Music, an Influence on and Reflection of Consciousness

Western music, once the greatest in the world, has fallen on hard times. It flourished for over 1,000 years and spoke to the whole person, body, mind and soul, but now is reduced to a pitiful caricature of itself and this is true whether you are speaking of popular music or the more serious variety.

It is certain that our distant pagan forefathers would have had the kind of music we used to regard as primitive, heavy on the drums and accompanied by rhythmic chanting which whipped up primal emotions sometimes to the point of hysteria though they might have thought of that as spiritual ecstasy. It wasn't. It worked on the physical and what occultists call the astral bodies, the latter being the vehicle of the emotional nature. There was minimal melody and no harmony. Somewhat similar to what a lot of music has returned to today though in our time technology has made it even more powerful in its effects to, I might add, our great spiritual detriment.

But as Christianity conquered the West the influence of church music, plainsong and Gregorian chant, would have seeped into the consciousness of everyone, softening, civilising and elevating the primitive paganism of the past in music as well as everything else. Elements of love, joy, peace, hope, forgiveness, all Christian virtues, would have gone out of the church and into everyday society including its music, in the process uplifting dance from a purely sexualised form to one with considerably more grace and elegance.

Polyphony and harmony came from the church music of the Notre Dame era and this developed into the wonderful Renaissance sacred music of composers like Josquin, Ockeghem and a whole host of others. But secular music was affected too including instrumental music as instruments became more sophisticated and news ones were invented. When we reach the time of J.S. Bach we come to an apogee of Western art and a music that had grown quite naturally from its ancient seeds in the liturgy of the Church. Soli Deo Gloria as he wrote at the end of many of his compositions, secular as well as sacred. Baroque music is strongly tied to the dance with its dependence on the basso continuo or figured bass but this is a dance of lightness, elegance and refinement with nothing crude about it and always the primary inspiration is melodic. 

The development in music from baroque into classical might be said to have begun the descent even though the works produced are among the greatest in the Western canon. This was the time of the Enlightenment which was the worship of Reason. Consequently, there was a tendency in music to separate itself from both God and Nature and this carried on into the Romantic era when the centre of the creative process became the composer himself. Again, this resulted in works of exceptional beauty and power because enough of a connection to the past remained to temper the self-centredness and make sure it was not exclusive, and that combined with the appearance of men of genius in a relatively large number. But the disconnect from the spiritual world was becoming obvious. The focus on human emotion dominated spiritual feelings and the ego began to assume its current role as the leading impulse behind artistic creativity. The idea of Soli Deo Gloria was gone. What should have happened was that human imagination and creative drive would have been allied to spiritual perception. What actually did happen was that the former first set itself apart from the latter and then pushed it aside altogether.

The watchword of the 19th century was Revolution. Tradition was overturned to a far greater extent than we now recognise. Romantic artists felt that something vital had been lost and this was reflected in their work which was often deeply nostalgic. But they knew they could never get it back by returning to the past. That was an impossibility. The past is always gone. We must always strive to create a future that is new and based on what we are now even if it can and should contain transformed elements of the past.

The structure of music broke down as the post-Romantic era turned into full-blown modernism. At the same time, the emotional content, which had been ramped up both in terms of the musical message and by sheer volume as singers and orchestras became more powerful, moved in two directions. One, in serious classical music it was quite simply rejected. The music was now cerebral, abstract and elitist, totally divorced from the natural. It had become machine-like and spiritually dead. But in popular music feelings became more important, only they were much cruder feelings. No longer was there any inclination to elevate the emotions. Now, as rhythm and the beat assumed greater centrality in the overall musical package, the lower emotions relating to the body and its gratifications were brought out, encouraged and given their head. Certain writers at the time regarded the advent of jazz as extremely destructive of higher sensibilities and a real factor in the degradation of civilised values, indeed of civilisation itself. It's hard to argue with that and when you see where this sort of music has led the conclusion they were right is unavoidable. We have returned to the deep pagan past of drums and orgiastic dancing in which we do not rise about the ego but fall below it with lyrics all too often depicting crude sexuality and real love totally ignored. A modern love song is likely to be at best a self-pitying complaint but much more probably will sound like the grunts of rutting beasts.

Music is the most profound of all the arts. It can raise us up to a world of divine beauty and order or it can drag us down us to chaos and base material satisfactions that do make us beast-like but without the natural dignity of beasts who act as they act because it is what they are. But human beings are not animals and when they behave as animals they become worse than animals.  We have now replaced a music that elevates with one that degrades and the worst thing is that it is the young that are targeted, people at their most susceptible. Man can be like an angel or an animal and it is music that helps us turn to one or the other. We are fortunate today in that we do have access to all the great music of the past through recorded versions but deeply unfortunate in that most of our modern music is degraded and corrupting.