Soul Music

I have been listening to Wagner's opera Parsifal recently. For those who are interested in such things it's the 1962 Bayreuth performance conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch, excellently recorded in stereo and featuring perhaps the last great generation of Wagner singers. I first heard orchestral extracts from Parsifal, specifically the Prelude and Good Friday music, in my early 20s but didn't listen to the whole opera until much later. I couldn't really get on with the singing and seeming longueurs then but now if I listen to Wagner it's the operas as a whole I listen to, the Ring cycle, especially Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, being my favourite with Parsifal a close second. No one can plumb the depth of Jungian archetypes like Wagner, almost literally so with the prelude to Das Rheingold. There is a spiritual intensity to his music which is quite different to the spiritual quality of, say, Tallis or, different again, Bach because it includes much more than these of the human element though less of the purely spiritual, as is only appropriate for Romantic music. You might say it goes deeper but is less elevated. Those who don't believe that human consciousness has evolved should study Western music of the last 1,000 years. From the pure simplicity of Medieval plainchant to the intricate  harmonies of Renaissance choral polyphony through the more expressive and technically sophisticated Baroque and Romantic music and on to the 20th century when it all broke down there is a clear progression with ever greater emphasis on self-consciousness. Wagner brought this to a pinnacle. After him there didn't seem anywhere left to go except for music to turn in on itself and we are still struggling with that problem. The composer Cyril Scott in his book Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages wrote that Wagner touched the buddhic plane, meaning a plane of high spiritual quality, on two occasions in his music, once with the Good Friday music in Parsifal and once with the Prize Song from The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. One doesn't have to express this in his Theosophical terms to recognise that these two pieces of music genuinely do have a spiritual quality like few others.

This is real soul music. It has always seemed ridiculous to me that what is called soul music is so called. Maybe it's a kind of inversion typical of these latter days since music of the soul is precisely what this kind of music is not. Soul, as in sensitivity to spirit and the higher dimensions of being, is just what is lacking here. It may be enjoyable music on its own terms but those terms are of physical being with input from the emotional level, not spiritual in any proper sense at all. Real music of and from the soul inclines to contemplation not sensual movement. The feelings it arouses are to do with reverence, majesty, awe, humility and the sublime not frenetic excitement of mind and body. It may be that not all people are capable of feeling these, let's call them what they are, higher feelings but it is a spiritually fatal mistake to pretend that the lower is the higher or that the two are in any way equal. They are not and if you don't recognise this you will desensitise yourself to higher reality. It's no good saying everything has its place unless you see the lower in the light of the higher. Sometimes, often, that will put it in a very different light from how it sees itself.