I HAVE often heard people say that “Music speaks louder than words,” or “Where words fail, music speaks,” as they recall deep or memorable experiences of being affected by music. But what if music “speaks” in a louder or more profound way precisely because it doesn’t speak as words and sentences do?
Setting words to music or singing them can add a huge amount to our experience of a text, but musical pitches, harmonies, and rhythms themselves don’t have shared distinct meanings in the same way as words do. Music doesn’t work between us in the same way as spoken or written language does.
And yet the comment about music “speaking” isn’t flippant; it’s a way of pointing to something important. Music can move human beings, ushering us into very meaningful experiences that often feel deeper than verbal expression. It can therefore “mean” more to us, if we are prepared to think of meaning as not just describing or defining or clarifying something, but also in terms of connection and profound experience.
In theological terms, this meaningful connection is about relation to God, others, ourselves, and the world around us; relation that reaches beyond words and language. Perhaps you might say it’s about a way of being rather than knowing.
So music, like visual art, dance, or experiences in nature, can open us up to something different — to aesthetic experience that is often felt more than defined. This is part of being a creature in the created world.
ENGAGING with the experience of meaning beyond words is important. It reminds us, maybe even teaches us, that being human is about more than what can be clarified or quantified. We may think we know this, but we often live as if we didn’t — as if we can’t really say something has meaning unless we can explain it, or worse, prove it.
Yet something can have meaning, can shape us, even if it can’t be grasped linguistically or technically. Human reaction to music suggests that meanings that escape definition can sometimes be more profound for us than anything that can be put into words.
However you might put it, embracing the effect that music — as one example of aesthetic experience — has on us is a way of living abundantly: that is, living in a joined-up way with what’s true about ourselves and the God who gives life.
When it comes to theology and scripture, this belongs in the fundamental teaching that God transcends — is beyond — what any language about God can ever express. We can speak or write of God’s being only by analogy. Of course, God transcends any aesthetic experience that we might have, too — that’s equally important — but such experiences can often effect a greater sense of God’s transcendence and intimacy, or God’s mystery, than language can.
If scripture witnesses to God, then it witnesses beyond what can be worded or spoken — so far, so theologically obvious. It points beyond itself. Music, in evoking “meaning” beyond language, can perhaps partner with the text in drawing us more deeply into the profundity of God’s activity towards us, reminding us that the deepest meanings can also be mysterious.
Sung settings of biblical texts through which the music seems to enhance the power of the words are one example (although there is are different opinions on how permissible that is). You might also think of a gifted composer creating a sonic/musical “atmosphere” evocative of a scriptural narrative. All this is about exploring the potential of aesthetic experience, which is such a fundamental part of being a creature, in partnership with scripture.
These comments simply skim the surface. Gareth Wilson’s book Music and Monotheism (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offers a much fuller treatment of these themes, and has been key to helping me to think through such things.
YOU might reasonably ask whether it’s ironic to write about the impossibility of capturing music’s meaning in words; so I’d like to turn to the practical. Being a jazz musician as well as a priest, my own exploration of this has been through bringing together scripture, instrumental music, and improvisation.
One recent work, Psalter: Themes for peace (Arts, 28 November 2025), offers six movements of instrumental jazz based on verses about peace in the book of Psalms. The verses vary considerably in focus, and each short text is read before each movement is played. As in most jazz, we play the composed themes before improvising extensively on them — each musician taking the lead as the band explores the text through the harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic world that the composed theme sets up.
Trevor LeeDr Tim Boniface and band perform the première of Psalter at St Albans Cathedral
Each performance of this and other similar works is usually very different from the last, exploring the music and the text afresh each time. As a band, we’re building on what we have discovered together in previous performances and always stepping into new territory.
The sound-world of the suite itself is an invitation to encounter the texts through the kind of aesthetic response described above. Of course, the character of the music might give rise to particular ways of thinking about and experiencing the words, and there will be all sorts of reasons that the music was composed in a particular way, deeply affected by the text, but this can never be sealed nor used to offer a final “interpretation” of the text which can be put into language.
I’d suggest that there are experiences with the texts, and perspectives on them, which we might not reach without sometimes being ushered away from our relentless pursuit of clarity through text and language. And — in the case of the Psalms on peace — maybe the experiences and perspectives forged in the musical setting might enrich or motivate living for peace in all its forms. Sometimes aesthetic experience can help to move us towards doing the word of God.
Crucially, everyone’s response to music — from thoughts to physical responses — is different, and these performances force us to recognise that the text is experienced in many different ways, and takes on many meanings in the space where musicians and audience gather. This is a musical nudge to resist the idea that, somewhere or other, there is a complete, definitive interpretation of any particular scripture.
It’s also an opportunity to notice that we can have experiences where there is great multiplicity and variety, but where difference in meaning and interpretation is a profoundly unifying rather than fracturing experience. To put it simply, for argument’s sake: a concert where everyone “feels” something different can nevertheless be one in which they also feel deeply connected to the others alongside whom they had those very different experiences. An experience in which human beings can’t pin down one meaning does not have to fragment us. Aesthetic experiences (which are necessarily individual) can be powerfully unifying.
THERE is an opportunity here to think about the resemblance between a jazz group improvising and a community of faith reading its sacred text, and to recognise that resemblance as something that can enhance communal life rather than fragment it.
But, more importantly, performances like this give opportunities for us to practise being ushered towards spheres of meaning and expression that are beyond language — honing the ability, perhaps, to allow human communion with God to be “spoken louder than words”. Improvisers know that there is always more to be found in the music that they are playing, and exploration of the Bible can be similarly open-ended when read in a community open to God’s enlivening Spirit.
Two things to bear in mind, though: theology that leans into jazz as a metaphor or inspiration can sometimes idealise the musicians’ experiences or relations, as if making this kind of music was always shot through with experiences of spiritual depth and mutual giving and receiving. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it can feel uninspired, annoying, or it just doesn’t go as well as it did before. It’s important to retain that perspective, avoiding the idea that jazz is where it’s really at in comparison with other things.
Furthermore, sometimes musicians can give the impression that they “know the meaning” of what they play, even if nobody else can put that into words or quite grasp it. I think we jazz musicians can imply that quite often, whether intentionally or not.
Yet, despite the similarities, jazz playing isn’t actually a language; and more importantly, players aren’t necessarily party to a deeper or more spiritual meaning that only they can really “know”.
If we should welcome the idea of meaning beyond, or “louder than” what can be specified by words, then musicians must welcome the mystery of what we’re playing, and relinquish control over what we think our music might “mean”.
Theology nudges all of us to acknowledge that we might never know quite what the meaning of our own lives in God’s world is, and invites musicians to a humility about the impossibility of any player grasping precisely what the music they make “means”, especially when playing deeply personal improvisation. Without that humility, we limit for ourselves the way in which it can “speak louder than words”.
The Revd Dr Tim Boniface is Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge, and a jazz musician, composer, and educator. Psalter: Themes for peace (Audio-B, 2025) is available on CD from timboniface.co.uk, media outlets, and all streaming platforms. He will be speaking in Oxford on 10 June as part of the Jazz Spiritualities series rpc.ox.ac.uk