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| Sting in Concert |
Quite a shocking statement, until one listens to how and why English musician Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, better known as Sting, believes that music and religion share a connection. While giving the 1994 commencement address at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, Sting’ metaphor showed music’s power by equating music and religion.
Ceremonial speeches like Sting’s express values, and Sting’s intention that day was to reveal music’s most basic value. Musical success comes, he emphasized, not from fame, but from one’s soul. That is, he explained, religion and music find common ground. All good ceremonial speeches either praise or blame their subject, and Sting elevated his audience by praising music and, in doing so, he explained music’s link to the human soul.
After mentioning his youthful failures studying the piano, Sting described his sudden inspiration when he first picked up a guitar:
“Where the piano had seemed incomprehensible, I was able to make music on the guitar almost instantaneously.”Once Sting discovered the guitar, his practicing became a celebration rather than work. As he explained:
“I spent hour after hour, day after day, month after month, just playing, rejoicing in the miracle and probably driving my parents 'round the bend.”A “miracle.” Sting had discovered something central about himself and it reminded him of a religious experience. Indeed, no words, no logic could explain where his music came from. He continued his religious theme:
“If somebody asks me how I write songs, I have to say, ‘I don't really know.’ I don't really know where they come from. A melody is always a gift from somewhere else. You just have to learn to be grateful and pray that you will be blessed again some other time.”
“Pray,” he said, and “blessed.” More religious themes! As he continued, was he mocking religion or praising music? No, not mocking, but showing how religion and music were linked:
“What I'm trying to say here is that if ever I'm asked if I'm religious I always reply, ‘Yes, I'm a devout musician.’ Music puts me in touch with something beyond the intellect, something otherworldly, something sacred.”The “devout,” the “sacred” are, I think we should remember, deep parts of human experience. We miss part of life if we dwell only on what is rational. That may be why Sting insisted that music teaches wisdom that goes beyond language:
“It's very hard to talk about music in words. Words are superfluous to the abstract power of music. We can fashion words into poetry so that they are understood the way music is understood, but they only aspire to the condition where music already exists.”Concluding his speech, Sting told the graduating musicians that their success as a musician was not central. No, music’s central point is to understand and heal one’s soul:
“So what I'm getting round to saying is that as musicians, whether we're successful, playing to thousands of people every night, or not so successful, playing in bars or small clubs, or not successful at all, just playing alone in your apartment to the cat, we are doing something that can heal souls, that can mend us when our spirits are broken. Whether you make a million dollars or not one cent, music and silence are priceless gifts, may you always possess them. May they always possess you.”“Heal souls?” “Priceless gifts?” Uplifting goals indeed!
Singer Dolly Parton's Commencement Speech
People, Sting showed, need to engage with music (or, no doubt, although he didn’t say so, with other arts). We all need to engage emotions which we cannot talk about but that the arts develop and express. For my part, although I am just a retired speech teacher, I always supported education in music, theater, dance, film, and visual arts. They matter every bit as much as reading, writing, and arithmetic. That is because, as Sting demonstrated, artistic expression is basic to our souls. As talk radio, cable news, and social media take over our world with their arguments, half-truths, and wishful thinking, we must never forget the concepts that only art can provide. Not being conventionally religious himself, Sting didn’t think to mention how religion and music often join in hymns, chants, and meditative ceremonial music. I, for one, do not think that music is religion in any literal sense, but Sting is right that music and religion both reach deeply into our souls. Therein lies the metaphor.
We do not all need to think about the music-religion link in the same way. Maybe we could say that Sting's mind rejected religion while his musical spirit accepted it, or we could say that music and religion guide us to truth over different routes. Maybe we could say that music and religion work together to heal us. Perhaps best, we might say that Sting’s shocking metaphor made his audience think.
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| Me, practicing |
While Sting's musical art gained him fame and fortune, I myself rarely perform in public, and, to me, music means plunking away on a guitar or piano for my always-appreciative wife. Despite my long training as a logical, linear-thinking, Aristotelian-style debater, my life, like any life, requires expression. Sting did not merely speak to the young people who had just graduated from a superb music school. He spoke to humanity. Let us hear. Let us hear the sounds, see the images, or sense the actions that shape our ideas and our thoughts. This was a speech for art’s spiritual power.
by William D. Harpine
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Theoretical Note:
Many rhetorical theorists have studied the rhetoric of metaphors. I. A. Richards' book The Philosophy of Rhetoric has probably been the most influential work on the subject.
Copyright ©2026 by William D. Harpine
Image of Sting: QueenbdayRAH210418-34, Creative Commons License, via Wikimedia Commons
Image of William Harpine, by Elaine Clanton Harpine, copyright ©2026, used by permission
