Music for the Seasons
Eight playlists for the seasons of solar & liturgical time
Over the past few years, I’ve been deepening into my relationship with the seasonal changes I experience as a creature of the earth living in the northern hemisphere. I have also spent a great deal of time researching the history of how the seasonal cycles of solar time connect with the liturgical cycles of my own Christian faith tradition. Understanding the pre-modern experience of time prior to Western capitalism and industrialization has been incredibly illuminating and also spiritually grounding. Many things about Christian theology, liturgical practice, and the Bible begin to make a whole lot more sense when understood from the perspective of our intended creaturely closeness with the rest of the natural world.
While I did not grow up in a particularly religious home, I have always had a bit of an obsession with time, ritual, and the ordering of seasons. My cognitive inheritance of AuDHD manifested at a young age in the paradoxical tension between my inability to grasp the normative structures of a daily routine, and my deep inner longing for the experience of time anchored in form. By the age of 6 or 7, I had already earned the moniker “keeper of the traditions” in my family, for my self-appointed role of tending to the liturgies of our household, remembering (and in many cases inventing) the order of events for our seasonal family get-togethers.
This attentiveness to the intersections of time, form, and meaning also translated early on into a deep affinity for music. My Boomer parents were both avid music lovers who raised me properly on the pop, rock, folk, and soul soundtracks of the 60s and 70s. But by the 1980s, my dad’s musical interests had veered off into ambient music via the prog rock-minimalism-Brian Eno pipeline. Over the course of my childhood, he amassed a fairly large collection of Windham Hill, medieval revival, Celtic, “world music,” and film score cassettes, along with some obscure local bluegrass, old time, and hammer dulcimer recordings he picked up during his frequent drives through the NC mountains.
I’ve developed a taste for many different styles of music throughout my life as a musician and songwriter, but I’ve always returned to instrumental soundscape music as a kind of somatic therapy. The older I get, the more I’m comforted by music’s ability to capture the nuances, textures, timbres, and rhythms of embodied existence in space and time. As Don Saliers writes,
“Because we live through time, music is perhaps our most natural medium for coming to terms with time, and attending to the transcendent elements in making sense of our temporality. Our lives, like music, have pitch, tempo, tone, release, dissonance, harmonic convergence, as we move through times of grief, delight, hope, anger, and joy… The order of sound is comprehended as we remember and re-configure the previously heard in light of the yet-to-be-heard… Music is intimately related to the narrative quality of human experience, presenting our temporality in symbolic form, but always bodily perceived through the senses.”1
For many years, I have kept a playlist for the Fall, which I put on whenever I notice the leaves starting to change. Perhaps my oldest playlist is the one I still put on at the end of every November, which gently heralds my favorite liturgical season of Advent. But it wasn’t until last year that I began expanding my playlist collection to include other seasons in solar and liturgical time as well.
This year, I plan to debut my collection of 8 “Annum” playlists, releasing each one as the year unfolds, along with reflections on the time of year and the layers of meaning I’ve been able to glean from my own musical and liturgical journey.
Each playlist is about 2 hours long, and is curated to be listened to in order. The songs attempt to capture something of the movement and mood of each seasonal arc, both in terms of what is happening in the natural environment (the changes in the light, the temperature and quality of the air, the activity of plants and animals) but also the intersections with liturgical time, and some layers from the secular calendar as well.
Calendar of Seasonal Playlists:
I. Epiphany (January 7-31)
II. Imbolc (Feb 1 - Mar 21)
III. Bloom (Mar 22 - Apr 30)
IV. Nova (May 1 - Jun 21)
V. Midsummer (Jun 22 - Aug 30)
VI. Serotinal (Sept 1 - Oct 15)
VII. Autumnal (Oct 15 - Nov 26)
VIII. Hibernal (Nov 26 - January 6)
Because the purpose of these playlists is to capture a sense of what is going on in the natural world, the dates are obviously approximations. Depending on your latitude and local climate, “Bloom” might start much later than March 22 for you. The leaves may change in your region much earlier or later than Oct 15th. Those living in the southern hemisphere or in the tropics will obviously have a different calendar orientation altogether. But the idea is to listen to whatever playlist seems to match best with whatever season you find yourself in… or whatever you season you find yourself longing for!
I’ll be working on a similar set of playlists for the liturgical seasons of the church year as well, which I will include along the way.
Happy listening!
Jump to Playlist:
Don Saliers, Music and Theology (Nashville: Abington Press, 2007), 7.