The lost music with which the world worlds

The lost music with which the world worlds

Arthur Haswell, BA
 

...Of course, we listen to music more than ever. But the way we attend to music is entirely cordoned off, reserved solely for music itself. As such, it is as if music came into being out of a vacuum, and we struggle to understand why it exists or where it came from. Why is it so unlike anything else in the world? What is its purpose? How can a melody with no explicit meaning or message move me and have such power over me when really it is nothing but a jumble of noises?

There is no answer to this question because it is based on a false premise. The false premise rests on the presupposition that a jumble of noises is how the world should be, according to any right-thinking person, while music is a strange, almost miraculous exception and illusion. But this is merely a prejudice borne of our current hylomaniac [Editor’s note: hylomania is an obsession with matter] worldview (the contours of hylomania should become apparent as this short essay proceeds). That isn’t to deny that there is such a thing as a jumble of noises; of course there is, but it is an edge case of the musical.

For the ancient Greeks, music was not simply a stimulating arrangement of sounds, but a mountain stream springing from the source of being. The symmetries of musical intervals were not arbitrary, but reflected the divine proportions that ordered the cosmos. Pythagoras and his acolytes, upon discovering that musical harmonies could be expressed as simple ratios, saw in this a profound revelation about the nature of existence itself. This idea was crystallized in the notion of the ‘music of the spheres’: a cosmic symphony conducted by the movements of celestial bodies, imperceptible to mortal ears, yet governing all aspects of being. Plato, in his Timaeus, described the world’s soul as constructed from musical ratios. For the Greeks, music wasn’t cordoned off from the rest of existence, but was considered an expression of the deepest structures of reality...

Let's face it, some music really is a cacophonous noise. Sometimes I've chosen to listen to such stuff as it reflected my inner mental state at that time and somehow was soothing, almost like expressing something I could not put into words.

But in general it is the harmonies which interest me, I say 'interest', I don't mean in an intellectual sense, but in the way it can communicate, or at least express something. Sometimes I associate with people who make music which revolves around the lyrics, so long as one can pump out the words, the melody or sound it makes is a lower priority. Maybe because of my upbringing where about half the stuff I listened to was in a foreign language, I've got used to ignoring the words and only paying attention to what sort of sound it all makes.

I like to think of music as a means of mind-to-mind communication, which is why I so much appreciate live performances. At best it is a two-way communication, the audience or listener can feed energy into the performance - though sometimes energy can be drained away too.

As for Pythagoras and the 'music of the spheres', that seems really important as it hints at the way the world, the physical world at least, can be described using mathematics. I make an association between for example the different modes of vibration of a plucked string with the different levels of an electron within an atom, a quantum leap to a higher or lower energy level being likened to the various pure tones from a single string vibrating in each mode. I'm less sure this applies to such things as planetary orbits, though there was a rule derived from observation of the orbital distances of planets in the Solar system which loosely fits and may have some predictive power.

In the shared article above, there is consideration of traditional societies and mention of a 35,000-year-old carved figure. These distant times interest me a great deal, in that I think that world was inhabited by people exactly like ourselves, but their entire view of the world would have been very different. Reaching into the past is difficult. Sometimes I watch recently-produced films about times not so long ago such as the early or mid 20th century. There is a difference, modern representations often seem to tell us more about the present day and our current preoccupations than they do about the actual past. And that's only reaching back to times within a human lifespan. Trying to go further back, I think we flatter ourselves somewhat when offering ideas of how the world was, how it was felt and experienced.

Was flipping through Faggin's Irreducible and landed on the following:

As Albert Einstein states: “It is possible that everything can be described scientifically, but it would not make sense; it would be as if we were describing a Beethoven symphony as a variation in the pressures of the waves.” For sure, a piece of music is not just the musical score and the frequency spectrum of the air vibrations: “The music is not in the notes, the music is between the notes” (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart). The Music is also the subtle meaning contained in the emotions and the joy it brings, not to mention the pleasure of reproducing it with our own voice or with an instrument, if you are so lucky as to be able to do it. The objective structure and characteristics of a piece of music are not enough to describe the lived experience of it, which is enriched immeasurably when you play it with other musicians you love to be with. That is a cooperative work of art and discipline.

Music as physical vibrations is only its symbolic dimension. The experience of music is its semantic dimension, and the two can be conceived as the indivisible and correlated faces of the same creation. Music, together with speech, provides us with a striking example of the close link that exists between the inner and the outer worlds. “Where words fail…music speaks” (Ludwig van Beethoven). And, “Music is perhaps the only example of what could have been—if it had not been for the invention of language, the formation of words, and the analysis of ideas—the communication of souls” (Marcel Proust, The Prisoner).

Faggin, Federico. Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature (pp. 268-269). Collective Ink. Kindle Edition.