The Shape of Music
Sep. 21st, 2022 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteele
Music is one of those basic things that ideally should be good for humans. The music that has evolved from the classical versus pop fracture and the music of advertising is not good for humans. If anything, it is anti-human. Marketing jingles and the popular songs that sound like extended versions of them are designed to implant in the brain like parasites. We call them ear worms because they burrow deep into the consciousness and the soft tissues of the brain. Once they are there, their function is to poison by immersion. Instead of being able to hear our own thoughts, we hear the pop song or the jingle’s more direct sales pitch.
Pop songs sell desire, or more specifically dissatisfaction with one’s own appearance and circumstances in order to create desire that makes the host into a good customer intent on collecting all the accoutrements of modern life. Advertising jingles do this in a straightforward way: they plant a catchy tune that lasts far longer than the appeal of the product in question, for instance McDonald’s “duh-dum-duh-duh-duh, I’m lovin’ it”. In the case of longer format jingles, try finding a hip hop song that makes no mention of the accumulation of large amounts of money or contests in which the artist declares themselves superior to others in terms of their sexual appeal.
The hook of any given hip hop tune is designed to convince young people that they need to compete with each other by becoming narcissistic, greedy copies of the artist’s image as presented in the song. In other corners of the pop music world, we find whiny It Girls and It Boys crooning about their broken hearts. The image created in this case is the beautiful martyr who struggles prettily while wearing the latest fashions and taking designer drugs. Once again, the point is to create desire to mate with the star or to be like him or her, constantly advertising one’s status on social media while looking great, of course.
Music is Prayer
Music is and always was a form of prayer. Music is holy and to use it for mass advertising campaigns or by deliberately crafting ear worms to pimp commercialized images defiles it to some degree. This is not to say that all pop songs or even advertising jingles are inherently bad. They’re not. The point is that music has become degraded and debased like many other parts of modern life.
Science has shown that music uses more parts of the brain than any other human activity. Music is a way of accessing parts of the brain and improving them via exercise. Merely listening to music has been shown in studies to improve overall cognition; performing it and improvising it take brainpower to whole new levels of achievement. In other words, music often acts as a highway to the divine.
Nevertheless, not all prayer is good. Prayer is a means of contacting and communicating with incorporeal beings. There are many, many incorporeal beings who are not gods. Praying to them as if they were gods is what most people do, like when I was a child and prayed to the Christian God and Santa Claus at once because I was confused and spiritually illiterate. There are also the ethical issues of praying for someone else, and music can easily become part of that mess. When someone forces you to listen to loud music, whether this is the blaring commercials of a TV program or the twenty-something in his car with a modded out stereo system blasting autotuned swear words to thudding bass, they are attempting to drag you into worshipping what they worship. This practice is not exactly the same praying on someone else’s behalf without their permission, but it is well within the ballpark.
Music is powerful because it is a connecting force or a bridge. Music conjures up a state of mind, for better or for worse. I can no longer bear to watch Midnight Diner, a TV series from Japan that got popularized on Netflix, because of a song played at the beginning and the end of each episode. The song is a plaintive, sad number called Omoide by Tsunekichi Suzuki. I watched the first couple of seasons of Midnight Diner when my cat Kiki was in her last few weeks of life and the song viscerally puts me back in that time. I become overwhelmed with emotion as if I have traveled through time.
Music: The Best Part of Church
Religions have known the power of music for a very long time. Many Christmas songs are Gregorian chants that have been with us since the Dark Ages. The Hagia Sophia, built over 1500 years ago in the city of Istanbul, was clearly designed at least partially to provide beautiful acoustics for singers and perhaps instrumentalists of old.
Music creates structures within the imagination. The imagination is one and the same as the astral plane. I have a peculiar predisposition to synesthesia, or “seeing” sounds and music in my imagination as a series of colorful lines and shapes. The truly odd part is that I believe I can teach other people to be synesthetes and that becoming a synesthete helps singers especially to improve their vocals. Visualizing a pitch as a color makes me far more likely to hit the pitch accurately, especially if it is extra high or low or embedded in a difficult passage of music. When I tell my voice students to do the same, it works like a charm. It is as if the structure of the music exists on a plane other than the one where the sound is heard and that by paying attention to it (by colorizing it within the imagination) we can capture it and hit it like an expert marksman shooting a target.
When I listen to music, I see all sorts of artistic representations of it in my mind’s eye. If the music is crap, such as a commercial jingle, a pop song, or any form of atonalism, it is extra irritating. The shapes are ugly and they linger for a long time as earworms. It is for this reason I rarely attend concerts, and that includes “classical” music concerts. Much of classical music is garbage, especially when listened to as recordings. Mozart, in my opinion, was nowhere near as perfect as his fans presume. I find that much of his music, especially from his early periods, is trite and syrupy. When I listen to music, it is well-chosen and curated. Beautiful music creates kaleidoscopes of color, pattern, and structure and uplifts my imagination often for days afterward.
When a Bach chorale is sung inside a church, it creates a structure within a structure. Astral structures are amplified and reflected by similar astral structures, but can also be affected by physical/etheric structures. Beautiful churches attract and amplify symmetrical, beautiful, harmonious energies. Ugly churches do the opposite. Most religious buildings in the US are hideously ugly and badly designed, so often the music is the only thing redeeming the structure of the building. When a psychically sensitive person walks into such a religious building, he or she will often be deluged by the conflicting and dissonant currents of astral energy pervading the building, not the least of which come from the parishioners and clergy themselves.
If occultism is to experience a renaissance, I believe it will happen largely because of a resurgence of folk music and the study of astral shapes. There isn't much I can do to affect an entire musical and magical renaissance as an individual. Nevertheless, I can at least attempt to play my part (ha ha) by performing and in my case, writing religious music and by teaching others to recognize a musical shape when they see it in their mind's eye.
Christian Rock
Date: 2022-09-22 04:49 pm (UTC)To actually be in a well-designed church when people were doing ancient chants would be wonderful. I have had the privilege of seeing/hearing the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. There isn't anything that compares to a performance like that in a place with well-designed acoustics. The building next to the one where I went to music school, the Auditorium Theater, has what is believed to possess perfect acoustics. I got to see a few shows there and from experience, I think it may be true. Even when the place is packed to the rafters, you can hear the words the singers are saying from the cheap seats.
Pianos are difficult to move, so if you can find the muscle, you can get a decent one for free or very cheaply! Facebook sucks but it does have one good feature: Facebook Marketplace. People give away some amazing things on it if you keep your eyes open. I hope you can find a good one for your youngest, or even a toy keyboard until he/she is ready for an upgrade.
Re: Christian Rock
Date: 2022-09-22 07:36 pm (UTC)I didn't even go to one of the rock and roll churches--- that'd be hard to stomach. But I remember being a little kid and my favorite parts of both mass and the protestant services were the bits where the whole congregation would recite the creed or the responses together: a great rumble of sound that you could almost float on. Neither church had a choir worth mentioning, so I can see how the dumb-ification of the music happened--- I mean, could "Shine, Jesus, Shine" (hork hork hork! Sorry, hairball) ever have gained a foothold in a congregation where the majority of people were still even halfway musically literate? No. Anything you can imagine as a feature of a "KIDZ BOP 27" album, sung by a slurry of high-pitched, overproduced children's voices, to a catchy beat... does not belong in church.
(grump grump grump)
Perfect acoustics for an auditorium are, of course, different from church acoustics-- in an auditorium it's best to avoid echoes and things-- you want sound projected, but not much reflected. There, you'd want the lapse time (how long the sound bounces around the walls and ceilings) to be pretty short. In a cathedral or basilica, it can be pretty long-- but it's an instrument to be played! A good chant harmonizes with its own echoes.
I remember hearing an interview once with a flautist who had made a recording in the Taj Mahal, which has a lapse time of something like *three minutes*, which is insane. It was a delightful thing to listen to. I think it was this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GXcr_Me7yI
Not too long ago, some bright Orthodox musician managed to get permission to record the echoes inside Hagia Sophia-- it was complicated, as singing is not permitted there. Too politically loaded. They set up several microphones, and recorded a baloon popping. From that they did a sort of digital acoustic reconstruction and made a few Byzantine chant recordings of what it should sound like, if you could chant in Hagia Sophia. They're pretty cool, too:
https://www.openculture.com/2020/03/hear-the-sound-of-the-hagia-sophia-recreated-in-authentic-byzantine-chant.html
Re: Christian Rock
Date: 2022-09-23 04:23 am (UTC)Re: Christian Rock
Date: 2022-09-23 02:44 pm (UTC)Re: Christian Rock
Date: 2022-09-23 04:44 pm (UTC)