Tunes for Painted Glass?

The ending of my last Painted Caves page in January 2001, whilst it was meant as a throwaway joke, turned out to be remarkably prescient, because I was entertaining two ladies, my wife and a good friend of ours, when the germ of this next section took root. We were in Mechelen, and if you've read the saga of trying to get there, you'll know that it was not without trauma. However, we'd seen the procession, standing in the sun for a couple of hours, then went into the church for the thanksgiving service (I'd checked in advance by email that this was okay). I have a reasonable amount of training in plainchant and, despite the service being in Flemish, after seeing the service-sheet I recognised the form and could join in with the alleluia and amens, which don't need translation.The darkened church, incense, 110Hz resonances and candlelight hit me like the jolt of a first cup of very good coffee in the morning or a glass of wine on an empty stomach (I can vouch for the similarity with the latter because that's what we did after the end of the service).

The effect was remarkably similar to the vaious descriptions of what might have happened with the flute and drums in the cave. I didn't experience the sort of lfying effects described as part of shamanistic journeying, nor did I see choirs of angels singing to me, but it felt as if I might have done. The experience was fresh in my mind when we visited Diest the next day, and I stood in the Begijnhofskerk, now a cultural centre, listening to a CD playing Arabic music: the resonances were familiar. It's quite possible that both churches were deliberately constructed to give this effect, because by the time they were built, acoustics was well enough understood for Wren to construct the 'whispering gallery' in St Paul's, London.

There's a class of musical tricks such as throwing in an unexpected instrument, or breaking a previously established musical rule, that work even if one has training and even if one knows the trick being played. Like it or loathe it, it's hard to ignore the bagpipes in Paul MCartney's 'Mull of Kintyre'. There are plenty of other popular examples, but my favurite is MIke Batt's 'Bright Eyes'. It's almost shameless in the way it's constructed, but the gold disc was proudly displayed in the foyer of the Soho office until it closed. I use some of these tricks in my own compositions, but that's another story. Given work by Newberg and d'Aquili, Persinger and Todd Murphy to name but a few, it seemed obvious that it would be possible to deliberately generate the effect that the Hanswijk acoustics had on me, but I did no more about it until I stumbled over 'Art and the Brain'.

We missed the first two of these, only finding out about the third event by accident, but in time to book for and attend the Friday-Sunday sessions of 'Religion, Art and the Brain', which featured up-to-date presentations on neuroscience, archaeology and sacred space sharing a stage with various religious and secular performances. The key here is that the science was up-to-date: advances in the areas of cognition and perception are coming thick and fast and many lay articles in the popular press seem to be written by people who aren't keeping abreast of the material. If 'Religion, Art and the Brain' was good, the one-day 'Language, Poetry and the Brain' (Autumn 2005) was, for me at least, even more interesting. Alongside evidence from brain scans that showed me how my brain works when I'm following the fingers of another musician who I can't hear because of the background noise level, was a presentation by Steven Mithen that made a convincing case for the parallel evolution of language and music from a single original proto-language. I was hooked, and started enthusiastically posting back to my friends once again.