Collaboration - Journal of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Summer 1995, Vol. 21, No. 1

SAMPLES

Music: A means to higher experience

Music as a world art exists because it is one of the primary heightened experiences of human culture. The very existence of music depends upon its role as a means to higher experience.--from Music: A Living Language, Tom Manoff (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982)

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Peter Sellars, theater director: . . . music is the most specific language that exists. It can say things that no other language has words for. It can put its finger on moments of human feeling that go largely unacknowledged in a verbally dominated culture like our own, where for most people the only reality is a verbal reality. You know, if you can't write an essay about it, if it can't be quantified, then it can't be sold and there fore doesn't exist. Most people's lives are, again and again, reduced to what they can talk about. And that's a very narrow band of the world! The time you spend with music is time spent in that larger realm.

Bill Moyers, TV journalist: But why does music open the emotions? The question intrigues me because music is a mathematical operation, yet somehow touches a spring in us that has nothing to do with mathematics.

Sellars: It's a unification of a Pythagorean sense of perfection which in its mathematical exactitude recalls what is divine. We realize that the world has been ordained, that it is ordered, that it does make sense, that it has been thought of, and behind every imperfect form that we see, there is a perfect form that has been badly imitated in our mortal world. We look at the imperfect mortal form, we peel off its surface, we ask what's underneath it, what's behind it, what would be inside this imperfect body. And inside this imperfect body is a perfect soul. Hiding.--from Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas (New York: Doubleday, 1989)

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Accept that music is not sealed to passion, nor to piety, nor to feelings; accept that it can blossom in spaces so wide that your image cannot project itself within them, that it must make you melt within its unique light!--Louis Dandrel

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Every music lover knows intuitively that music embodies a certain truth, but few go so far as to obey this intuition and search for truth by way of music. Most people accept that truth belongs by rights to science, religion, or philosophy, while the arts, vital as they are to a fully human life, are still only matters of opinion and taste. We propose on the contrary to take literally Beethoven's dictum that "Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom or philosophy." Accordingly, to penetrate the mysteries of music is to prepare for initiation into those fathomless mysteries of man and cosmos.--from Cosmic Music: Musical Keys to the Interpretation of Reality, ed. Joscelyn Godwin (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, Int'l., 1989)

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Philosophically, I think that composing is trying to get a pure stream in a faucet that connects with some cosmic pool of music somewhere. I think that's what the great composers like Mozart had, some huge powerful stream as if you are tuning in your radio. There was no static on his station, he got it really pure in a channel into the source.--Ragtime composer and pianist Scott Kirby in "An Interview with Scott Kirby," David Reffkin, The Mississippi Rag, June 1995

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I know that some people see music as merely sound for sound's sake. I disagree. There can be moments when you are in contact with the experience from which the music came. And there are audiences who listen at that level. They're not listening to say that this guy has a fantastic technique or fantastic sound--they're really getting the message of the music. When that happens, the ritual of concert-giving is at its highest. . . .

Beethoven thought that through his music he could change the world. Today, rock musicians are virtually the only ones who think that. Beethoven believed that there is a soul. Today, most people don't believe that there is a soul. Although he wasn't religious in a traditional sense, Beethoven believed in God. Today, most people don't believe in God. When you perform Beethoven, you have to transform yourself and commit yourself. You have to believe that God exists, that there's a soul, and that you can change the world. . . .

. . . I would listen to recordings of Schnabel, Kempff, and Serkin playing the last [Beethoven] piano sonatas, and would be struck by many things--for instance, by the trills. These are no ordinary trills; they are searching, reaching out toward the ideal. . . . The musical language of the last two cello sonatas is terse. At one moment, it's turbulent and assertive; then he interjects something that's just heaven, and you get a glimpse of a better world. That's where you find the cinemalike montage. but even when the music is fierce it's not just violent. He's doing more than shaking his fist at destiny; there's nobility, there's heroism within the drama--a sense of exaltation. . . . The slow movements of both sonatas are intensely introspective. After that, you've earned your freedom. The finales have to do with a divine comedy; they are a celestial play, not in the realm of human endeavor. The gods are sporting among themselves.--concert cellist Yo Yo Ma in "A process bigger than oneself: Yo Yo Ma," David Blum, New Yorker, May 1, 1989

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The effects of rock 'n' roll--those thrilling, dangerous crescendos of release, rebellion, and all-night ecstasy--are as old as the first time the first man pounded out a syncopated riff on a hollow log. Therein lies the key to rock's origins and its unique relationship to religion.

One can almost hear the chorus of boos and hisses rising like steam at the very suggestion. Rock 'n' roll is supposed to be about fun, not the somber verities of the hereafter. It runs no deeper than a passing fancy; it's as enduring as the age of sixteen. Rock's virtue is its disposability. Pop and profundity just don't mix.

But music and mystery do. . . .

If music is, as sociologist Raymond Williams asserts, a way of "transmitting a description of experience," then its use to transmit the most significant and enduring experience in the whole human catalog, the religious experience, naturally follows.--from Stairway to Heaven: The Spiritual Roots of Rock 'n' Roll, David Seay and Mary Neely (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986)

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In what might be termed the punk art wing of modern rock, the sonorous resonating properties of feedback-sustained guitar textures have assumed an explicitly spiritual association through their development by bands and performers such as Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Tom Verlaine and Television, and more recently Sonic Youth. To attend a show by one of these groups is to immerse oneself in a clanging, droning sensurround of guitar harmonics, to enter a precisely demarcated, ritually invoked sonic space. This is the movable church of the sonic guitar, a vast, high-vaulted cathedral vibrating with the patterns and proportions of sound-made-solid. Perhaps the most appropriate analogue for this invisible but highly audible sacred architecture is the Gothic cathedral, designed according to traditions of mystical mathematics, such as the proportion of the golden mean. And they were designed to resonate music, specifically the chanting of monks. One finds the same sonic concerns in the sacred architecture of Islam: the courtyard of one medieval mosque was designed to resonate any sound made within it seven times, in overlapping waves of slap-back echo. And of course there are the legendary acoustical properties of Eastern structures such as the Taj Mahal.--Robert Palmer in "The Church of the Sonic Guitar," from Present Tense: Rock and Roll and Culture, ed. Anthony DeCurtis (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992)

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From the outside a rave may resemble a high-tech den of hedonistic escapism, but the most devoted ravers insist that raves are the defining spiritual experience for the diverse and indefinable under-30 generation. Like ambient music, raves evoke a spirit that is nonhierarchical, tribal, and intimately connected to the environment. You might call it an ambient spirituality. Like the music of ancient tribal dances, the computer-generated sound of raves has a strong repetitive beat that induces a hypnotic state of mind. This trancelike experience can lead to a meditative state where body and mind become synchronized through computer pulses and dance. Ideally it melts away social barriers so people experience connection with a larger community. It even provides some with a taste of the music and movement of transcendence. . . . These days raves are a worldwide phenomenon found in Thailand as well as London. House music has evolved into a wide variety of musical styles ranging from hardcore techno rock that mixes samples of Jimi Hendrix guitar riffs to the soulful and meditative sounds of ambient, with its samples of flowing water and rainforest bird calls.--from "Sacred Raves," Rachel Lehmann-Haupt, Yoga Journal, June 1995

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I think music actually raises the very molecular structure of body, brain, and being to these larger dimensions. With music, you gain a coherence or bridging of one reality with another.--Jean Hous ton in "Sound and the Miraculous," from Music and Miracles, ed. Don Campbell (Wheaton, Illi nois: Quest Books, 1992)

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I love that great saying of Godowsky: "In your youth, you play with all your virtuosity and flair; in middle age, you show what a deep musician you are; and, as you get older, you look for the inner voices."--concert pianist Adele Marcus in Great Pianists Speak, Adele Marcus (Neptune, NJ: Paganiniana Publications, 1979)

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Music is another planet--Alphonse Daudet (c. 1890)

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It was deep calling unto deep,--the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars. . . . It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own emotion.--Professor Starbuck in The Variety of Religious Experience, William James (New York: Penguin Books, 1982)

I took my first communion on the same day as my elder sister. . . . It was spring: the sun shone brightly, a light wind stirred the rustling poplars; the air was full of some delicious fragrance. Deeply moved, I crossed the threshold of the chapel. . . . I knelt in prayer and waited for the solemn ceremony to begin . . . I gave myself to God . . . I was rudely awakened by the priest summoning me . . . I went up, blushing at the unmerited hour, and received the sacrament. As I did so, a chorus of fresh, young voices broke into the eucharistic hymn. The sound filled me with a kind of mystical, passionate unrest which I was powerless to hide from the rest of the congregation. I saw Heaven open--a Heaven of love and pure delight, purer and a thousand times lovelier than the one that had been so often described to me. Such is the power of true expression, the incomparable beauty of melody that comes from the heart.--Hector Berlioz in Memoirs (the composer's description of his first musical experience)

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. . . an answer came. It flashed up lightning-wise during a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony at the Queen's Hall, in that triumphant fast movement when "the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy." The swiftly flowing continuity of the music was not interrupted, so that what Mr. T.S. Eliot calls "the intersection of the timeless moment" must have slipped into the interval between two demi-semi-quavers. When, long after, I analysed the happening in the cold light of retrospect, it seemed to fall into three parts: first the mysterious event itself which occurred in an infinitesimal fraction of a split second . . . then Illumination, a wordless stream of complex feelings in which the experience of Union combined with the rhythmic emotion of the music like a sunbeam striking with irides cence the spray above a waterfall--a stream that was continually swollen by tributaries of associated Experience; lastly Enlightenment, the recollection in tranquillity of the whole complex of Experience as it were embalmed in thought-forms and words.--from The Timeless Moment,H. Warner Allen (London: 1946)

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After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.--Aldous Huxley, 1894 - 1963

Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

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Last modified on Nov. 13, 1995