The Role of Music in Our Lives

The Role of Music in Our Lives

· 8 min read

claude_heartsong_FINAL_upscaled_00001_.png

Edit: Here is the song I made about this. It’s allegory style.

In 1830, music was a wholly different experience than it is today. Few people ever had the opportunity to hear a live professional choir or orchestra. There were no player pianos, phonographs, record players, AM or FM radios, 8-tracks, audio cassettes, Compact Discs, MiniDiscs, MP3 players, iPods, Apple Music, or Spotify. There was no music industry as we know it.

How did one find the right music for their current mood? What was a person supposed to do to keep the kids from arguing, or asking “Are we there yet?” from the back of the wagon?

Prior to all of the modern blessings we have in listening to music today, there was almost no difference to the average person between the questions “What’s your favorite music?”, “What kind of music do you listen to?”, and “What kind of music do you like to sing?”

It was into that world that the Lord gave a revelation through the prophet Joseph Smith, and in so doing coined a phrase that has since been written, as Paul might say, on the “fleshy tables of [my] heart” (2 Corinthians 3:3).

For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, ==the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me==, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads. Doctrine & Covenants 25:12

This revelation was given as a calling for Emma Smith, wife of the prophet Joseph, and her assignment was to compile a collection of sacred hymns. The little book she produced tells us something about the musical world it was made for. A Collection of Sacred Hymns (1835) was pocket-sized and held ninety hymn texts — words only, with not a note of music printed anywhere in it. None was needed. The Saints, like their neighbors, already carried the standard tunes in their memories. A words-only hymnal can only work in a culture where everyone holds the melodies in their bodies. It was a book made for singers, not for an audience.

And that hymnal was not just a book for Sunday. In a world without recordings, a community’s sacred songs were its popular songs. The singing school and the camp meeting were where ordinary people learned music and traded it. The songs sung over the washboard and behind the plow were, in large measure, the same songs sung at meeting. Emma’s little collection wasn’t competing with an industry for the hearts of the Saints. It was the repertoire.

Yes, we still sing hymns today, but I can’t help but turn my thoughts to the role hymns must have played in a person’s life in those times, and how dramatically that role has changed since.

Two hundred years ago, how did a person get an “earworm” — and once they had one, how did they extract it? They couldn’t search a streaming service by lyrics. They couldn’t hum a few seconds of the tune into a music-identification app. But they could hum it. They could sing the song to themselves. Today, when you come across a person singing to themselves, you might even question their sanity. But it stands to reason that the vast majority of people in the world at that time — and in all of history prior — had exactly one choice for music on demand, and that was to sing it themselves, or with their friends, or family, or community.

Scholars who study music across cultures tell us that this was simply the human condition. Ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino draws a line between participatory music, where the whole point is that everyone joins in, and presentational music, made by performers for an audience. For nearly all of human history, participatory music was the default. The person who only ever listens — the pure audience member — is the historical anomaly. We are the strange ones.

The change, when it came, came fast. In 1906, John Philip Sousa — the March King himself — published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” warning of what the phonograph would do to a singing people: “the tide of amateurism cannot but recede, until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant.” At the time he could still boast that there were “more pianos, violins, guitars, mandolins, and banjos amongst the working classes of America than in all the world.” He was not wrong to worry. American piano sales peaked around 1923 at roughly 350,000 a year; by 1929 they had collapsed to 131,000. In a single decade, the parlor piano — the family’s instrument of participation — gave way to the radio and the record player, instruments of consumption. We did not drift slowly from singing to listening. We fell.

And when we fell, we landed in somebody’s hands.

From the moment music became a product, the industry has paid to decide what you hear next. In the 1950s, it was called payola — cash slipped to disc jockeys to put certain records on the air — and it took Congressional hearings to drive it underground. Today it doesn’t need to hide. Spotify’s “Discovery Mode” lets labels accept reduced royalties in exchange for having their songs pushed harder by the recommendation algorithm — an arrangement the Recording Academy has denounced as payola in modern dress, and one now facing a class-action lawsuit that calls it exactly that. Behind the playlists, three companies — Universal, Sony, and Warner — control roughly seventy percent of recorded music. The songs of our hearts have a marketing department.

Here is the part that troubles me most: no major medium gives a family less say over what comes into their home. Movies are rated by a review board independent of the studio selling the film. Video games are rated by an industry body with the power to sanction publishers. For television, Congress went so far as to mandate filtering hardware — the V-chip — in every set sold. Music has a voluntary sticker. The “Parental Advisory” label is applied, or not applied, at the sole discretion of the label selling the record, against no agreed standard, reviewed by no one. And the streaming services built on that foundation offer little more: a single on/off toggle for “explicit content” that depends entirely on whether the label chose to tag the track. It does nothing about lewd album art and playlist covers, which display regardless of your settings. It does nothing about what the algorithm decides to set before your children — or before you. You may skip the song. You may not shape the stream.

Why does this matter more for music than for film? Because of what the Lord told Emma. The song of the heart is a prayer. A movie stays on the screen; a song gets inside. It plays in us unbidden while we work, while we drive, while we pray. Whoever writes the songs of a people’s hearts is handling something sacred — and an industry that pays for the privilege of deciding what we hear next has, in effect, applied for the job of writing our prayers.

So what is there to do about it? Complaining about the stream is, in the end, just another way of consuming it. Lately I have been trying something else: making music of my own, with the help of new AI tools like Suno.

I know the objection, because it has been put to me directly: this is nothing like the call given to Emma. But that objection reads 1830 through the categories of our own day — categories this essay has been arguing were manufactured. The line between the people who make music and the people who merely receive it is an artifact of the recording era; in Emma’s world it barely existed. She was not asked to write the words. She was not asked to compose the tunes. The music already lived in the people. Her calling was to curate it: to take what a whole singing culture held in common, select what was worthy, revise what fell short — making what was available more prayerful and more doctrinally true — and give it back to the body of the church. Of the ninety hymns in her collection, fifty-five were borrowed from the Protestant hymnody around her; thirty-five were new. In a culture where everyone sang, that curation was not a step removed from participation. It was participation.

That is the shape of what I am attempting with these new tools. I do not compose from nothing — no one in 1830 did either. Suno works the common musical language of our day much as a congregation worked its shared stock of tunes, and my part is Emma’s part: selecting, discarding, revising, bending what emerges toward prayer, and sharing what proves worthy. The point is not retreat. I have no interest in damming the stream; I want to add to it — to increase what is available, to magnify what is already good in popular music, and to make songs that help people come closer to Christ. The phonograph drew a line between maker and hearer; tools like this begin to blur it again.

One difference between her book and my songs is real, and I want to keep it in view. The 1835 hymnal was words only — inert until a body of Saints gave it breath. A recording sings whether you join it or not. The book demanded participation; the song merely invites it. Which means the last mile is still, as it has always been, ours to walk.

And I can report that in my house, the invitation is being accepted. My kids — from the three-year-old to the thirteen-year-old, and I suspect the fifteen-year-old too, though I haven’t caught her at it yet — are walking around the house singing the songs I have made. Not streaming them. Singing them.

The revelation reads differently to me now. “The song of the righteous is a prayer unto me” was given to a people who made nearly all of their own music — it sanctified what they were already doing. To us it reads less like a description and more like an invitation, maybe even a warning: the song of your heart will be written by someone. Choose the songs you allow to be written there with the same care you would choose the words of a prayer — and then do the thing our ancestors never had to be told to do. Sing them. Yourself, with your friends, your family, your community.

Sources

hymns music doctrine-and-covenants media-and-family ai
← All writing