Alice’s Restuarant. Ever hear it? It’s a riot. A Thanksgiving classic at my house. And in keeping with Arlo Guthrie’s spirit, “But I didn’t come here to tell you about Alice… I came to talk about…. spirituality.” lol! Aw, go listen to the song. You’ll get it.
I lived my twenties as a music major in college. When I started down that road, I thought it would just be a kewl job. I had no inkling that I was responding to the call of it’s mystical nature and it was resonating like a bell inside me.
So I studied music theory and music history like all good freshman do, I took site singing and composition and principals.
And gee, I learned that Western music in linear in construction, meaning it has a beginning, a development, and an end. It’s a straight line. Eastern music by contrast is cyclical. It doesn’t have any defined ending, it merely wraps back around on itself, returning to it’s beginning, ready to repeat again and again. Sort of like reincarnation… a Eastern belief. As contrasted with Western beliefs that say your born, you live and you die. The End. Nice straight line there. And I thought, wow! Isn’t THAT kewl. The music reflects their culture, their beliefs.
And then I discovered music is an art that doesn’t really exist anywhere’s but in your head. Think about it. It’s not like a sculpture you can touch, or a painting you can see in it’s entirety… it’s not like a meal you can taste and smell. Music is a series of notes, tones that occur in a particular order *in time*. You *can’t HEAR* the whole song at any given moment, you can only hear that one tone that is playing right then. But your BRAIN assembles those tones second by second, all the tones you’ve heard, into a continuous melody, and you respond to that melody. All in your head.
If that isn’t mystical/magical enough for you, consider Musica universalis – or ‘Music of the Spheres’. It’s an ancient philosophical concept dating back as far as Pythagoras and the Greeks that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies — the Sun, Moon, and planets — as a form of music.
This ‘music’ is not literally audible (well to some of us it is!), but a harmonic and/or mathematical concept. Semi-mystical, semi-mathematical. The astronomer Johannes Kepler said the connection between geometry (and sacred geometry), cosmology, astrology, harmonics, and music is through musica universalis.
Kewl, kewl stuff.
And did you know all the Western music you’ve ever heard was all composed with just 12 notes? The same twelve notes. Beethoven, Mozart, Britney Spears, Led Zepplin. Now if THAT doesn’t make ya go Hmmmm, I think you should get to the hospital and have your life signs checked!
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