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There can be no doubt that we live in a “connected” world, that isolation is neither good nor sustainable, and that music education continues to counter that trend at the peril of its viability. We need to break through the assumptions of self-containment and self-sufficiency to other disciplines1 that can illuminate what music educators are called upon to accomplish. A thorough treatment of this issue is a good idea.

Before we get too far afield in disciplines beyond musicology, however, we have some work to do closer to home—on how we employ text-based musicology (encompassing, basically, music analysis and history) to parse the musical meanings of materials we intend students to learn. Most music teacher education programs are attached in various ways to the assumption that the conservatory model of performance study and a quasi-linguistic analytical model of music analysis are sufficient to the task of gaining access to musical meanings. Space does not permit me to go beyond that problem in this essay. However, I shall pull in ideas from disciplines outside musicology to support this view.

The purpose of this essay is to provide arguments about how we think about music in support of the notion that music educators should seek connections outside their traditional boundaries, of why the dominant model of study and research in music and music education should change, and of why music teachers and musicians need to be less insular in their relations with other disciplines. We can help students grasp music’s true power and significance if we break through the theoretical boundaries that encompass the established notions of traditional musicology—the notions that music is autonomous and purely musical. The practicalities of breaking out, however, require intellectual courage and a critical approach.

In order to provide these arguments, it is important to do two things. One is to examine the most powerful contemporary reason that lies behind the dominant model of study and research in music and music education. In other words, in countering its limitations, it is important to understand the most important motivation for the model’s intellectual and pragmatic narrowness. The second is to explain the character of music’s connection to other cultural and social phenomena, something that is overlooked (or rejected) by the dominant model in music, but revealed by other disciplines. For, without this understanding, it will in the end be unclear as to why music educators need to broaden their range of professional and general knowledge in order to be more effective as teachers.

This second purpose is important because of the way in which music communicates and evokes in people the kind of experiences that do appear to be quite distinctive, unlike that of any other form of human communication and expression; on the surface, then, stressing its connections to other forms of experience appears to be a risk to music’s particular character and the kinds of experiences to which it gives rise. The degree to which this is the case is certainly open to debate. However, it seems reasonable to assert that, at least in Western cultures, the feature of music that makes it recognizable and accepted as music is the use of sound in a purely structural and nondenotative and nonreferential manner. While much music, and particularly popular music, contains words in the form of lyrics or libretti that invoke the external world of objects, people, ideas, and concepts, it is the defining, nonlinguistic use of sound in music—structural, nondenotative and nonreferential—that distinguishes music from language. By contrast, the use of sound in language is based upon reference outside it to objects, people, ideas, and concepts, and it is this that characterizes language as language in the minds of people and that distinguishes it from music. Add to this that many other forms of human communication and expression seem to be based on a denotative and referential capacity—as in forms of visual representation—and the feeling that music is something apart from other forms of human communication and expression becomes understandable.

The line that distinguishes music from other forms of human communication and expression cannot, of course, be quite so easily drawn. Abstract art is nondenotative and nonreferential in its appeal and can—in a certain sense—be thought of as purely structural. Further, there are forms of literature that, while using words, very seriously weaken or eradicate an appeal to the denotative and referential and play, through words, on the more musical aspects of sound as sound. In this context, it is worth recalling the nineteenth-century French poet Paul Verlaine’s credo of “la musique avant toute chose” (in poetry, “music before everything”). If music is truly distinctive, then, this distinctiveness lies in a combination of the sonic, the nondenotative, and the nonreferential, where words, if used, are declaimed in a manner that far transcends their normal articulation in language and that serves an intrinsically musical logic.

It is because the nondenotative and the nonreferential do not seem to figure in other forms of human communication and expression, or figure in a less fundamental way than they do in music, that music’s distinctive character has been quite jealously guarded by musicologists and music aestheticians. To admit that music has some connection to other forms of experience—forms of experience, it is tacitly assumed, in which the nondenotative and nonreferential are not fundamental or do not figure—is, for them, to risk draining music of its constitutive and defining characteristics, in short, of its “essence.”

This has in the past led to the argument that the meaning of music lies exclusively within its sonic structures. This argument is tautological: music is its own meaning. Leonard B. Meyer took issue with it in his groundbreaking book, Emotion and Meaning in Music, in criticizing the position of those he characterized as “absolutists”:

The absolutists have contended that the meaning of music lies specifically, and some would assert exclusively, in the musical processes themselves. For them, musical meaning is non-designative. But in what sense these processes are meaningful… they have been unable to state with either clarity or precision… This failure has led some critics to assert that musical meaning is a thing apart, different is some unexplained way from all other kinds of meaning. This is an evasion of the real issue. (Meyer 1956, 33)

The problem with this “absolutist” position is that of confusing a symbol that has no referent in the world of objects, people, ideas, and concepts with one that is a closed system. Music is not a closed system; however, it is capable of invoking the world outside it without referring to objects, people, ideas, and concepts. It is this distinction that facilitated the influential theories of Meyer and Suzanne Langer on the issue of musical meaning. Meyer located musical significance in “psychological constants” (1973, 14), while Langer located this significance in “psychological laws of ‘rightness’” (Langer 1942, 240). Put simply, music was taken to appeal autonomously and directly to the autonomous awareness of the individual. This appeal was assumed to be purely structural in character. That is, since all music was taken to originate in the minds of people, and since all human minds were assumed to possess similar psychological characteristics, it was concluded that there existed a certain conformity of structure between all music and all minds.

Because music was taken to appeal autonomously, directly, and in a purely structural manner to the autonomous awareness of the individual, it was once more felt that this quite distinctive form of human experience should be kept safe from intruding external and situated elements that might drain it off its supposedly abstract and universal “essence.” One such element was explication through language, whose basic appeal was to the world of objects, people, ideas, and concepts. The other was the idea that music was in some meaningful way related to this very same external world. This sense of keeping the “musical experience” safe from contamination through explicit examination became apparent early in the development of musicology following World War II, and is evidenced in the writings of leading musicologists of the time. In 1962, Arthur Mendel observed that “music-historians are interested in musical works… as objects of delight” (Mendel 1962, 4). He concluded, however, that although the “direct relation of the music-historian to the work is necessary, it is certainly not sufficient for explanation.” It must remain, he said, “unanalyzable” (16). In other words, although a love and appreciation of the direct and powerful experiences that music can evoke should be the starting point for scholarly work on music, they should not themselves constitute the object of study for musicologists. Claude Palisca was of the same opinion in arguing that music aesthetics was not a legitimate area of inquiry for scholars of music. “We cannot forget,” he argued, “that musical aesthetics is not musical scholarship; it is musical experience and musical theory converging upon a philosophical problem. Aesthetics does not rest upon documentary or similar evidence, but on philosophical and psychological principles tested by experience” (Palisca 1963, 110).

No scholar of music would argue that “the musical experience” should not be the starting point for musical scholarship. Indeed, David Gramit has more recently observed that “the musical experience” attracts “statements of allegiance that cut across the boundaries of otherwise conflicting musicological camps” (Gramit 2000, 38). However, the overwhelming trend within musicology since the writings of Mendel and Palisca has been to keep the “musical experience” off limits as an object of inquiry. This trend was the subject of some perceptive remarks by the feminist musicologist Susan McClary toward the end of the twentieth century. McClary confesses, “I was drawn to music because it is the most compelling cultural form I know.” She entered musicology because she “believed that it would be dedicated (at least in part) to explaining how music manages to create such effects.” Musicology granted her access “to an astonishing cultural legacy: musical repertoires from all of history and the entire globe, repertoires of extraordinary beauty, power, and formal sophistication.” Yet McClary soon discovered:

Musicology fastidiously declares issues of musical signification to be off-limits to those engaged in legitimate scholarship. It has seized disciplinary control over the study of music and has prohibited the asking of even the most fundamental questions concerning meaning. Something terribly important is being hidden away by the profession, and I have always wanted to know why. (McClary 1991, 4)

An answer to this question becomes apparent in considering the character of a musicology different to that encountered by McClary. Gramit argues that this kind of musicology, a critical musicology, “neither denies the relevance of intense involvement with music nor presumes it as a foundational experience.” Precisely because this experience is real, continues Gramit, “it is… socially constructed, an object of inquiry rather than a postulate.” As a consequence, says Gramit, a critical musicology “begins with an acknowledgment that… every encounter with music is historical through and through.” Both the experience and the music on which it is based are social constructs and there cannot, as a consequence, be any relationship with music that is “pure” or unmediated by social processes. Therefore, every encounter with music is

… contingent on culturally constructed concepts, values, and expectations that are bound up not only with an individual’s society, but also with an individual’s place within society, as determined by economic structures, gender roles, class values, and host of other categories, of which we are aware to a greater or lesser degree. In this sense, regardless of the repertoire under consideration, there is no direct, unmediated contact with a musical object, for neither listening subject nor heard object are so purely and unproblematically constituted. A critical musicology thus both recognizes the intense experience we call aesthetic and explores its historical contingency, a double perspective of involvement and detachment… (2000, 34–35)

In a well-known exchange between musicologists Gary Tomlinson and Lawrence Kramer, Tomlinson proposes that, in line with this double perspective of involvement and detachment,

… we might begin to interrogate our love for the music we study. This is not to say that we should try to stop loving it…. It is instead to urge that we dredge up our usual impassioned musical involvements from the hidden realm of untouchable premise that they tend to inhabit, and that we make them a dynamic force—to be reckoned with, challenged, rejected, indulged in, whatever—within our study. (1993, 24)

This, for Kramer, becomes a dangerous undertaking. For Kramer, a concern with contingency necessarily involves a distancing from the immediacy of an engagement with music. What would happen, Kramer asks, “if we gave up listening with the kind of deep engagement, the heightened perception and sense of identification, that both grounds and impels criticism?” He answers, “the materiality of the music, the dynamic sensuous fullness that arguably offers a major site of resistance to ideological pressures, would be put at risk” (1993, 27). Kramer is here rendering as mutually exclusive “the musical experience” and the elements conceived as being external to music, which situate music and its apprehension as events that are culturally and socially constituted. The latter is seen as an ideological threat to the former. In Kramer’s view, “Tomlinson in effect asks for… the dispersal into context of what we usually grasp as the immediacy of music” (1993, 27). The “essence” of music, its autonomy and “purity,” is put at risk.

Kramer’s view is one previously espoused by a number of scholars in the French-language tradition of poststructuralism. Prominent among these was Roland Barthes, who argued that music “speaks, it declaims, it redoubles its voice: It speaks but says nothing, because as soon as it is musical, speech—or instrumental substitute—is no longer linguistic, but corporeal; it only says, and nothing else: my body is put into a state of speech: quasi parlando” (Barthes 1985a, 304). For this reason, speech about music subjects music to ideology, compromising its purity:

As soon as someone speaks about music—or a specific music—as a value in itself, or on the contrary—though this is the same thing—as a value for everyone—that is, as soon as we are told that we must love all music—we feel a kind of ideological cope falling over the most precious substance of evaluation, music: this is “commentary.” (1985b, 279)2

This view seems somewhat ironic, given the propensity of poststructuralism and its antecedents in the French-language tradition of linguistic and cultural theory to lay bare the ideological predispositions of artifacts in all other forms of human communication and expression.

It is this perceived risk of the dispersal of music’s “essence” into a context of ideology that explains, as Susan McClary puts it, why “something terribly important is being hidden away by the profession” of musicology. However, this risk is only perceived—not real. First, the tacit assumption that the nondenotative and nonreferential are not fundamental to or do not figure importantly in forms of human expression and communication other than music is just that, a tacit assumption that bears critical examination. If critical examination shows that other forms of human expression and communication are to an important degree nondenotative and nonreferential, then the risk to music in relating to them reduces, if not evaporates. Second, if music is capable of invoking the world outside it without referring to objects, people, ideas, and concepts, then, on the face of it, there seems no reason why this capability should be restricted to the autonomous awareness of the individual, an awareness that is presumed to be independent of the social and cultural forces that to a significant degree constitute it. Is it the case, in other words, that social and cultural realities are not importantly structural in character? Finally, is it really the case that social and cultural mediation of necessity reduces the immediacy of “the musical experience”? Cannot the concrete directness of “the musical experience” be constituted socially in its intrinsic characteristics?

An important argument in support of these ideas has been supplied by Mark Johnson in his book, The Body in the Mind (1987). Johnson shows that the basis of language—that which is fundamental to what language communicates as opposed to how it communicates (denotatively and referentially)—is importantly nondenotative and nonreferential. He says:

I am perfectly happy with talk of the conceptual/propositional content of an utterance, but only insofar as we are aware that this propositional content is possible only by virtue of a complex web of nonpropositional schematic structures that emerge from our bodily experience. Once meaning is understood in this broader, enriched manner, it will become evident that the structure of rationality is much richer than any set of abstract logical patterns completely independent of the patterns of our physical interactions in and with our environment. (5)

Johnson’s arguments can be put in context by noting that people have a location in the material environment as a consequence of bodily placement, and can only ultimately operate on this environment through their bodies. To the extent that people have a sense of their location in the environment, and a sense of the significance of this location in relation to the material world (including other people), they thus have it through their bodies. It can as a consequence be argued that senses of the world and of individual identity and significance in the world must be rooted in the body. The process of grasping the character of the connections between embodiment on the one hand and experience, feeling, rationality, and imagination on the other rests on what Johnson terms a “geography of human experience.” Such a geography, says Johnson, “seeks to identify the chief contours (structures) and connections that our experience and understanding exhibit. It… explores the emergence of comprehensible form and organization in our experiences and the means we have of making sense of it” (1987, xxxvii). “Any adequate account of meaning and rationality,” concludes Johnson, “must give a central place to embodied and imaginative structures of understanding by which we grasp our world” (1987, xiii).

Through imagination, continues Johnson, we constitute the “structures that organize our mental representations” within the constraints proffered by the external world as well as the materiality of our bodies. These structures, argues Johnson, are “embodied schemata.” As such they “are not propositional,” neither are they “rich, concrete images of mental pictures” (1987, 23, italics original). They are “structures that organize our mental representations at a level more general and abstract than that at which we form particular mental images” (1987, 23–24). Johnson is talking about language as invoking a fundamentally nondenotative and nonreferential world in what it communicates; as always invoking the logic of grounded, social situations as internalized within the individual, and, through the material connectedness of bodies and their physical environments, of invoking experiences that—although socially mediated in their very constitution—are direct and concrete in character.

Johnson could equally as well be talking about the world invoked by the sound fundamental to music. Sound brings the world into people from all directions, simultaneously and dynamically. While it is frequently possible to locate the source of a sound, it is a fundamental experiential characteristic of sound that it lifts off the surface of its material source to occupy and give life to the space not only between the source and the listener, but also around the listener. It is experienced as a phenomenon that encompasses and touches the listener in a cocoon-like fashion. Sound reminds people that there is a world of depth that is external to them, which surrounds them, and which touches them simultaneously from all directions. Sound is, in addition, the only major medium of communication that can vibrate perceptibly within the body. The sound of the human voice could not be amplified and projected were it not for chambers or resonators of air inside the body (the lungs, the sinus passages, and the mouth), which vibrate in sympathy with the human voice. Equally, the sound of the human voice could not be amplified were it not for the objects of the external world, objects whose configurations, textures, and movements mold and shape the sound of the voice as it comes into people from all directions simultaneously.

Consequently, the human experience of sound involves, in addition to the sympathetic vibrations of the eardrums, the sympathetic vibration of the resonators of the body. Sound, shaped and resonating with the properties of the internal and external configurations, textures, and movements of the objects of the external world, can thus be felt in addition to being heard. Sound enters the body and is in the body. Not only does sound reveal the internal properties of inanimate material sources and the order of their relationships to the material world around them, but it also reveals the inner, physiological life of individuals in terms of the way the internal configurations, textures, and movements of their bodies affect the quality of sound production. Sound is ideally suited to revealing and connecting the internal and external worlds. It provides an ideal metaphor for embodied schemata and the dynamics that lead to the formation of schemata.

Sound is the medium of music (Wicke 1989 and 1990). As applied to music, the concept of the medium has two distinguishing characteristics. First, it conceptualizes the use of sounds in music as being of a purely structural character consistent with music’s evocation of a world that is fundamentally nondenotative. This world is powerfully material and corporeal in character. Second, while the medium conceptualizes sounds in music as being structured and structuring (that is, structured by people, and structuring in providing the sonic grounds for the construction of meanings), sounds do not determine meanings. They only make them possible through a mediating role. The medium is merely the sounds of music. Music arises as the process of interaction between the sounds of music and individual people. The connection between sounds and people is a concrete, tangible, and direct one that remains to a degree capable of being negotiated, where its precise characteristics are concerned. The kinds of meanings that people invest in the sounds of music are grounded in forms of structured and structuring awareness—embodied schemata structured by the sounds of music and structuring the sounds of music. For this reason, the meanings people invest in the sounds of music must have a certain character that renders them amenable or suitable for such investment. The character of “the musical experience” is thus constrained and to a degree explained by the fact that only certain kinds of meanings are “musical” meanings (this is because of the specifically corporeal and structural character of the connection between people and the sounds of music), and by the fact that only a certain range of meanings can be invested successfully with any particular medium. As Barthes and other poststructuralist scholars have argued, “the musical experience” is direct, concrete, immediate, nondenotative, and nonreferential. However, in contrast to the arguments of poststructuralists and of many musicologists, “the musical experience” is also mediated, invoking a socially and culturally constituted world that is structural in character.

The world to which Johnson refers is not, then, peculiar to language alone. Embodied schemata underlie all human expression and communication. Music is distinctive in its capacity to invoke this world in a direct, concrete, and immediate fashion, with no intrinsic need to be mediated by the denotative and the referential (although, of course, mediated socially and culturally in its very constitution). Music is not, therefore, the pristine cultural form that needs to be protected from the penetrating glare of all other ideological forms. Music is central and fundamental to the mediation of the affective world, a world that, in turn—and as Johnson so persuasively argues—is fundamental to all forms of human awareness, expression, and communication. This argument is elaborated further by Johnson in his most recent book, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007). Music therefore provides a basic ground for apprehending the world in all its multisensory complexity, a point made by Wicke in his arguments concerning sound as the medium of music.

It is important for those who teach music to understand this connection of music to other cultural and social phenomena because only then, in the classroom, will music’s full affective, cultural, and social potency be revealed. Contrary to the dominant model of study and research in music and music education that takes for granted music’s autonomy from life—its supposed purity—other disciplines demonstrate instead that music connects powerfully to all other forms of human awareness, expression, and communication. Music’s true power and significance cannot therefore be grasped by students if music teachers are insular in their approach in regarding music as autonomous and purely musical.

The practicalities of countering this insularity are daunting, however. There can be no easy remedies based on a shopping list of other important disciplines to consult, or on a list of prescriptive measures that accrediting, certifying, and professional organizations should institute in order to broaden the professional and general knowledge of music teachers and their professors. One thing is sure: such measures will not be effective unless they are based on a secure understanding of the character of music as a fundamentally important form of human expression and communication.

However, these are theoretical arguments. What do they mean in practical terms? They mean that music educators and students need to work with forms of music where the socially constituted power and significance of the music is readily apparent—or can be made readily apparent—to teachers and students alike. There is no simple prescription or script for doing this. However, it is possible to draw on the work of two authors where the power and significance of the music with which they have engaged has been made readily apparent to indicate the kinds of directions that may be followed by music educators persuaded by these arguments.

Illustrations of how music serves to constitute social life and is therefore socially powerful and significant are provided in Tia DeNora’s book Music in Everyday Life (DeNora 2000). It is about the power of music. It explores the proposition that music is capable of creating and influencing moods, emotions, and the ability to concentrate, and is capable also of establishing a basis for individual and collective action. It explores the proposition that music acts powerfully on the body, not just as an external presence, but also as a constitutive agent that serves to form and activate the body in particular ways in particular situations. By joining these two major strands of exploration, the book proposes that music, by acting as a resource and progenitor of individual agency, operates as a force for social ordering at the level of collectivities as well as that of individual behavior.

The book is rich in fieldwork and examples, including those drawn from aerobics classes and the retail sector. Three examples serve to illustrate the points DeNora is making. First, music can act as a force for personal integration. One woman interviewed by DeNora confided:

I was feeling very stressed this morning because we’re in the throes of moving house… so I actively decided to put on Schubert’s Impromptus because they were my father’s favourite… and I thought… about half an hour before I come up here [to her place of paid work], I’ll just listen to them…. I needed it…. It was only ten minutes of so, you know (2000, 16).

This woman’s confidence provides a telling illustration of the manner in which classical music is frequently used in an everyday situation. More dramatically, music can be a force in therapeutic situations for drawing out personality and identity. DeNora reports a situation involving Gary “who is unable to see or speak in words.” Gary “exhibits distress in the form of shrieks and screams when taken to (no doubt frightening) public places such as shops, and sometimes he bites or scratches other people if they come too close.” Gary was referred by a local health authority for music therapy. DeNora’s observation at this point is telling. Music therapy she says is “often used as a ‘last resort’ for clients when previous, more conventional, therapeutic strategies have been tried and failed” (2000, 14–15):

Gary is sitting in the music room with his carer, waiting for the music therapy session to begin. He is very still. His child’s body is knotted up, his head bent over, his legs are crossed. As the music therapist begins to play, Gary shouts, and rocks backwards and forward in his chair. The therapist responds to whatever noises he makes, imitating them but also modulating them into softer, more “musical” forms. The therapist then picks up a drum and bangs out a steady beat in sync with Gary’s cries. She begins to sing, “Gary is rocking,” after which Gary’s rocking becomes so intense that his carer has to hold on to Gary’s chair…. The therapist then holds the drum closer to Gary and he takes her hand (the first time he had ever done so). He then uses her hand as a beater, and bangs the drum with it. Later, the therapist returns to the piano and plays a low-pitched, “eastern”-sounding (pentatonic) melody. Gary is still rocking, but gently now. His noises are gentler too. At the end of the session he is smiling… (DeNora 2000, 15).

The social power of music can also be used in the service of commerce. As a brochure from a background music company claims:

Creating a happy and relaxed environment through the imaginative use of music is a vital element in securing maximum turnover and ensuring that your business has optimal appeal. Used correctly, music can influence customer buying behaviour by creating or enhancing the image, mood and style you wish to achieve (DeNora 2000, 18).

The manager of Euphoria, an independently owned store retailing trendy disco clothes and street wear to men predominantly in their twenties, commented that “you don’t want anything too ‘soulful’—certainly no classical, but not even jazz” (DeNora 2000, 136–37). DeNora reports that the store sticks to drum-and-bass and club numbers.

Music’s social power has perhaps been best summarized by John Blacking 30 years ago in his book How Musical Is Man? “The rules of musical behavior,” argues Blacking, “are not arbitrary cultural conventions, and techniques of music are not like developments in technology.” Blacking continues: “musical behaviour reflects varying degrees of consciousness of social forces, and the structures and functions of music are related to basic human drives and to the… need to maintain a balance between them” (1973, 100). Much in How Musical Is Man? is drawn from Blacking’s fieldwork with the Venda of South Africa. Blacking suggests that:

The Venda make music when their stomachs are full because, consciously or unconsciously, they sense the forces of separation inherent in the satisfaction of self-preservation, and they are driven to restore the balance with exceptionally cooperative and exploratory behaviour. Thus forces in culture and society would be expressed in humanly organized sound, because the chief function of music in society and culture is to promote soundly organized humanity by enhancing human consciousness (1973, 101).

The power of music can act as a force for thought as well as action. As Blacking concludes:

If there are forms intrinsic to music and dance that are not modeled on language, we may look beyond the “language” of dancing, for instance, to the dances of language and thought. As conscious movement is in our thinking, so thinking may come from movement, and especially shared, or conceptual, thought from communal movement. And just as the ultimate aim of dancing is to be able to move without thinking, to be danced, so the ultimate achievement in thinking is to be moved to think, to be thought…. Essentially it is a form of unconscious cerebration, a movement of the body. We are moved into thinking. Body and mind are one (Blacking 1977, 22–23).

If students and music educators are to engage with the worlds of music, then the work of these two authors indicate, if you will, “paths of imagination” that can be put to work in the classroom by drawing on the musical worlds of educators and students, or on carefully selected materials that, while falling outside the direct musical experience and engagements of students and educators, illustrate abundantly (as in the case of Blacking’s work) music’s social power and significance.

Notes

  1. 1.

    For simplicity’s sake, I shall take “discipline” to mean a body of knowledge, ideas, and procedures, which has a term or “title” used by those acquainted with it. This body has coalesced because those within the discipline have focused their concern on a rather discrete set of problems and have developed methods for dealing with them. Psychology, biology, political science, linguistics, etc., are disciplines. Musicology is another, encompassing music analysis and history.

  2. 2.

    The word “cope” here refers to a priest’s cloak, with the attendant implications of religious-like sacralization.