Hearing the Mystery: Musical Diversity and the Search for Beauty

A recent study explored the music listening habits of people as they age and found that, until their mid-thirties, listeners tend to explore different types of music with preference for the contemporary. After forty, they increasingly favor styles, sounds, and tastes formed during their younger days.[1] Similarly, another study found a consistent “reminiscence bump” among adult listeners, whereby they remembered and remained emotionally invested in music from adolescence.[2] While this gradual preference for the familiar may offer a comfortable nostalgia, it also risks a kind of aesthetic calcification by ignoring the diversity inherent to beauty.

Indeed, our individual experiences of musical beauty are grounded in the diversity of creation, because music manifests a unity in variety that points ultimately to the Creator. One musical note can be lovely with its latent aesthetic quality, but two notes in harmony open new possibilities. One piece can be meaningful and have an internal soundness, but a suite of musical pieces reveals a larger structural coherence. The privileging of a particular tonal system in one culture is complimented by the pitch organization employed in another, and so on. It is in the context of difference and variety that our aesthetic sense is fully engaged. So, if these research findings are correct, they suggest that the search for musical beauty requires intentional openness as we age. Without it, listeners risk treating difference as a problem to be solved—not as a mystery to be encountered.

Difference as Problem: Historical Reductions

This tension between the familiar and the mysterious is amply evident in the history of Indonesia, a soundscape explored in the recent collection, Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago, edited by Anna Maria Busse Berger and Henry Spiller (University of California Press, 2025). The scholarship represented in this collection offers a complex picture of the history and peoples of Indonesia and their interactions with European missionaries and anthropologists.

Henrik Smeding (1833-91) was a missionary in East Java who stands out among his peers as someone favorably disposed to Javanese music. In an account to be shared back home, he wrote the following about the gamelan, a traditional Indonesian orchestra featuring tuned percussion instruments: “The gamelan sounds are, especially heard from a distance, a pleasant rain, a soft feeling caressing sound, and I am by no means surprised that the Javanese can listen to it all night long.” In contrast, his fellow missionaries more commonly dismissed this music as monotonous noise.

Smeding’s statements about Indonesian instrumental music were sometimes contradictory. In an exchange with a Javanese believer named Matthew, he encouraged the cultivation of gamelan as a private endeavor, likening it to Dutch Christians who play the “Dutch gamelan” (i.e., the piano). On the other hand, he also confirmed Matthew’s concern that encouraging gamelan playing among Javanese converts to Christianity could invite dancing and any attending temptations. Citing Romans 14, he explained that while he was not willing to say that the music or even the dancing was sinful, if it unintentionally led someone astray, he thought the practice should be curtailed.

On the topic of Javanese singing in Protestant church services, fascinating differences were heard among the songs typically sung by missionaries and other Europeans living in Indonesia, those practices cultivated historically by Indonesians, and new musical creations subsequently made. On one point, all were agreed, believers must be free to express their faith and sing in their own languages—but with what melodies, rhythms, or instrumental accompaniment?

A debate published in missionary periodicals between 1901–1902 revealed several perspectives that had circulated throughout nearly a century of Protestant work in Indonesia. Some advocated freely adapting Javanese melodies and gamelan instruments for singing congregationally, while some said to do this sort of adapting would be highhanded, a violation of Javanese culture, and not practicable due to the soloistic nature of Indonesian song. Others said that new converts must abandon wholesale their former customs, including their musical practices, and learn European ones. From available records, it appears that, among the Javanese believers led by European missionaries, opinions varied similarly along these lines.

Among Indonesian Christians who operated outside the direct guidance of missions, unique vocal styles emerged that were neither European nor strictly traditional, but a third, original creation. They drew, for instance, from the rhythmic structures of Islamic devotional practices to create an antiphonal Creed: singing line-by-line in a call-and-response that felt intuitively Indonesian. These were not problems being solved by a committee; they were mysteries being lived out by a people forging a new, localized identity.

Apart from debates concerning the adaption of Indonesian music to Christian worship, other encounters were far more disruptive. On the island of Sumatra, in the nineteenth century, both religious and colonial powers banned use of the ritual ensemble of the Toba Batak people (gondang sabangunan), to weaken local authority structures that the music reinforced and to turn people from the indigenous belief system that the music facilitated. More subtly, the tradition of sung poetry (ende) was not banned but slowly replaced. Missionaries preferred European religious choral singing and were eager to teach it—their aesthetic preference for the open vowels and multipart harmony led them to view indigenous singing styles as inferior. In time, songs from the longstanding ende tradition were no longer commonly heard, and the Toba Batak became known as prodigious singers of Lutheran chorales.

Difference as Mystery: Creativity and Agency

In the twentieth century, the Catholic Church’s approach to musical difference underwent a profound transformation, increasingly driven by the agency of Indonesian believers themselves. As early as the 1920s, and later through the work of The Center for Liturgical Music in Yogyakarta, a new generation of Indonesian Catholics sought to synthesize their faith with their heritage. This was not merely an administrative application of theology, but a radical assertion of identity: to be “100% Indonesian and 100% Catholic.”

Through collaborative workshops, Javanese composers and local participants reclaimed traditional musical grammars to produce hundreds of new religious songs. These were not mere adaptations of European hymns, but original creations—stylistically familiar and deeply resonant within the local landscape. By intentionally navigating the associations of their own music, these Indonesian artists forged a liturgical soundscape that was both sacred and authentically their own. In doing so, they moved the conversation beyond the colonial question of what Indonesian music was permissible, instead treating their own culture as a primary revelation of beauty.

Berger’s and Spiller’s book is long because this story is complex, much more than the brief summaries above might suggest. Perhaps the most important aspect in all of it is the agency of Indonesian peoples themselves who have chosen to learn new music from foreign cultures, to engage new scales, rhythms, music theory structures, and vocal styles, and to forge something original by adding their own creations. An additional fascinating aspect of the story today is the popularity of Contemporary Worship Music among Indonesian Christians and how Western pop styles have been embraced in some Indonesian churches.

A Path Forward: Beyond Primary Reflection

In his book, Man Against Mass Society, philosopher Gabriel Marcel describes how modern people generally engage with differences in the world and in other people, as problems and as mysteries. Considered as a problem, one engages diversity through abstractions and reductionistic thinking, failing to perceive a living, fully contextualized person and culture. At heart, this is objectification. If musical difference doesn’t fit a familiar tonality, it is reduced to noise or a barrier to be overcome. Marcel’s assertion is that one should instead acknowledge the mystery of difference, seeing and hearing each other as unique subjects whose lives and cultures reveal new dimensions of beauty not yet understood—what he calls intersubjectivity. Instead of trying to manage, categorize, or fix a musical other, we should remain available to the difference and even open to be changed ourselves. For Marcel, the other is a “thou” worthy of communion and love.

Looking back at the centuries of encounter in Indonesia, the mistakes made by European observers—whether well-intentioned missionaries or scientific anthropologists—were often rooted in what Marcel calls “Primary Reflection.” By approaching Indonesian music as a technical problem of tonality to be catalogued and corrected or a barrier to be overcome for the sake of liturgy, they engaged in a form of reductionism. When the Toba Batak gondang was banned or Javanese singing judged by European preferences alone, the musicians were denied their proper status as a “thou”—a worthy human subject—and reduced to objects of analysis. This approach sought to manage musical difference rather than enter into communion with it. In contrast, Catholic inculturation efforts represent a move toward Marcel’s “Secondary Reflection,” acknowledging the mystery of the Indonesian soundscape as a unique revelation of beauty, allowing for true intersubjectivity.

Applied personally, if the natural tendency in middle age is to retreat into the musical echoes of our youth, then our search for beauty requires a conscious rebellion against our own inertia and a robust set of commitments: awareness of cultural bias, curiosity and patience to study unfamiliar musical grammars, and the humility to join rather than lead. By shifting from primary reflection to secondary reflection in our thinking, from problem to mystery, we ensure that our aesthetic lives remain as expansive and vibrant as the diversity of creation. Only then can we hear the world as it truly is, a vast and varied music whose beauty no single culture—or lifetime—can exhaust.

References:

[1] Arsen Matej Golubovikj et al., “Soundtracks of Our Lives: How Age Influences Musical Preferences,” UMAP ‘25: Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (2025), https://doi.org/10.1145/3708319.3733673.

[2] James Renwick and Matthew H. Woolhouse, “The Soundtrack of Our Lives: Music Preference and Our Identity,” Psychology of Music 51, no. 4 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356221141735.