MYSTICAL MUSIC THEORY, Part 2.
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.
David Fekete 