Has a piece of choral music fixed my health anxiety?!

Let me tell you about singing, shrooms and this great Eric Whitacre piece you should all listen to

I really like choral music, which is fortunate because I sing in a choir. Not all choral music is to my taste, but when it is… well. There is no other style of music that I am capable of finding relaxing and uplifting and other-worldly all at once. A lot of it is about God, and you sort of have to look past that if you’re singing or listening to it as a non-religious person, but also, props to religion for figuring out how much a tuneful choir with some nice reverb can assist it in its stated aims. Really good choral music is like a high-speed pipeline to a more reverent frame of mind. If I were a godly soul, it would definitely make me more godly.

This brings me to a big thing I did recently that seems to have made me into slightly more of a godly soul than I was before. I took drugs! Specifically magic mushrooms. It was my first experience with any drug besides marijuana (yes, I am a square, what of it) and it was sort of like a religious experience and therapy all rolled into one. I’ll spare you the details and skip straight to the most relevant part, which is also the wackiest part, which is the part where I became a blubbering cloud of non-linguistic euphoria prostrating myself before Bach’s Mass in B Minor.

I mean this literally! I was listening to a playlist specially designed by psilocybin* researchers at Johns Hopkins University to help study participants get deeper into their trips, and it was playing from Spotify on the TV. When it got to the Mass in B Minor, I found myself bowing towards the TV with my hands clasped, sobbing. I don’t know what I was thinking, because I wasn’t thinking in the usual sense. I definitely was not thinking about my dignity, even though I’d completely lost all trace of it, because I was no longer in contact with the behaviour-policing part of my brain and I didn’t really have a concept of what dignity was. I was concerned with much bigger things, like *touching the divine*, which is a phrase I have to put in asterisks because the behaviour-policing part of my brain is back in action and it doesn’t like me saying earnest quasi-religious things. But that is literally what I felt. The thing was that from the depths — or rather heights — of my trip, I knew the divinity in question was not God or the cosmos or any kind of higher power, per se. It was the music itself.

Thanks to mushrooms and the demigod Johann Sebastian Bach, I now have a sense of what it might be like to be deeply religious. Those American evangelical Christians swaying and crying while someone yells into a microphone about Jesus? I sort of get it now. I’ve been to that place too, it’s just that a pastor yelling about Jesus isn’t ever going to be what takes me there. What is going to take me there, though, besides mushrooms? I would like to have something approaching that experience again and obviously I can’t just be tripping all the time. I wondered this during the trip too, once I was done prostrating and had moved onto giggling and weeping, and it seemed glaringly obvious that my route back to that place would be through music. Even though I could barely speak, I managed to voice what felt like a very important piece of information, which was, ‘I need to have singing lessons’.

So now I am actively looking for a singing teacher. Do you know any? Send them my way! And maybe don’t let on that I’m looking for someone to guide me to a place of divine reverence outside of regular cognition, in case that scares them off? To be clear, I’m not expecting singing lessons to give me a psychedelic trip. It’s just that if there is a spectrum of experience in this life with mystical psychedelic trips at one end and, say, filling in spreadsheets at the other, I’d like more of my experiences to be weighted towards the psychedelic end.

In the meantime, pending singing lessons, I have been listening to even more choral music, mostly this chamber choir called VOCES8 who are just really, really good. I like to imagine that I could one day sing like them, which — haha! — is not true. Recently I listened to their latest album, most of which is a multi-movement piece by Eric Whitacre called The Sacred Veil. I was listening to it while I worked, thinking what a nice piece it was. What I didn’t realise was that it is about one of my avoid-at-all-costs bogeyman topics, until it occurred to me that the choir had been singing the word ‘metastasis’ over and over again for quite a while. And that, leading up to this, they had been singing ‘I’m afraid we’ve found something’. Could I be listening to a piece of choral music about cancer??? I’m a terrible hypochondriac and make a point of avoiding artistic depictions of disease, so I turned it off.

But I found myself wondering about it. I looked it up, and it turns out that yes, The Sacred Veil is a setting of words by the poet Charles Anthony Silvestri about his wife, Julie, who died of ovarian cancer in 2005 at the age of 36, leaving two young children. Let me tell you, if this was a film, I would not watch it. If it was a book, I would not read it. But as a piece of choral music I felt strangely drawn to it, and when I listened to it again in full knowledge of what it was about, I found it surprisingly untriggering. Even though it contains terrifying words like ‘mucinous cystic adenocarcinoma’ and ‘paraaortic lymphadenectomy’, it didn’t give me the usual creeping sense of unease that results in me diagnosing myself with cancer shortly thereafter. It’s still incredibly sad, but not in a scary way — more in a big, awesome, transcendent sort of way.

I felt like I wanted to pay it some proper attention, so on one of the unseasonably warm weekends we had earlier this month I took a blanket to the park and listened to it from beginning to end. It opens with these words:

Whenever there is birth or death,

The sacred veil between the worlds grows thin and opens slightly up

Just long enough for Love to slip

Silent, either in or out of this, our fragile and fleeting world.

I lay on my back on the blanket with angelic voices and crunchy-to-redemptive chord progressions filling my ears, watching the clouds and the birds and the planes and feeling just incredibly alive. Isn’t it funny that I was made to feel so alive by a piece of music not only about death, but about my most feared way of dying? The sky above me was blue but there was a translucent haze of cloud over part of it, which actually looked a bit like a sacred veil between the worlds growing thin, if you were of that inclination. It wasn’t a trip or a religious experience, but it gave me tingles from head to toe.

---

*the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.

PS. For more about magic mushrooms/psilocybin and their myriad exciting and interesting applications I recommend the Netflix documentaries Fantastic Fungi and How to Change Your Mind.