In the textbook we use at MIT to teach Introduction to Western Music (21M.011), there are several "Beyond Europe" pockets, intended to broaden the students' horizons, and also to give those from other cultures some useful reference points for understanding the new material. The first of these pockets, keyed to the discussion of Medieval chant, concerns sacred chant in Islam. Part of the discussion reads as follows:

"The repertory of Gregorian chants developed in the Christian Church of the Middle Ages ... is only one of many traditions of monophonic religious chant... Another highly elaborate tradition of chant is from Islam, practiced today by about a fifth of the world's population, and the dominant religion in some fifty nations. Across all of Islam, the revelations of the prophet Muhammad gathered in the Qur'an (or Koran) are chanted or sung in Arabic. Muhammad himself is said to have enjoyed this melodic recitation...

"Qur'anic recitation ... aims, above all else, to convey the Qur'anic text in a clearly comprehensible manner. Unlike plain chant, it has been passed along in oral tradition down to the present day. It has resisted the written notation that came to be a part of the Gregorian tradition already in the Middle Ages. To this day, great Islamic chanters sing the whole Qur'an from memory. (Source: Listen, Brief Fourth Edition, by Joseph Kerman and Gary Tomlinson, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000,p. 60.)

Listening to such music reveals to us the central position of music in all the world's great religions, for purposes of worship and of elevation of sacred texts to more than mere words - chanting the texts within a sacred place of worship, with a crowd of worshippers listening and contemplating their meaning, invests the words with transformative spiritual power, and helps to remove both the listener from the everyday. The remarkable thing is that such chants have always been central to worship in the rites of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The music transcends the language barriers that divide these religions - barriers that make us forget how very similar are the sacred texts and moral codes that underlie each of the three religions.

In the religiously diverse culture of the United States, whose early colonists and founders were mainly Protestants, chants were not a key musical practice, but hymns certainly were, and they remain crucial to our cultural identity, as can be heard in such songs as "America" and above all, "God Bless America." The latter has been sung so often over the last few days, it is important to keep in what it means to many of the older generation of Americans who are singing it: for them it was the anthem during the years of World War II. It had been composed by Irving Berlin originally for use in a wartime review during World War I, but he withheld it at that time and reworked it in 1938. He then had the good fortune to give it to the wonderful contralto Kate Smith to sing it publicly for the first time during a CBS radio broadcast on Armistice Day, November 11, 1938. Quickly the song became enormously popular across the nation, despite almost no "plugging" or promotional acitivity on Berlin's part. This was an example of the power of radio broadcasting to bring a song to the public's attention - and of the power of one man to tap into the "national psyche" at a time of deep uncertainty.

Keep in mind that at the time Berlin thought of "God Bless America" as a "peace song," not as a wartime anthem; and 63 years later we can still feel a bond when we hear and sing it, and be particularly moved by the line "through the night with the light from above." But the light is that of peace, not war, and of a longing for continued blessing and tranquility, not for vengeance. I hope that as people continue to sing this anthem in the days to come, they will keep in mind what the spirit of the words and music really mean.

(For more about the song, see Lawrence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, 1990 -especially pp. 368-70, upon which I have drawn for some of the factual details above.)

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