Spirituality Studies 9-2 Fall 2023 33 Carmen Ramírez-Hurtado, Victoria Cavia-Naya the texts prayed – or of affective prayer, to move the feelings more towards a certain object than towards contemplation. And in too many occasions, the role of religions ends here: in a set of practices, rules, and dogmas that are far from contemplation. The original contribution to knowledge intended here is precisely that of introducing the sung voice – and not just any kind of music, nor just any type of singing – as a vehicle for contemplative prayer, understood as the stillness of mind, inner silence, personal and holistic perception, and direct, non-discursive knowledge. In the world of contemplative mindfulness (the comprehensive version), it may be referred to as meditation. Since we intend to reach a broad audience from various traditions, we will use these words (meditation and contemplative prayer) almost synonymously. The methodology for addressing our question is to explore the music-related practices that can lead to and establish singing as a tool for contemplation, that is, silence and deep listening. We underline how they can lead to embodied self-awareness, i.e., to a conception of our lives that focuses on the personal awareness of being in the here and now and, through these tools, acquires its relational dimension with the absolute, hence constituting the most complete vision possible. This is the subject of Section 3. Next, we discover that there are philosophical and historical-paleontological roots that can underpin the practice of contemplative singing. By delving deeper into the traditions of these areas, we find the foundations that relate the voice to the spiritual path. This is presented in Section 4, which is subdivided into each of the fields in which we have traced our findings. We also find that, in the Western tradition, the Gregorian chant is an interesting source with truly spiritual roots, but that its practice within the framework of the Catholic church may not always lead to true spiritual growth, but rather to the reinforcement of a specific religiosity, sometimes identitarily closed or, at best, conducive to moving the emotions rather than the stillness of the soul. For this reason, and based on this study, we also propose as a result some concrete practices in how the voice could be used for contemplative education: an experimental proposal which we have called, in Section 5, deconstructed Gregorian chant, that can serve as a workshop-laboratory for its development at practically all formative levels. To round off this point, we can add that perhaps the place for setting the foundations of contemplation is precisely this music-philosophical vision, in which the various traditions certainly converge and, equally, are underpinned by some kind of spirituality. There are conceptual and ritual differences, when spirituality is concretized in religions, but it is not the rationality of these explanations that is of interest, but the common experience of a unified vision: a “trans-traditional engagement” (Sarath 2015, 314) that can be approached from music as understood within this tradition of thought – Western, in our case – and from specific practices, since it is also true that music constitutes a privileged place for this spiritual encounter (Boyce-Tillman 2007, 1410).
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