Resonating Sacralities

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In modernity, music has received an almost religious status while liturgical music has been increasingly regarded as art. This study of the unique Dutch festival Musica Sacra Maastricht demonstrates how this dual development leads to new frameworks for meaning-making. These frameworks provide traditional religions relevance in secularized contexts and emphasize the ritual qualities of music. Many visitors value the festival's focus on the sacred, which it maintains in a program of both religious and non-religious music, from Gregorian chant to art music. The framework of sacrality transgresses the strongly-embedded boundary between the religious and the secular, displaying the multiplicity of contemporary sense-making practices. The ethnographic data of this study is situated in a discussion of the sacred's theoretical potential. It draws attention to the values people attribute to music, whether or not it is religious. This study argues for a broad approach to the attribution of non-negotiable value. Such attribution results from experiences that connect everyday life with the non-ordinary reality of musical performance, evoking memories, feelings of recognition and homecoming, or the opposite feelings of discovery of the unknown.