Norwich, UK
St Augustine said, “he who sings, prays twice”. But does church music also have a health benefit? A new research project is seeking to find out.
St Paul’s Knightsbridge, a Church of England church in west London, has obtained a grant from Scientists in Congregations to explore the health benefits of music in worship. The health benefits of musical participation are well documented, highlighting lower heart rates, enhanced happiness and increased communality. This will be the first time that music’s capacity in a liturgical sense to affect beneficial outcomes for listeners and participants has been studied.
St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge, in London. PICTURE: Joseph Fort
Leading the year long research project is Dr Joseph Fort, director of music at St Paul’s Knightsbridge, and parishioner Dr Tom Tull, a medical doctor and scientist.
Fort told Sight that the project “will enable us to run a series of liturgically orientated, medically informed spiritual reflections to probe the scientific basis for liturgical music’s capacity to engender a sense of spiritual, mental and corporeal well being”.
Dr Joseph Fort. PICTURE: Kaupo Kikkas
“People are ‘time-poor’, more radically ‘individualised’ than previous generations, have ‘smaller attention spans’ than previously, and seek ‘affect and experience’ and in a parish context in which a set of assumptions about gathering a congregation has eroded a more traditional sense of the parish church being for all the people of the parish.”
“We will create an innovative mid-week spiritual reflection which uses different art forms to create an informal, flexible liturgy that we hope will enable us both to reach our current congregation in new ways, and a new congregation from the local business and residential community (and from further afield in London) to whom this liturgy might speak more readily.”
The research project will be taking place from September, 2022, to June, 2023, and will focus on two services a month, of which one will be experimental, the other a standard service. An on-going evaluation will be undertaken, with people being asked to complete a survey of health and wellbeing at the start and end of each service.
Both participatory and performed music will be studied as part of the project including elements such as the musical conclusion of the gathering or service, the role music – or silence – can play in enabling cohesion and connection and the impact of verbal stimuli such as the reading of a passage of Scripture or poem.
Music has always played a major role at St Paul’s both in the Sunday masses and its many special services. The resident musicians have a repertoire spanning centuries of Western church music as well as new music. It also encourages the use of the church for music performances, such the BBC Singers who regularly record and broadcast from St Paul’s.
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Fort anticipates that the research project will affect worship at St Paul’s.
“The mid-week service is specifically designed to admit considerable flexibility, in order that we can shape things as part of the research,” he says. “We might change the styles of music performed to consider whether different musical parameters elicit different personal responses. Beyond this, we will consider whether the improved understanding might feed back into other areas of parish worship, for example Sunday Morning High Mass”.
It is also hoped that the project will have a wider impact as he indicates.
“We will disseminate our findings to the wider church, and are making plans to keep our network of churches informed and to invite them to these mid-week services.”
