I am back with another thought salad…
In my last blog I mentioned that holding onto a dream is one of the bravest things you can do in an age where everything seems to be going to hell.
War, surveillance capitalism, the dumbing down of humanity now A.I is more prominent, crazyyyy political corruption, the intentional destruction of nations and states to “build back better” cough yada yada
It's like we're in the Truman show-
Life really feels claustrophobic with all of this going on all at once
and it's so easy to feel powerless, fearful, anxious about what's coming next.
Heck they're even talking about aliens now…
But as a musician I was thinking, what role can music play in all of this?
Recently I've found pleasure in reading 2 amazing books that discuss how different historical figures understood music during different periods of time.
The books are called Harmony of the Spheres, a sourcebook on the Pythagorean tradition in music and Harmony of the Heavens and Earth.
Both books are by Jocelyn Godwin a Professor of music at Colgate University.
The former discusses texts from different philosophers, mystics and scientists presenting their view of music.
The latter focuses more on the mystical/occult side of music.
I haven't finished reading both of them yet, they're tough reads because of the language for me haha but I comprehend it after reading a few times.
Now the one thing I was looking for was answers.
What can music do for the world and how can I use it to do my part in making the world a little better?
I know there is so much more to music which I know has been lost over time.
These days we just play notes because they sound good.
We learn songs because we want to improve our skills and techniques.
Which is all fine but there's so much more to it.
What I learned studying intervals for the last 2 years
When I started studying intervals, I told my friend it's so interesting how the Root note of a scale can be used to act as the source for all the following notes after it.
The following notes after the Root note can be pleasing to your ears and tell a happy story or, they can be really displeasing and tell a sad story or both… You can create anything!
After pondering on this, I then thought, “What if we are the Root notes in our own lives?”
The Root note can be seen as the Source, God, Creator of everything, on it's own, it is perfect.
If you think this is blasphemy, you won't like what I have to say next lol
After that you can forget you are the root note and create anything else, maybe you want to create a Major third from the root, this will give you a pleasing sound.
Maybe you create a Minor 3rd from the Root, this creates a darker sound.
By doing this, Music is now a Journey.
The Root note leaving it's place of power and becoming something lesser, more dense.
But when the Root note remembers its place, it can return to it and create a different story whenever it wants.
I think the Root note forgets that it's the Root note so it can enjoy the experience of being other notes.
Maybe it wants to feel what being sad is like.
Maybe it wants to imagine what desiring to be another note is like.
Maybe it wants to be with another note in marriage idk.
Or even experience harmony with plenty of other notes.
Maybe it wants to become a note and argue with other notes saying it is the closest to the root note and all the other notes are going to die forever unless they return to the root note when really all notes were the root note all along.
The Root note has so many dreams and desires it wants to experience.
It's kinda cool how the Root note is all the notes at once and none of them at the same time.
All notes can be the Root note tbh,
They are just Root notes having different experiences in the grand scheme of things.
Once the Root not has experienced what it wanted to, music now becomes a Journey of Remembrance.
Remembering what though?
When a note is experiencing so much tension that it doesn't like, all it has to do it remember that it's the source of everything, the root note.
When a note has experienced it's deepest desires and it still feels empty, it just has to remember that it is the root note so it it everything and is never empty.
Whatever a note is going through during its time, it just has to remember that it is the root note and the root note is it.
It's an eternal dance.
Knowing this, you can see that truly, every note is actually perfect.
Read this all again and let it sink in.
Louis Claude de Saint Martin 1743-1803
While skimming through the Harmony of Spheres, there's a text from this guy where he talks about a
“Common chord”
On my first read I was thinking wtf is a common chord.
If you don't want to read this large block of text, I'll sum it up for you under the image.
He says that there is a chord that is perfect, self contained without need of any other note.
In my head I was thinking is there? Tell me that chord so I can play it lol
He then mentions that the chords first three notes are separated by two intervals of a third, distinct but linked to each other.
All this means is that there's a Root note, a Major third (Lighter sound) and a Minor Third (Darker Sound)
When you stack a Root, Major Third and Minor Third together, you get a Major chord.
This is what a Major chord sounds like:
Lastly he mentions that you can add another Root note to the top (An octave) to act as as a “Principal agent”
This simply means it unifies everything together.
You can see it as directing the light and dark sounds below that I mentioned, balancing it out.
(The Journey of remembrance)
What interested me though was how called the Root note the "active and intelligent cause"
which "dominates and presides with a double law over corporeal beings)
Corporeal meaning material and you can see double law as duality.
So this guy from the 18th-19th century spoke of this one chord as if it were a mirror of the reality itself.
There's source (Root)
The Major Third (Good)
The Minor Third (Bad)
The 2 thirds represent duality.
Light, darkness, pain, pleasure, contraction, expansion etc.
Timaeus (Dialogue from plato)
If we go back even further in time, we have a dialogue from Plato called Titled:
The Demiurge Fashions the World-Soul
This is a long piece of dialogue which I won't add here because I'm still trying to understand it all to the best of my ability.
If you don't know what the Demiurge is, it's the God of this realm who shapes the world into what it is.
This according to Plato atleast, Gnostics and other traditions teach it as a God who created this physical world but is evil out of it's own ignorance because it doesn't know that there is a God that created it which is the true creator. Quite interesting stuff to research.
Anyways I'll mention one thing that blew my mind when trying to understand the Timaeus.
Within the dialogue, there's a part where it describes the Demiurge using Musical ratios to make the universe in a structured way.
He says that first he uses the 1:1 ratio which symbolises Unity.
Let's say our unity note is C and it vibrates at 261 hz
In music you can see this as playing 2 notes at 261 hz. That's the rate of vibration per second.
These notes are linked, every vibration, they play at the same time.
Here's a diagram I made to understand it, but you can see the notes playing at the same time (the dots)
You can see all the dots are aligned.
Earlier I said the Root note is perfect on its own.
Then the Demiurge split it and made a Double interval, this is called an Octave and this is the first interval Plato uses after Unity.
An Octave can be seen as 2:1
We have one Note a 522 hz and another at 261 hz, one is vibrating double the speed.
This could represent higher unity? Idk, its the same but bigger. Or maybe expansion.
You can see the dots still align, just on every other count so it aligns less frequently compared to 1:1.
The next ratio is 3:2 and this is called a perfect fifth.
The fifth is still stable but not as stable as unity as the notes align every 6 counts in the diagram.
Next we have 4:3 and it'd look like this:
This one aligns only every 12 counts.
Now i'm sure you can see that as we keep going, we get more and more out of alignment.
If you were to hear it, the smaller the ratio, the more pleasing to the ears.
1:1 sounds good
The larger the ratio, the more displeasing to the ears.
It's fascinating to see that it's based on how frequently the notes align with the root note.
But regardless of how much tension there is and how long it takes to align, the notes always have to align back to the Root note.
How music can make the world a better place.
At the start of this blog I mentioned all the fuckeries going on with the world right now.
My first question was, what role can music play in all of this?
I think it can be used as a tool to see nature itself and understand it.
If Plato and countless others in the past saw sound as what created everything
“Let there be light”
why don't we?
That's so powerful.
Music literally touches the soul, so why don't we see how we can use it to enlighten ourselves and grow in understanding of our inner world and outer.
"Sound can't be seen, but it can be felt.
In the same way, our inner world can't be seen but it shapes what we feel in our outer world.
Perhaps all it takes is a spark within your inner world saying ‘let there be light’ for it be felt in the outer." - Nass
The more I see music like this, the more powerful it becomes for me.
The second question is, How can music make the world a better place?
If we dedicated some time to see music at this level or even deeper, I'm sure that whatever happens externally, as long as everyone remembered that they are the Root note, things would shift in favour for them.
But its all a dance, a game of awareness.
Eventually you're going to want to be the Root note again and I hope when that time comes, you create an experience that betters your own and everyone else's life while we are still dancing.
I'm gonna go see if Platos Timaeus has any relation to the bible's creation story lol
Thank you for reading.