The Mystery of Music

[mystical_mountain_9]

For a change, I was indecisive for a while regarding what topic to write about as the year closes out; it was an issue of too many issues bouncing around in my mind rather than none at all. And then I came across an unexpected news headline regarding Canadian jazz singer Michael Bublé performing a live Christmas concert at the Vatican in early December. I took that as a ‘cue’ and so I am running with it!

It’s funny that when I was growing up, I – along with my friends – steadfastly refused to appreciate or acknowledge the great jazz singers of our time (Frank Sanatra, etc.) because it was “our parents’ music” and therefore “hopelessly old-fashioned”. What opinionated fools we were! But about 15 years ago, my wife and I heard Michael Bublé singing in the style of the “rat pack” and we were very impressed with his talent. We became Bublé fans on the spot. And, so, we have continued to listen to him and follow his career (from the comfort of our home). So, when I read that this nearly permanent “fixture” of Las Vegas was invited by the Holy See to sing Christmas songs, that caught my attention. And the more I read the news article about the Christmas concert, the more fascinated I became. The annual event (initiated in 2015 by Pope Francis) is a free concert of top musicians for Rome’s poor. And then came the lightning bolt: on the eve of the December 6 Christmas concert, the Pope told Bublé and the other artists, "I would like us, as we participate in this gathering, to recall the Lord's words: Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me." These were precisely the final words in the Leo Tolstoy story Where Love Is, God Is, which I shared last week. So, here we go!

The are many great mysteries in this world – and for that I am very grateful. What a dull world we would live in if we had figured out everything! But among these mysteries, music – at least for me – is one of the most enduring. All the more so that it has been an important part of my life since early childhood. Some of my earliest memories are of me singing silly little songs to my parents’ friends whenever they gathered: I must have been three or four years old at the time. Musical talent runs strongly on both sides of my family, so no big surprise that grew up singing. During those difficult and awkward years of high school, music was the unshakable central pillar of my identity: all my friends were highly musical, I took every music course available, was involved in every band I could within school and outside, and even ate my lunch every single day in the school’s music room for five years – for, outside that refuge of order and beauty (mixed in with raging teenage hormones, of course) was a sterile, ugly, uninteresting social world that I interacted with only as much as was absolutely necessary! Many teenagers have found that, one way or another, music has kept them sane enough to navigate the chaos that is adolescence – and I was one of them.

What fascinated me, even at that early age, was how music could so immediately capture a mood or feeling and communicate it so directly to the listeners as well as participants. Other arts, of course, accomplish that emotional communication; but they tend to do so more at the individual level – be it reading or observing a piece of visual art. Of course, there are exceptions such as public art and the now nearly extinct practice of public recitations of poetry, but even so, qualitatively, there is a difference. Music reaches into the mind and memory in a unique way: we can effortlessly memorize a song with hundreds of words after just a few listenings, but to memorize the lyrics without music usually takes many times the amount of effort. Just a three-note melody is enough to enable Muslim students to memorize the entire Koran within the space of a year, or for Hindu Brahmins to memorize entire Vedas. From my own personal experience, I have quickly learned to memorize lengthy songs in languages that I have no knowledge of – and I don’t have any particular talent in learning languages!

The more one looks into music the weirder it gets. So far in my life I have met only one person who claims to not like music (that individual happened to be super-hyper-rationalistic to a degree that I have rarely encountered). To my knowledge, no other species of primate has an innate sense of musical creativity. So far, I have not encountered a convincing theory as to why, from an evolutionary perspective, humans developed this innate musicality. What is the tie between a sequence of sounds and the emotions that they invoke? Music seems to be so hard-wired into our very being that perhaps a more appropriate name for our species is Homo musicalis (Homo sapiens certainly seems to be inappropriate – especially these days!).

It is certainly not a stretch to call music “magical” (if one uses the definition of magic to be “the art and science of making changes in consciousness in accordance with will” as per Dion Fortune). For example, manual labour can be excruciating – but when set to music, the burden is much lighter, the effort is less and time passes by more quickly! The power of music to evoke specific emotions at the individual and mass levels is so self-evident that institutions – be they religious, political, social, or business – have used music for their own purposes since the dawn of history, if not before. However, music being what it is, monolithic control of it is virtually impossible and, therefore, there has always been folk music and counter-culture music (whether recognized as such or not) to reflect the on-the-ground perspectives and aspirations of the commoners, the oppressed and the slaves.

And from the “lemons” of the sufferings of the downtrodden, what exquisite musical “lemonade” has been produced! If one were to produce a visual representation (sketch, painting, or sculpture) of a really hard-hitting blues song, I doubt that one could see much or any beauty in it; yet when the lyrics of pain are set to a soulful tune, it is somehow beautiful – sometimes bewitchingly so! How can this be?

For more than a decade of my life, I restricted myself to listening to, and singing, only sacred music. And not just the Christian music of my ancestral roots, but of various cultures and religions. Be it traditional church hymns and Gregorian chants, the songs of the drum circles at indigenous pow-wows, the Sufi Qawwali, or the Hindu bhajan and Indian classical music – I reveled in it all! And what I discovered was that despite the extreme differences in languages and in styles of expression, I found a deeper “hidden” language of the heart: the yearning of the river to merge with the sea, so to speak. This is the essential mystical element behind sacred music that I found.

But what of the “secular” music? Is it just a distraction to a mystic? For a long time I certainly thought so; but then I made friends with a fellow who was very deep in his devotion and who sang a lot of bhajans. One day I heard him singing a song in a very heart-felt way – but I recognized it as a Hindi film song! So, I asked him what on Earth possessed him to casually sing such a secular, sappy, ooey-gooey, lovey-dovey film song. And he said to me very plainly: “to me my only beloved is the Divine; and so, if I hear a song that I like and if the theme of the song is love, I sing it to the Divine!” His response was like a slap to my face, breaking the barrier that I had created separating “sacred” love from “secular” love and it dawned on me how secular love can be seen as a reflection or metaphor of sacred love. After that I started my search for this parallel and gradually I began to listen again to music that I had long ago rejected.

To be honest, it has not always been easy for me to find sacred love in the profane modern music scene (many verbs can be used to describe it, but “chaste” definitely isn’t one of them!). More often than not, I have failed to make them “fit” into a concept of Divine love. But still, the occasional song makes it very easy. The one that most often comes to my mind is the song Together Again by Janet Jackson. It is actually the only Janet Jackson song that I know or would recognize. It was played so much on the radio for years that I ended up paying attention to it and was able to pick out the initial lines and the chorus:

There are times when I look above and beyond
There are times when I feel your love around me, baby
I'll never forget my baby…

Everywhere I go, every smile I see
I know you are there smilin' back at me
Dancin' in moonlight, I know you are free
'Cause I can see your star shinin' down on me

Given my natural bent-of-mind (some might say “bent-out-of-shape” mind!) I had always thought that she was singing directly to God. Perhaps addressing God as “my baby” is unusual, but I didn’t knock it: one can have many different kinds of relationships with the Divine, so why not such an endearing one? I just recently found out that Together Again was actually composed in memory of a friend of Janet’s who had died of AIDS, which makes me respect the song even more because of its buoyant mood and the expansive lyrics. The song is mystical in its own special way. Besides, I’m a sucker for songs with descending bass lines, so she had me from the start regardless of the intent of the song.

After a while, I ended up seriously questioning myself about what I thought “sacred” music was. Ultimately, I concluded that music is inherently sacred. It is a Divine gift – one of many. In quite a few traditional cultures, music was considered as such. The ancient Greeks apparently started out worshipping three muses on Mount Helicon, of which Aoide ('song' or 'tune') was one. They were the daughters of Zeus, king of the gods, and Mnemosyne, Titan goddess of memory. Three Muses were worshipped in Delphi, but their names were different and were assigned as the names of the three chords (Nete, Mese, Hypate) of the lyre. In the peak of Classical Greece, there were a total of nine muses, several of whom had musical connotations: Polyhymnia (hymns), Euterpe (flute), and Erato (lyric choral poetry). In Hinduism it is believed that the manifest universe is based on sound and that the seven notes of the scale are descended from the primordial sound of creation – and that each musical raga (roughly equivalent to a musical scale) is a goddess.

I have long believed that music can be the “royal road” to feeling the proximity of the Divine; but now I try to see it as being a part of Divinity itself. At times when I am easily transported to transcendent heights by the music I am listening to, it is easy to believe this; in situations where music is being used to manipulate people into base thoughts or encourage actions that are not necessarily to their benefit, it is hard to see the Divine within such black magic. And, for the life of me, I cannot appreciate, let alone see Divinity in, traditional Tibetan monastery music -- with the monotonous droning of the monks, the flittering oboes, the occasional blaring horn and the crashing cymbals: it just sounds like chaos and cacophony to me. Maybe that is the intent; I don’t really know. Either way, this seeing Divinity in all music thing is still definitely a work in progress for me. But without music itself, I’m not sure if I’d even be sane by now.

Wishing all a blessed 2026!

Comments

stories, music, gardening

[kallianeira]

Thank you for another enjoyable essay, Ron, and for the Tolstoy story - It reminded me of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". I have just begun reading my first Tolstoy novel, far too late in life.

With regard to (under)valuing different kinds of music, I wouldn't say I could find the divine in Tibetan sacred or several other genres either. To me it points to the longstanding question of whether everything labelled is indeed truly such. Thence to deeper philosophical issues of categories.

When it comes to the individual privileging some forms of a practice over others: I recall being an avid would-be hardline self-sufficient gardener as a youngster, holding that herbs were all right, as were fruit and vegetables, but no way would I suffer a mere ornamental to grow in my patch! Then I found out more, such as about companion planting, and going deeper into herbal practices learned that virtually every ornamental plant (as well as many weeds) has properties which allow it membership in one of my original categories of acceptability. There went those categories! Recently I met someone who thought the same way and declined to argue with them about it :)

Re: stories, music, gardening

[mystical_mountain_9]

Enjoy reading your Tolstoy, Kallianeira. He was a truly remarkable author living in a remarkable time. Russia's contribution to literature, classical music and ballet during the latter half of the 19th century and much of the early 20th century are, in my opinion, among the "high points" of Western culture.

Funny you should mention Dickens' A Christmas Carol: even though I have read plenty of Dickens, it is still by far my favourite (then again, I am a sucker for any story that involves visitations by ghosts/spirits). I may write up my own weird take on the tale sometime - maybe in December.

As for "categories", you are onto something there. I know of what you speak within the gardening context. Farming is in my blood, and so my default philosophy is "if we can't eat it, I won't grow it" - though I do tolerate flowering plants (mostly native species that have medicinal value) in the front yard and allow a wild zone in the deepest part of the back yard (the "back 40" so to speak, but it is 40 square feet rather than 40 acres) to allow the plants spirits of the wild some unmolested space, which I hope they appreciate.