Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us

The alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A woman stand at a mixing desk playing a small keyboard.

Lleuwen Steffan plays.

In 2012, musician Lleuwen Steffan first came across a trove of lost Welsh folk hymns preserved in the sound archive of St Fagan’s Museum. Knowing they were not in current hymn books, she undertook further research and discovered they had been excluded from earlier hymn books by the then all-male hymn book committees of their time. Instead, they had been passed on orally, and, although recorded for St Fagan’s by the historian Robin Gwyndaf, had become lost with time and secularization.

Steffan was particularly attracted to these hymns as many dealt with the dark side of the psyche including addiction and mental distress. She has said that many of these hymns, some of which date back to the eighteenth century, are “conversational and the lyrics feel so current”. She is currently taking these hymns back to where they were born through a tour of 50 chapels in Wales but this is not an exercise in nostalgia as her focus is on their contemporary resonance: “Musically, I’m not interested in recreating something from the past. That’s missing the point. Yes, the words are old but the message is always new. The music is free form.”

Although the subject matter of these hymns will have been part of the reason for their exclusion from the hymn books of their day, that same subject matter has been part of worship songs from the time of the Psalms to the present. The Psalms are the worship songs of the people of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament and are the first occasion in ancient literature where the voice of victims is heard and valued.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann in his book Spirituality of the Psalms provides an insightful and structured overview of the Psalms using three categories: orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. Orientation is the establishment of structure and order. Disorientation is a place of imbalance and nonsense, which is potentially unjust. New orientation is moving forward away from what was and toward new possibilities. As a result, the Psalms provide us with expressions of suffering and hope in the seasons of everyday life. In his book, Brueggemann explains how Psalms of negativity, cries for vengeance, and profound penitence are foundational to a life of faith, and establishes that the reality of deep loss and amazing gifts are held together in a powerful tension.

“This eerie, intriguing and enchanting music... is infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song.”

Rupert Loydell

With such a collection of worship songs as the foundation of worship in churches, and with plainsong in Western churches providing a means by which to chant the Psalms on a daily basis, it should not be surprising that later hymns, such as those being reimagined by Steffan, tap into the dark side of the psyche. The success of albums such as Officium by saxophonist Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, together with Steffan’s own collaboration with pianist Huw Warren and saxophonist Mark Lockheart on Welsh hymns Duw A Wyr (God Only Knows) which is in a similar vein, show how such music can be made relevant to contemporary audiences.

Ghostwriter’s latest album, Tremulant, inhabits similar sonic territory to Steffan’s current Tafod Arian (Silver Tongue) music. Created over several years by Mark Brend, Suzy Mangion, Andrew Rumsey and Michael Weston King, this album has also been borne out of a shared love of antique evangelical hymns and spiritual songs. Using English, Welsh, Scottish and American source material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quartet pieced together their reconstructed hymnal through remote collaboration – creating an album that sounds both ancient and modern.

In his review of Tremulant, Rupert Loydell says it is “a strange ambient gospel album, where what used to be called spirituals and hymns are subverted by echo, wheezing organ and spacious musical interludes, which recontextualise, reimagine, stretch and mutate the very idea of song”. This, he says, “is eerie, intriguing and enchanting music” with “echoes of classic Nico (the cold beauty of Desertshore)”. It's ”declamatory poetry, alt-folk, noise and gentle discord” combined with “calm vocals” is “infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song”. As such, it's not what you’ll hear the local worship band playing, more’s the pity!

“Something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.”

Lleuwen Steffan

Like buses, other revisiting’s and reimagining’s of old hymns and gospel songs are also coming along together. Hymn Time In The Land Of Abandon by Over the Rhine is “Music that we grew up singing, music as present in our formative years as the air we breathed”. Their recordings of hymns have been described as “spare, sweet and subtle renderings that transform the familiar into something fresh and new”.

The musical reimaging involved in Over the Rhine’s reinterpretations of hymns takes them into the space that Brueggemann defines as new orientation, while the sounds and, in some cases, content of the hymns chosen by Steffan and Ghostwriter are more in the realm of his disorientation category. The music making of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter and Over the Rhine takes us to places not commonly accessed by the music used in many church services. As is indicated by the story of hymn book committees omitting hymns that tap into the dark side of the psyche, much of the music used in church services can be located firmly in either the orientation or, sometimes, the new orientation categories.

Given that the arc of Christ’s life, death and resurrection takes us on a similar journey to that which Brueggemann sees occurring in the Book of Psalms, when our music and liturgy fail to go on a similar journey, we are only encountering part of the meaning and message of faith. The recent music of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter, and Over the Rhine is therefore profoundly helpful in beginning to redress that loss of balance in worship by taking us back to a fuller appreciation for the original songbook of the faithful, the Book of Psalms.

In speaking about why she has been drawn again and again to church music, Steffan described her teenage experience of drinking with her “mates in Bangor on the Saturday night” then getting “the last bus back home” and rolling “out of bed the following day to go to Sunday School”. She concluded: “That’s a strange paradox but, you see, something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.” It may well be that that something is the arc of orientation, disorientation and new orientation we encounter and experience in the Psalms.

Article

Culture

Politics

Psychology

29 August 2024

5 min read

To troll or be trolled?

Laughing at others conceals a terror of being laughed at ourselves.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

Donald Trump gestures with his hands while someone holds a mic in front of him,

Politics and satire belong together, they deserve each other. Humour has been part of politics ever since the first jester dared jingle a bell in the face of a king. Those who get their kicks from bursting the bubbles of the pompous are drawn to the corridors of power like moths to a flame. But in recent weeks laughter has hit the headlines again. A couple of weeks ago, when Democratic presidential candidate Kamela Harris chose her running mate Tim Walz, the only thing most of us knew about him was that he was the one who had called Trump ‘weird’. A few minutes of furious googling later we knew much more, but the suspicion lingered that he had been picked for having finally answered the question that had plagued the Democrats for nearly a decade: how do you deal with Donald Trump?

As a psychologist who works with leaders I have been asked this question numerous times. How do you go up against someone with the magnificent trolling skills of Trump? Is it possible to win against a person so adept at humiliating those who oppose him? And I think Walz is on to something. He hasn’t called Trump a threat to democracy or labelled his supporters a basket of deplorables. No. He has called Trump weird, and his supporters good dinner guests. Why is Trump weird? Because, says Walz, he has never seen him laugh.

Trump is not the only one accused of being humourless. Our own former Prime Minister, Liz Truss, was equally unamused at becoming the butt of the joke, when a banner reading ‘I Crashed the Economy’ next to a googly eyed lettuce quietly descended behind her during an onstage interview. She left the stage abruptly and was quick to respond on X that what had happened was not funny. Most people thought it was funny and that she – like Trump – was slightly weird not to laugh it off, at least a little bit. As the political prankster Noël Godin once said: there is no better way to judge a person’s character than by how they behave when hit by a custard pie.

We spend our lives subtly and unconsciously evading the slightest whiff of humiliation.

There is however a deep psychology behind all this hilarity, or lack of it. For decades now psychologists have conducted numerous studies on the phenomenon of Gelotophobia. Not the fear of ice-cream, as one might initially think. Gelotophobes you’ll be pleased to know are perfectly capable of holding it together in the presence of a knickerbocker glory. What they fear is being laughed at, and as always this sounds infinitely more sophisticated translated into Greek (gelos/laughter, phobos/fear). Much of the gelotophobia literature is a heartbreaking tale of young people crippled by the fear that others will laugh at their weight, or their acne, or target them for bullying. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but mocking words it seems can leave us socially terrified for the remainder of our adult life. In its most debilitating forms gelotophobia is a cause for clinical intervention.

But the study of gelotophobia goes further than treating the clinically distressed. Lurking among the samples and statistics is a wisdom that helps us understand why Trump and Truss are the people they are, and more importantly teaches us something about ourselves. Because most of us in some mild sub-clinical way are gelotophobes. We spend our lives subtly and unconsciously evading the slightest whiff of humiliation. Margaret Atwood was no doubt right to say that men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them. But many people would rather die than be laughed at.

Could it be that our love of laughing at others conceals a terror of being laughed at ourselves?

One of the primary findings about gelotophobia, is that those who are most scared of being laughed at are also scared to laugh. To say of Trump or Truss that they lack humour is equally to say that the last thing on earth they want is to be the object of laughter. Most gelotophobes were once victimised, ostracised or bullied, and humour was the chief instrument of their humiliation. They were forged by the cruel conditioning of mockery. As a result, they view laughter-eliciting situations negatively. In facial coding studies they show less joy and more contempt when presented with smiling joyful people. The inner freedom to join others in laughter has been quashed by the suspicion that the laughter of others is a threat. Some compensate for this by making sure they always have the upper-hand, always the troll never the trolled. Which speaks to another finding, more applicable to Trump than to Truss, that derisive humour is the way narcissists conceal their vulnerability. Behind every grandiose expression of superiority, lies a shame and inferiority that can be defended by attacking others.

Gelotophobia ultimately is a subtype of our fear of being disliked, and if the bestseller lists are anything to go by, this is clearly a pressing concern for many people. Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishmi brought the wisdom of Japan to the question in The Courage to be Disliked, and Ryan Holiday did the same from a Stoic perspective in Courage is Calling. How to live in a world that shapes us through the threat of ridicule has been pondered for thousands of years. It even turns up in the New Testament of the Bible. When the disciples of Jesus stepped out to deliver their first public discourses, they were accused of being drunk, stupid and presumptuous. The word used to describe them in the historical sources is parrēsia, usually translated bold, but perhaps more accurately rendered the freedom to say anything (pas- all; rheō- to utter). For them freedom of speech was not a societal given but a virtue they enacted in spite of their society.

In the ancient world the term parrēsia was more often used to describe the counter-cultural courage of the Stoic philosophers. But the disciples were not Stoics. They weren’t schooled in the rigours of Greek philosophy, but rather apprenticed to the Hebrew prophetic tradition. A tradition which equally appreciated the inevitable opprobrium befalling those who presume to critique and rejuvenate a stale culture. They were simply following the teaching of the master who pointed to ridicule, scorn and gossip not as PR disasters to be managed, but as prophetic honours to be celebrated. Or, as Marty Babcock once claimed, ‘Jesus promised his disciples only three things: they would be absurdly happy, entirely fearless, and always in trouble.’

We should be cautious then laughing too much at the embarrassments that befall our political class, and perhaps more attentive to what our schadenfreude might point to within us. Could it be that our love of laughing at others conceals a terror of being laughed at ourselves? Even worse, what if vindictively celebrating their misfortunes is itself a symptom of the inner helplessness, inertia and unfreedom we claim to oppose? Or, to give the same question a more positive inflection: what would we be doing or saying differently if we were genuinely and entirely free of the fear of being ridiculed?

Blessed are those who do not fear the laughter of others for they may change the world.