the experience of music rather than the technique as well and I find that fascinating – that’s the first time I use the word phenomenology on the podcast, but…And tell me – just linking with that – that idea that music helps people connect with well, in my, my language, they connect with themselves and maybe with their vocation about who God believes they are, with this connection with the Divine. Can you connect that for us with some work you’ve done around brain injury? The charity Brain Odysseys, if I’m understanding correctly, it’s helping people find recovery through the performance arts as well. In what way have you been involved in that project and what healing have you seen?

Joe: So I was a very, very small part of a very big or pretty big team. It was part of an organisation called Stroke Odysseys. It’s seeing what music can do by way of healing and health for people who have had quite severe strokes. And, you know, who might not be able to speak, for example, this sort of really quite brilliant team of musicians who, who go and create often an opera style piece and the stroke patients wil,  they will be involved with the composition and the performance often and especially for people who can no longer speak it gives them, they can still often sing or sing some bit of a melody for instance, whether you know, if it’s a melody, it doesn’t have to have words. But they can still they can still do that. And it really, I mean, the feedback for it is very, very strong. Can you imagine how difficult it is if you have if you’ve had a stroke, suddenly you know that just to lose the power of speech and that whole possibility of communicating. But music, especially music, you know, performed as part of a group, you have to communicate with everybody around you and you actually communicate very, very naturally and easily. It’s impossible, really, just to sing something, sing something with somebody else without feeling a sense of community there. And I think that’s possibly the most important thing that Stroke Odysseys do, it’s building this community of people. Actually, often people who’ve been involved with one project will then sign up immediately for the next one. Great friendship groups grow out of it as well. So that’s, that’s one way I think that, I think that, that it helps a lot.

Gillian:  You know, since the beginning almost, music has been seen as healing. I believe it was Pythagoras who used to write and compose different types of music depending on your illness, almost like a prescription, like something goes wrong or you should hum this. I don’t really know how it worked, but you know, certainly it’s been around for a long time that music promotes health and healing and then science has been catching up in the last 50 years or so, hasn’t it? Music has this potential and they’ve demonstrated that it can lower the heart rate, it can increase happiness. I guess they could do some analysis of how much dopamine is in your system. It increases community, you just mentioned that as well, and it can help with mental health. This huge potential impacts on our health and wellbeing. And let’s sort of add that into the mix of what happens in church and tell us about this project that we have in St Paul’s Church in London.

Joe: Is a really, really exciting project. I think it’s great as a church to be able to do this. I think it’s the first thing to say because yes, we know. Well, as you said, you know, for at least 2000 years we’ve known the power of music to, to do all sorts of things, of which healing is one. And over the last 50 years, again, as you say, you do, scientists have have approaches from a number of different angles. We’ve had, psychologists have looked at it, physiologists have have looked at it, sociologists have looked at it, in all these different ways. But the one angle that hasn’t really had any attention, I think, is actually looking at it in connection with the church, with connection with the Divine and connection with liturgy. And that’s really what we wanted to do. And so we set up this, this project essentially to try and start to assess the ways that music can give a sense of healing within a liturgy. And it’s very, very much a partnership because I’m not a scientist in any way. And but in the congregation at St Paul’s, we have Dr. Tom Tull, who is a scientist and who has been at the church for about 20 years. And he’s also he’s also served on the server team at the the church as well. And he has helped us put put this together. This isn’t his specialist area. And so we’ve also thanks to the the funding from ECLAS, we’ve also been able to get the services of a of a PhD students called Camp Shiloh and Camp is a student at Goldsmith’s. And he’s, he’s an absolutely perfect fit for this project because his background is in music and in psychology. So asking the exact kind of questions that we’re looking at. He also grew up in a, in a church setting and so he gets what we’re all about and has done from the outset. And what we what we’ve been working and working with camp especially on is trying to find ways of asking people before and after they hear pieces of music and before and after they come to a service. Finding ways of, of assessing the piece of music’s effects on them. So this survey, because it’s, you know, is part of a liturgy it has where we sort of slightly…I don’t know if limited is the right word. We have to think very, very carefully about how, about how members of the congregation can  fill in this survey in a way that’s not going to detract from their experience of the service as a whole. But we will, we ask them various questions like, you know, during this piece of music, how strongly did you feel that you were in touch with your self on a scale of 1 to 10, or how strongly did you feel a sense of communal experience or how strongly did you feel any sense of divine presence? So these are the sort of questions that we’re asking them and they get a get a scale of 1 to 10 and they have to pick a number on that scale. And of course, different members of the congregation might – what’s one person’s six might be another person’s eight, for example. But because we asked them before and after the thing, we can get a sense of whether ,  whether on their own scale, the music is having a particular effect and we’re, as we developed the project, I’m sort of making careful very, very careful tweaks with the music so that we can, you know, we can have, you know, we have a slow, slow, quiet piece first of all, for it. This is just a generalised example. We have a slow quiet piece and see if that has more effect than a fast, loud piece say, in a particular way. So that’s how we trying to nuance it a little bit. The other person that I should mention in, in this is Christina Arakellion, Christina is a composer who just actually completed her Ph.D. in composition at King’s, and I’ve known her for several years. She is also very, very she’s very interested in music as a sort of as a music’s potential for healing. And she has written some music for the BBC’s music and meditation podcast, and that is sort of designed to engender a state of mental calm in people who listen to it and so Christina is somebody who’s also been thinking about this quite a lot, and she has written some pieces of music for us that are specifically designed for this liturgy and to fit in that in that liturgy. The other people I should mention in this are the clergy who really put everything together, you know, to Alan Gyle, our vicar, oversees and runs this, and until he recently moved to New York, Luigi Gioia was also involved with the, with the service. We also are trying to incorporate some, I guess, what we call everyday sounds. For example, the sound of a, of a reversing lorry. That’s a beep beep beep sound or whatever…

Gillian: I’m getting more stressed already. 

Joe: Oh, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Another sound, actually we did one on the theme of death, and we had the sound of a heart monitor. And the idea is that with, when we’ve done these, we’ve, we’ve played the sound at the beginning and played the sound at the end and then hoped and asked the congregation whether the sort of journey of the service or what they’ve what they take away from the service, what they’ve learned in that, in the, in the spoken part of the service, whether that would inform how they would hear these sounds in everyday life as well.

We’re being pretty experimental about it and we’re not, you know, we deliberately haven’t got in there with that, with one formula, you know, saying we’re doing this. We’re trying to play around with it. I mean, there’s something I’m always saying to the students is that music is fundamentally messy, because they always want to arrive and to learn that simple, you’re going to write for this chord or whatever and then they feel that they’ve kind of they’ve put it in a box and now they know what it is. But actually, it’s the opposite, it’s, you know, it’s all about the kind of the life of the thing. And then it’s kind of the same with this. We’re being very experimental with it.

Gillian: I love that link you have with external noises. Very un high church, random noise and using them to make a link from liturgy to outside the building. So that’s clever. And it’s clever, I think as well that you’re using new music so people aren’t coming with their, their experiences of that music, whether that’s positive or negative before, these are new experiences. And tell me about the liturgy. You said liturgy a couple of times. Is it a particular liturgy? Does the liturgy change every time you tweak your music?

Joe:  Where we started with the liturgy was, was actually with the ancient office of Compline and, you know, Compline for everybody, meaning – coming from the word really for completion. And the service at the very end of the day that in a monastery or in an Abbey, they would, they would do just before going to bed and this idea that, that it can you know that that service is, is, is part of the aim with that is actually you know is to do sort of what we’re trying to do which is to give the sense of calm.

We started with that idea and then created something that, that’s very different actually. So we have typically as well as the musical bits, there will be a couple of readings as well, as and they can be biblical or they can be they can be from other sources as well as sometimes a poem. And we’ve also we’ve also used visual elements.

David Suchet. We used a video of him doing a particular reading and then put that together with a video that Father Luigi had found of a soul coming out of a body. So we’re really, we’re trying to be quite creative with, with what we do with that side of things as well. And I think as the project goes, I mean, fundamentally it’s about about the effect of music. But we’re also trying to, with that, we’re also trying to involve art more broadly. And so we can’t, you know, we might we’re thinking that we might have contemplation of a particular artwork or something and, and create the space where people could look at that and and we can consider what effects that might have on people. But it is it’s a very broad liturgy. We do have the Lord’s Prayer in it, partly to give, to give people a sense of the familiar, because as you said, we tried to do a lot…we tried to bring a lot that’s new to it, but we’d we wanted as well to have something that would also give something for people to latch on to.

Gillian: For me, it’s fascinating that no one studied this before. Given the healing potential in music and given the traditional understanding of the church as a place of health and healing, it’s, it’s really it’s really exciting research. And part of me I know you have to test out effectiveness via stories and questionnaires. I would have loved to take blood and looked at immune system response, like what actually is happening physiologically when people go to church as well? I would have loved to have added that on, but I’m not sure you would have got it through any kind of ethics.

Joe: It’s really interesting that, the, the challenge with I mean, so I guess taking blood would be the as you said, we wouldn’t get that through an ethics approval thing, but it would actually be possible to do. The thing that that people do quite often do are fMRI scans, they show certain things. But my sort of beef with those, if you like, is that often in order to create the thing you end up taking the person so far out of the context, you know, they’re lying in a in a scanner listening to something on a recording as opposed to hearing it in concert which is totally different. And the other tricky thing with all of this, is that I think we have a possibly incorrect idea, a kind of fundamental idea about how, about how music works on people. What I mean is that we tend and we’re all guilty of this, but we tend to think of music impacting on, you know, impacting somebody so that they’re listening and then it has this effect on them and we sort of measure them to assess what effect that has been. What that doesn’t allow for, though, is the person who’s listening their own investment in the music. So I could listen to a piece of music and I think I could, you know, tell myself, well, I’m just going to I’m going to have as little response to this as possible. Or I could listen to a piece of music and start dancing about the room and that they’re totally different responses. It’s all about my investment in them. And I think most of the ways that we kind of measure the effects of music, they don’t allow enough space to recognise personal investment of the person.

Gillian: That’s really interesting because I think you began to say it earlier, that people, you know, they live busy lives, but they’ll make time for yoga on a Tuesday evening. And, you know, we make choices around how we spend our time in order to keep our wellbeing up or improve our health. Kind of put your own oxygen mask on before you help others. We’ve sort of become familiar that we have to look after ourselves. Church doesn’t really figure, but if you’re a research projects, you know, you might be getting evidence to say yeah, go to yoga on a Tuesday, but come to church on a Wednesday because we’ve shown that it can reduce your stress levels. But you know, I mean that’s not exactly saying come to discover the Lord Jesus Christ and make it, but it’s maybe it’s a way in. Is it sneaky, do you think, to be doing, you know, doing this kind of mission or is this, you know, are we just broadly doing something that helps people, helps people, people who God created and loved find a bit of wellbeing in their lives?

Joe: Yeah, you’ve, you’ve rumbled us. That sort of master plan. It is definitely an element of, of mission in there. But I think that that’s that’s really important. People these days feel probably more time poor than they’ve ever felt historically before. And, and I think that this can be this can be a vehicle for calm, for wellbeing, the big challenge now is just convincing people that they that they can make that 45 minutes or something available to to be there.

Gillian: Yeah, absolutely. And how, what’s your feelings about how successful this research project is going to be? What’s your predictions?

Joe: It’s still fairly early days. We’re getting… the other thing I should mention, that we’re we’re also running, we’re also, we’re doing Compline as well. We’re doing the surveys at Compline and that’s working as our control, so that we can kind of assess one against the other. Yeah, the initial indications are,  they, they are what we’d expect them to be right.

That music does have this, does have the effect say of giving a state of greater mental calm. And so we’re kind of getting a bit of, a bit of data to sort of support what we know to be true in our, you know, anecdotally and we kind of know to be true already. The question that the, you know, sort of at the forefront of my mind at the moment really is, well, what can we you know, what can we actually do with this? Because we can, we can hopefully publish yet another, you know, another study of this that shows it and shows it specifically with regard to liturgy. But I’m still, I kind of want it to be a bit more than that. And that’s the that’s the challenge that I think that we’re going to be talking about over the next few weeks, because we’ve got you’ve got a decent time left, another seven months or so left to be running this. And that’s what I think we all to be be pondering right now.

Gillian: Yeah, there’s huge opportunities here isn’t there? We tie together the scientific, psychological benefits, music with a historic memory that the church is somewhere you go for health and healing. And we saw that during the Queen’s death recently. People flocked to the church there. There’s some memory there that you go there. We do death. We do suffering, to make you better, with the current mission of the church, which is the same mission has always been-  to grow the church but in a relevant way. I think there are huge opportunities as well. And given the high levels of trauma in our society, post-pandemic, given the high levels of uncertainty we’re all living living with at the moment, I think there’s huge potential for it to work as well. So it’s really exciting. I really love to stay in contact with this. And just to explain an acronym, you used a bit earlier ECLAS, this is a project sponsored by the Equipping Church Leaders in an Age of Science project, which is Templeton Religious…Religion Trust funded with the Durham, with Durham University as well. And it’s an amazing multi-part project giving money to congregations and churches and projects around the country who want to link together science with church mission.

And for me, this is certainly one of the more exciting ones, one of the most exciting ones that they’re funding this year. So it’d be great to follow you and see what emerges out of it. So just to become to the end of the podcast Joe, I’m going to ask the question, I’ve been asking everyone that’s been on the podcast this season. Where our theme is together, we flourish, what advice can you give us? And to anyone who’s listening today, given your experience and your wisdom around music and health and all the rest of it, how – give us a, give us a pearl of wisdom, how to flourish well today given the complexity of the world we live in.

Joe: I guess my…it’s probably not a bit of advice, but more a plea, is to try something new. What I try to think to myself when I’,m you know, when when we’re putting together these these new liturgies is, is would I go to that? If I saw you know, if somebody handed me an invitation card or I saw it online or whatever, would I, would I go? And that has made me realise that actually I am you know, I need to be more open and more receptive to trying these these new things because that’s the only way really that we that we do it. So I guess that would be my tiny, tiny little thing.

Gillian: Oh, I love that. Try something new to flourish and keep going. Keep moving forward.

Joe:  Absolutely. 

Gillian: Joe, thank you so much for your time, for sharing with us your experience, for telling us about this really important project linking together music and health and healing. I wish you God’s blessing on you as you go forward.

Joe:  Well, thank you, Gillian. Thanks so much for having me on on the podcast.

Gillian:  So that was my conversation with Joe. Thank you so much for listening. What did you think? We’d love to know what you thought of the podcast, this episode, and indeed all the episodes. The podcast is freely available to everyone, it is our gift into the world, but we pick up the conversation over in the GoHealth community. If the themes in today’s conversation resonated with you, why not share it? Share the episode with someone who you know would also enjoy our conversation. Now remember that tagline, together we flourish, we need more people to know about the healing power of music and the healing power of the faith. So please do share this episode and please do rate and subscribe to it. Perhaps sharing it on your social media channels as I said before, we want as many people as possible to experience these conversations and connect in with our vision, our vision to see flourishing in the world. Because together we flourish.