MYSTICAL MUSIC THEORY, Part 3: Music Is More Than Notes.
“Do you really want to bring him here?” she asked me. She was a prominent and amazing Blues guitar player, formerly played Speed Metal. I’d heard her play a song called, “THAT GUY,” or “THIS GUY”–she hadn’t settled on a title–and I liked the song very much.
We were enjoying each other’s company, over a week-end visit. I think she meant that if she played the song, that guy would be a third wheel in our enjoyment of two.
What could that possibly mean?
One explanation is her mind would go to that guy. Playing “THAT GUY,” she would be thinking about that guy, her mind would be on him, and not me. Not only her mind, music is primarily emotion, not thinking. She would be bringing her feelings about him into the room, into her. She was asking me if I wanted her to have feelings for him in her heart, sitting with me.
It gets deeper. Yes, the composer’s life experience goes into a song. In my poem, SOMETIMES IT COMES DOWN TO SCALES, I write:
“talking about soloing, or composing, or writing a poem
Then you’ll want considerations, the examined life, self-awareness
The struggle to outgrow the script childhood wrote for you–
These are to poiesis as scales are to a musician
I would say a good song or poem sings out of, sings out the human condition
Audiences don’t like a poem or a song they can’t hear
That doesn’t bespeak the human condition, their own condition
(LINES DRAWN AUTHENTIC: A Realized Man, available on Indigo Books online, and NOA Gallery, Bonnie Doon Mall).
My poem also brings in the audience. Music mystically connects the hearts of audiences with only Air. I think that the Air is alive. But science says air is Nitrogen and Oxygen gas.
People are returning to vinyl albums. You take a piece of plastic, and that plastic sends you into tears or ecstasy. A diamond needle sends electrical signals into speakers; speakers make air move in waves, and air waves hit your eardrums and you are joyful. Or cry. Or are transported to God if it is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, 4th movement. Plastic, Nitrogen, and Oxygen.
Part 4 will be about the relationship between performer and audience, as well as the way this figures into the “business of music,” or club management and Artist.
ENIGMATIC DR DAVE ENTERPRISES, PRELUDED
Those pedals and the amplifier back in front of them, makes it all happen!
When someone is born in this body, doesn’t life continue until death?
Either in conflict with others or in harmony with them,
we go through life like a runaway horse, unable to stop.
Working hard until the end of his life,
unable to appreciate any achievement,
worn out and incapable of resting,
isn’t he a pathetic sight?
He may say, ‘I’m still alive,’ but so what?
When the body rots, so does the mind – is this not tragic?
Is this not ridiculous, or is it just me that is ridiculous and everyone else is sane?
If you allow your mind to guide you,
who then can be seen as being without a teacher?
But if you ignore your mind but insist you know right from wrong, you are like the saying,
‘Today I set off for Yueh and arrived yesterday.’
This is to claim that what is not, is;
That what is not, does exist
why, even the holy sage Yu cannot understand this,
let alone poor old me!
I’ve been downloading and reading through the Ancient Taoist book called by the author’s name, Chuang Tzu, sometimes called the ZHUANGZI–Anglicized Chinese words become essentially guesswork. (It’s complicated.) At Harvard, the had us reading the most famous book to Westerners: Lao Tzu’s TAO TE CHING. But Grandmaster Chen Zhonghua, who essentially embodies the tradition of Chen Practical Method Taiji, told me differently.
The TAO TE CHING is “Philosophical Taoism.” Chuang Tzu is Taoism. It is irreverent and funny stories; it is deep and paradoxical Philosophy; it is poetry; AND it is Alchemy.
Westerners do not understand ALCHEMY: ALCHEMY is Spiritual Transformation. We (they) think of Alchemy as “pseudo-science;” a fake prequel to Chemistry. It is not. We (they) think Alchemists tried to manufacture gold cheaply by using furnaces in a lab. They did not. Some believe that Alchemists tried to make the “Elixir of Immortality,” which would grant immortality in the flesh. Maybe.
The traditional academic notion of Taoist Alchemy is that it is folk superstition, degenerated from ideal Philosophical Taoism of TAO TE CHING. We do not agree. Grandmaster Chen, who grew up in Chia and was taught by a genuine Taoist Sage as a child, teaches that the Alchemical Tradition was earlier. That Lao Tzu’s TAO TE CHING is an intellectual abstract of a real, living practice, that goes back hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, perhaps wanders down and into the corridors and caverns of prehistory.
We actually do Taoist Internal Alchemy when we do Chen Zhonghua Practical Method Taiji; I do actual Taoist Internal Alchemy when I do Chen Zhonghua Practical Method Taiji. I call it Chen Zhonghua Taiji, because other schools call themselves Taiji but are not the Authentic Tradition, handed down from the very Family and Village that founded Chen Taiji. GM Chen is the 19 Master in an unbroken chain of masters tracing back to Taiji’s origins.
The line I like best is when it goes, “Is this not ridiculous, or is it just me who is ridiculous and everyone else is sane?”
When I was a Swedenborgian Pastor, I emailed my musician friend Darryl Dybka about theology and metaphysics. I was not mystical, then. I was not a musician, then. I was looking in AT music from the outside, as a Pastor who forgot all about my life as a musician, 44 years ago. Music was dead to me as a participant. So, as a learned scholar and theologian, I was telling Darryl what I saw the essence of music to be, and how music is woven into the structure of Reality.
I told Darryl something I’d been believing for some time. When a musician plays music, they are connecting with forces of the whole universe. A vibrating string or sound wave, is physics. Physics is the physical, material universe. All the notes in a scale, and all the chords you make out of those notes, are contained in a vibrating string or standing air wave in a flute or organ pipe.
I am not a physicist, so I don’t know how much of the universe vibrates. I do know that an electron can be a wave, and that electron shells around an atom’s nucleus act like musical harmonics. (Atoms have lower and higher shells around them.)
Ocean waves are waves.
But the point isn’t how much of Reality vibrates like a guitar string or standing wave. The point is that music is physics and built into the fabric of matter. Musicians do not stop to think that what they do is participating in what the universe is made out of.
There is powerful Philosophy and Myth that speak to this: Pythagoras and The Muses are only 2.
Pythagoras discovered the Pythagorean Theory; for right triangles. But in a Harvard course called THE THOUGHT WORLD OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY, we learned about the Pythagorean Number Mystery Religion. That course was not about the Bible. It was about the thought world that Christianity took root in. We learned about the way Myths functioned in daily life. We learned about how Romans made offerings to the Spirits who governed the intersections of Roman roads. How when Cyrus the Mede liberated the Jews from Babylon, he told his priests to learn how to honour the God Who governed their land.
Pythagoras was thought to be divine. His Number Mysticism was based on a triangle arrangement of numbers, with 1 at the top: 1, 2, 3, 4. My interest is the number 3.
Pythagoras discovered that a string vibrating in half makes an octave. That is the same musical note next up: C to the C above it.
He discovered that a string vibrating in 3rds makes the 5th tone up. In C, that would be the note G.
And what blew my mind was the discovery of the 4th tone. Pythagoras discovered that 3/4 of a vibrating string is the 4th tone up; in C, that would be F.
This is astounding. The other tones, or harmonics, of a vibrating string do not have the 4th tone. But it’s there, anyway. Push down a string at 1/4 of its length, and let the remaining 3/4 of the string vibrate, and you have the 4th.
Why this is important is the I, the IV, and the V are the foundations of Western music: from Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven; Robert Johnson, Z Z Top and beyond.
The Numerology Mysteries of Pythagoras found the essence of Western music.
The Three Muses inspire Artists. Later traditions add more than 3; but originally, it was 3.
And the Three Muses all relate to music. They reside near a Sacred well at the foot of Mount Helicon. It is The Hippocrene Well, or Spring, because the winged, flying horse Pegasus touched Earth with his hooves and the well gushed forth.
There are 3 Muses: Nete, Mese, and Hypate. Their names mean, “Lowest, Middle, Highest.” They refer to the three strings on an Ancient Greek lyre.
I had to fight search engines because they kept telling me that Nete was lowest and Hypate was lowest. The root “hyp” doesn’t help. It can mean “hypo”–under, as in hypodermic–or it can be “hyper”–hyper which is “above.” My question was, is Hypate from hypo or hyper? The Proto-Indo-European root, “UPER” goes to Hype. “UPO” goes to hypo and its root means “under,” and a lot of other words so far from hyper that hypo isn’t what I went with.
Nete, has “NED” as its PIE root, which means “contain, hold together, a net.” That’s what bass notes do.
The origins of Western music are the 3-stringed Lyre. Each string corresponds to one of the 3 Muses. The Muses are the Goddesses who inspire all Art.
The 3 Muses are in Delphi, and connected to the Oracle of Delphi–the greatest source of Wisdom known in the Ancient World. The origins of Wisdom are the origins of Music.
I can’t wrap up this exploration. Other than to say that music is in the bowels of Creation. Maybe I should say the heart. Musicians involve themselves in the Creation of the Universe when they play a Blues song. Blues is based on the I, IV, V tones in the scale.
ENIGMATIC DR DAVE ENTERPRISES, PRELUDED
Safari detected unusual activity coming from my “research phone” when I was looking into all this, and wanted me to verify that I’m human. Whether I’m human is debatable; and, no, I did not let them know if I’m a human.
The whole song is finished: words and music. I only recently turned to completing the arrangement.
A song is more than chords and a melody. It needs a harmonic and rhythmic “package.” That package is the arrangement. I attach my Facebook post in which I play the song. I talk about the arrangement, too.
The man I have my arm around is Chain Reaction. He’s a street musician and he bought my poetry book: LINES DRAWN AUTHENTIC: A Realized Man. He is pointing to my book in the pic, but I can’t see it because we’re both looking toward the street photographer.
I asked Chain Reaction what hand gesture he was making; I asked, “That wasn’t a gang gesture or anything, was it?”
Just then a stranger in the pizza place went ballistic.
“YOU ARE A RACIST! YOU THINK JUST BECAUSE HE’S BLACK, HE’S IN A GANG!”
But SHE was the racist. There are a lot of gangs. To think only black people are gang bangers, means she is racist.
In my city, there are a lot of gangs of different varieties: The Red Men, because they wear red clothes; Russian gangs, who try to make me criticize legitimate Religion; Hindu mobs; Hells Angels; white supremacists and neo-nazis. None of these gangs are made up of African-Americans.
Who’s the racist, now?
BTW, does it look like I’m prejudiced against Chain Reaction?
I went through agony, the past few days, and ecstasy. The Agones were Art Competitions in Ancient Greece. It Agon means “struggle” and it’s the root of English, “Agony.” I’ll endure any agony if it makes art like this. The Hanged Man Tarot Card willingly hangs himself on The Tree of Life. Then, The Inverted Hanged Man teaches what he learned. In this sense, he is the Sacrificial Lamb. It is The Artist’s labor pains. This poem goes in my book in progress, A QUEST THROUGH QUESTIONS OF TIME:
COSMIC THERAPY
“Is the whole world conspiring to make me mad?” I’ve said, some days
What if it does?
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Shakespeare’s Hamlet said, one day
What of the whole world is conspiring to heal me?
To heal us all
I think IT is
“For God so loved THE COSMOS . . . that THE COSMOS, through Him, might be saved”
“God so loved THE COSMOS . . . that whoever believes in Him should not kill themself, but have VITAL LIFE OF THE AEONS” (John 3:16,17).
Science says nothing
ABOUT THE GRAND DESIGN
Traditionally, my translation, “kill themself” is rendered, “perish.” The Greek, “apoletai” also means “to be killed,” as well as, “be destroyed.” Apoletai is that strange verb conjugation only in Greek, called a “middle verb.” Middle verbs are like French “reflexive verbs.” They mean you do it to or for yourself–i.e., “wash yourself;” “kill yourself.” Some language technicalities.
Traditionally, my “have VITAL LIFE OF THE AEONS,” is translated, “life everlasting.” The Greek has the word, “Zoe,” which means life. But Aeon also means “Vital Force,” and “eternal”–both at the same time. So it’s “life” and “vital force forever.”
One sees John’s clever word play between killing and life. In this case, the option is killing one’s self, or living by believing that there is a Source Of Vital Life. One seizes the “bare bodkin” or the dagger Hamlet was pondering suicide with; or one seizes The Vital Life of The Aeons.
For the first time, I see how to use dry academic knowledge as and in poetry.
David Fekete 