Rameau and Ravel

Readers who don't believe in reincarnation will have to bear with me on this one, though even they might be intrigued to see how certain patterns repeat themselves in similar circumstances.

I have long had a theory that the two French composers Jean-Phillipe Rameau and Maurice Ravel could be the same soul in two different lifetimes. Rameau (1683-1764, making him an exact contemporary of Bach) worked in the late baroque style while Ravel (1875-1937) was associated with Impressionism but, like his very different contemporary Debussy, dismissed the label, and the precision and clarity of his composing style bear him out.

So, what are the grounds for this, admittedly speculative, theory? First of all, let's look at the two men's faces. Here is Rameau.

and here is Ravel.

They're not the same but there are similarities in the features which you don't have to force onto the images. They will obviously have different genetic input to their physiognomy, but something of the inner man comes through and stamps its impression on the face as well.

However, let's put that aside. At best it's only a support to a more thorough  examination, and we do find striking musical and psychological parallels between the two men. Before we look into those, though, I should say that I do not believe all incarnations follow a similar path. Here we have a case where the same soul might follow two lives in the same place (France) and doing the same thing (music). It is expressing a developed talent. But other lives might take on totally different forms and be devoted to totally different ends in different places. The soul does not learn by doing the same thing life after life. It might follow certain paths and hone certain talents for a while but to be a rounded spiritually completed being it cannot focus on those alone to the detriment of a more holistic development. If these are the same soul, it had a mission which lasted for more than one lifetime but that doesn't mean it will be a composer, or even musical, in every life.

Both composers were obsessed with order and logic. This may be a French characteristic anyway but these two men manifested it very strongly. Rameau, decidedly a man of the Enlightenment, wrote the definitive Traité de l’harmonie (1722) which stated that music is a science governed by definite rules which "cannot be known to us without the aid of mathematics". For his part Ravel approached music with the same precision, maintaining that his compositions were put together with the "inevitability of a mathematical equation." Stravinsky even teased him about this calling him "the Swiss watchmaker" because of how the meticulous intricate way he constructed his pieces.

Both men were masters of the dance. Although he came to opera late in his career, this was the genre in which Rameau most excelled. The musical form and structure of his opéra-ballets such as Les Indes galantes were entirely derived from dance patterns which he transformed into supremely elegant rhythms while Ravel, taking inspiration from the Baroque, translated those patterns into a 20th century idiom as in, for example, Le Tombeau de Couperin (a tip of the hat to a contemporary of Rameau’s), La valse, Pavane pour une infante défunte not forgetting his tour de force Boléro.

Both men were masterful orchestrators, exceptional even among their peers. Rameau employed rich textures and instrumental colours within his operas for dramatic effect such as the depiction of primordial chaos in the overture to Zaïs. He never wrote a purely orchestral piece but his operas and ballets are full of mini-symphonies and dances in which he demonstrated his outstanding skill in manipulating colour and texture. Ravel is considered one of the greatest orchestrators in the history of music, renowned for the balance and clarity he brought to his work. Examples are Daphnis et Chloé, Boléro and orchestrations of some of his own piano works though perhaps his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Picture at an Exhibition serves as exhibit A.

 

Both men poured a substantial amount of their creativity into keyboard works. Rameau demanded strict adherence to ornamentation and approached his compositions for the harpsichord with rigorous structural logic while, in like manner, Ravel insisted on an unemotional clarity for his piano pieces in which articulation had to be clean and precise. Then they both mimicked sounds from nature in their works, for example, Le Rappel des oiseaux  and La Poule for Rameau countered by Jeux d'eau and Oiseaux tristes by Ravel.

 

Finally, and most tellingly, both men had similar character traits with each of them exhibiting an extremely fastidious detachment. Rameau was a very private man, withdrawn and introverted with frugal habits and living only for music or so it seems. For his part Ravel lived a semi-reclusive life in his country home and guarded his inner life from outsiders with a mask that saw him dubbed as cold and distant. He never married, again living only for music. Rameau did marry but only when he was 42.

 

Obviously, none of that is remotely conclusive but it is intriguing,  and Ravel with his clockwork perfection, fascination with dance and devotion to pure form fits the bill as a spiritual descendant to Rameau in a way that Debussy never could, despite his piano piece Hommage à Rameau. So maybe it was the same soul just as some have speculated G.K. Chesterton was a subsequent incarnation of Samuel Johnson and George Bernard Shaw was of Voltaire. 

 

From Siegfried to Tristan to Parsifal

 Last year I wrote a post called The Spiritual Failure of Tristan about the character in Wagner's famous opera. In it I maintained that Tristan represents the failure of a spiritual test though, if failure is too strong a word, one might also interpret the opera as showing how a soul can only learn and grow through experiencing the intensity of desire for perhaps in order really to know the fullness and depth of spiritual love you must experience earthly love in its highest form, just as only a strong self can reap the deeper benefits of transcending ego. To renounce fully you must know completely.

I had forgotten about this post but a couple of days ago someone added a comment disagreeing with my interpretation. I then disagreed with his disagreement, though I wasn't entirely sure on what basis he was disagreeing, but this made me reflect further and I recalled something I had once seen, and maybe even came from Wagner himself, about how Siegfried, Tristan and Parsifal can be seen as the same character at different stages of development. I would like to explore that idea a bit further here.

The premise is that these three characters depict successive stages in the same soul's spiritual evolution. It is already the soul of a hero so not an everyman but one who has been brought to the apex of worldly achievement and is now ready to move beyond that into spiritual consciousness.

Siegfried appears first as a child soul linked to the world of nature and the instincts. Born and raised in the forest, he has no contact with the world of men and lives in a state of pre-conscious innocence. He cannot, certainly does not, reflect because his ego is directed only outwards. He is free and fearless but also insensitive to others and totally ignorant. And yet he is a hero which means he has on some level reached a certain degree of achievement. Nevertheless, he is only awakened to himself by his mountaintop encounter with Brunnhilde, demonstrating how we can only know ourselves and become fully self-conscious through experiencing the other. That is one of the fundamental meanings of the division into two sexes. Siegfried, however, betrays his other half through his lack of self-awareness, and this same lack leads to his downfall and death. 

Tristan is Siegfried reborn. He too is a hero but a more self-aware one. He loves Isolde from the beginning but obeys custom and convention and the mores of society, things that would have meant nothing to the pre-adult Siegfried, until the magic potion breaks down his resistance. The potion, by the way, could just as well be water as it is not magic that makes it no longer possible for Tristan and Isolde to conceal the truth of their love but the belief they are about to die. 

Henceforth, Tristan is consumed by passion, first the passion of Eros and then the passion for Thanatos. This passion is so intense it reveals to him the nightmare of the separate self, isolated but desperate for completion in the other. His sense of the pain of duality means he can find no resolution except through annihilation in death and darkness. Tristan is the earthly self brought to the realisation that it must go beyond itself to escape pain and suffering, but he seeks this outwardly in another created being rather than on a spiritual level. He must go through the fire of having all his earthly attachments burnt out before he can progress.

And so we come to Parsifal. To begin with Parsifal is Siegfried reborn, perhaps showing that we must recapitulate past experiences before we can move on to a higher level. He is the pure fool and must go through many trials before he gains wisdom. Unlike Siegfried, who fails through lack of thought and self-awareness, or Tristan, who fails by surrendering his will to desire, Parsifal resists temptation when he refuses to succumb to Kundry in the pivotal Act 2. By transforming sensual passion into divine compassion, he overcomes the desire that brought down Tristan and moves out of the state of ego-driven will into that of the redeemed self who can now become a saviour for others. It is no coincidence that the spear which killed Siegfried now becomes the holy spear that heals the wounded Amfortas who also may well stand for Wotan whose original sin in seeking power rather than love led to the whole corrupt state of the world which can only be healed by compassion.

In the light of this, perhaps my anonymous commenter was right after all in that Tristan's failure was not so much a failure as an inevitable stage that all souls must go through on their journey from the Adamic innocence of Siegfried through Tristan's full human immersion in self-consciousness which he sought to escape in the wrong way, to the transcending of that in Parsifal's eventual union with God. 

I don't know how much Wagner was conscious of this and how much came from his profound artistic intuition, but I believe he was aware of the significance of his characters. I would still have a bone to pick with him in that, even in Parsifal, he downplays the importance of Christ and God who are both shadowy figures in the opera, almost peripheral to its development when they should be central. That is a weakness, but then Wagner was writing in the 19th century when the weight of official Christianity may have been artistically stifling. He sought to break free from the trappings of religion to find its essential source, and in these operas he depicted the progress of a soul with extraordinary beauty and insight.

I could stop here but before concluding it is worth looking at the three female protagonists because they are far from being mere passive foils for the male hero. They are actually crucial to the whole story, and they have their own progression too. 

Brunnhilde represents the descent of the soul to the human state. She loses her spiritual qualities and knowledge but gains the capacity to suffer which may not seem like a gain but is because it opens up the heart to love. She becomes vengeful and bitter when betrayed but in the end, purged by suffering, in the great immolation scene, a Viking sati, she transcends both her human condition and her earlier immature spirituality (immature because it knows nothing else) to reach a kind of omniscience based on universal compassion. To love all is to know all.

Isolde's evolution is similar to Tristan's in that she starts off trapped by duty, the marriage to King Mark, but she is also consumed by pride and anger until her ego is rent asunder by her love for Tristan after that love can no longer be denied. Her trajectory is different to his in that she does not seem so consumed by her passion but she too ends up by dissolving her individual identity into the universal sea which may be seem a spiritual transfiguration but is actually a return to the pre-creation state so spiritually regressive from the Christian point of view. It ends suffering but does not bring true divine union. It doesn't appear that Wagner thought of it like this but it may be that on some level he knew he could not leave his female archetype there and had to move on to Kundry.

Kundry is Wagner's most developed female character, the one he had been reaching towards in all his previous operas. She is the eternal feminine at its most powerful and its most destructive before being transfigured by submission to divine will. After laughing at Christ on the cross she is condemned to wander through the centuries, acting as a despised servant by day and a demonic temptress by night, the one in payment for her sin, the other as the direct expression of the psychic state behind it. This sin cannot be atoned for until she meets someone who can resist her. Only when Parsifal does resist her kiss, which he does out of compassion, that is important, is she freed from her curse which is basically the prison of her own ego. 

This is not the end, either for her or for Parsifal himself, because she must endure many more years of purifying servitude, and he must undergo many more trials during which he cannot use the holy spear as a weapon however much he is attacked. But it is the beginning of the end, and it is brought to its conclusion when Parsifal returns to Montsalvat (Valhalla again, but built this time to support spiritual renunciation rather than worldly power), and she bathes his feet, in return receiving baptism from him. Her spiritual journey is complete and, though this is not brought out in the opera, she can now serve in the lineage of the Virgin Mary who is the eternal feminine fully spiritualised.

My (Current) Favourite Symphony

 I suppose Mozart is the greater composer but I often prefer Haydn. There is an innate goodness about his music and it appears there was about him too. Portraits show a kind looking man and reports about his life confirm this impression. He was widely regarded as a good and honourable person, and noted for his particular modesty, generosity and warm heart. He was a humble man with deep faith in God to whom he attributed his artistic success. All in all, a completely admirable person, very unusual for a great artist!

I have recently worked my way through his entire symphonic oeuvre, 104 official ones plus a couple of late discoveries, and there is not a dud among them. Some are obviously better than others, and the later works certainly show development. Quite unlike pop musicians who have usually done their best work by 25, Haydn carried on improving and was composing some of his greatest works at the end of his long life. But there are pieces of genius throughout the canon. I particularly love the last movement of the 29th symphony, a joyous presto rush to the line which is at 12.33 here, but there are countless other examples one could give. The middle period Sturm and Drang symphonies are very fine with their early hints at a Romantic sensibility expressed through the subtle use of counterpoint and dramatic contrasts.

English readers of a certain age will know the Ladybird books, short hardback books for children of about 50 pages which introduced their youthful audience to a variety of subjects from fairy tales to British history and wildlife. I remember as a small child being entranced by the Ladybird books of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, all beautifully illustrated. There was also a Ladybird book of classical composers and that may have been where I first heard of Haydn. It's certainly where I first heard of classical music. I remember reading that the experienced listener could even tell the difference between Bach, Mozart and Beethoven which seemed incredible to me then! 

This was when I was very young. Some years later when I began to explore classical music I remembered this book and bought LPs of some of the recommended works such as Bach's Brandenburg concertos, Mozart piano concertos and Beethoven symphonies and piano sonatas. I also bought Haydn's Surprise Symphony in a performance by Herbert von Karajan which would probably seem very heavy-handed to me now. But then I enjoyed it immensely. It is deceptively simple, incredibly tuneful and the perfect piece for a classical newcomer.

It's a pointless exercise, playing the game of favourites because there are so many possibilities and one's tastes change. I would certainly not say that the Surprise Symphony is better than Beethoven's Pastoral or Mozart's Jupiter or Dvorak's New World just to mention symphonies with names, but at the moment it is the one I am enjoying the most. The Andante 2nd movement is the famous one with the surprise which I won't describe in case you haven't heard it, but all 4 movements are wonderful with a fleet-footed joy to them. Elitists may turn their noses up at what Charles Ives called "Nice little easy sugar-plum sounds", but that's their bad luck. Haydn doesn't plumb the depths of a Beethoven or Wagner, that was not his era, and some may mistake his fluency for a facile shallowness. However, his music breathes sheer natural goodness, and that is sometimes the best thing to experience.

Humanity today is not creatively constructive but creatively destructive.

 "Creative power is used for destructive purposes. Nearly all modern arts are blasphemy."

This is a quotation from Towards the Mysteries by Swami Omananda (Maud McCarthy) which is presented as a record of communications from elevated spiritual beings. Most of this sort of stuff is spiritually sub-standard and not what it purports to be, but this is one of the rare exceptions that carries the ring of truth.

Anyway, back to the quote which can stand on its own, regardless of claimed provenance. It suggests that human creativity in the 20th century, and by extension the 21st since that has carried on in the same vein only more so, is not in line with divine being but goes against it. I don't see how any sane person could dispute this. For a while the idea of something being new and different as modern art was could perhaps justify it to some extent, but that period was over by the 1920s. Thereafter, most human creativity, and especially that which was lauded by the art establishment and cognoscenti, dismantled divine order and sometimes spat in its face. In terms of popular art, especially music, the trend was backwards, reviving primitive forms of expression that should have been outgrown, though with technological sophistication giving it greater potentcy. I am not saying that none of this had any artistic merit but overall the form in which these musicians worked rendered the content spiritually harmful. As the composer and Theosophist Cyril Scott said in his book Music, its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages, "After the dissemination of Jazz, which was definitely "put through" by the Dark Forces, a very marked decline in sexual morals became noticeable." We don't like to admit this now but the reality is that the influence of less evolved groups pulled down the standards and level of consciousness of Western society in general.

Even when art flirted with the so-called spiritual it was rarely on the level of aspiring to true divine understanding as with the music and cathedrals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Instead it sought to expand the circle of personal experience and consequently was just as likely to plumb the depths as scale the heights. The creativity involved did not explore truth and beauty and the good, but the supposed wholeness of human nature which effectively means delving into the ugly and the diabolical, and that inevitably damaged and degraded the culture. Human creativity was not aligned with divine order but actually worked against it. As a result it did not refresh or revitalise the human spirit. It exhausted it because it was only attuned to the human mind separated from God and that is a self-consuming, decaying source of inspiration. It retains a certain amount of energy from its origin in divine being but that dissipates over a period and we seem to be coming near the end of that period which is why so much in the field of art and culture now just recycles what came before.

People are acclaimed as great artists today who might have a certain skill and talent but do not have what truly makes an artist which is attunement to the level of Forms, using that word in its Platonic sense. What this means is an awareness of the pattern of divine being and this can unfold in a multitude of ways depending on the individual qualities of the artist. But now we have creative people falling back on themselves and their own minds, and where there is some inspiration from a non-material source it is from the lower levels of being though, as is the way with these things, often mistaken for or claimed to be from higher levels. But by their fruits shall you know them, and the fruit of most art over many decades now is rotten to the core. Humanity is possibly more creative than it ever has been but so often what is created or produced is spiritual poison. This is certainly the case with what gets taken up and promoted. Hence many people seek out the art and beauty of the past which still has the power to inspire. 

I'll tell you why this is done. It's because Satan (using that name to describe the central core of the powers of evil) knows that if he can deform people's idea of beauty he can deform their idea of God and the good. They will consider themselves more sophisticated and 'advanced' than those who don't get it and then they are his toys to do with as he wishes. Unfortunately, he finds plenty of willing egotists in this world to carry out his will.

The Spiritual Failure of Tristan

Tristan & Isolde is a great opera, one of the very greatest. The Act 1 Prelude, Isolde's Narrative and Curse, the Love Duet in Act 2 and the concluding Liebstod in which Isolde sings ecstatically of a transcendent union with Tristan after death are some of the most extraordinary moments in Western music. The impact of this opera was profound on late 19th century consciousness and marked all serious music subsequently. Countless writings testify to its enormous influence, and not just on composers but artists across the creative spectrum.

The music is extraordinary, and yet the message of this opera as it comes through in the libretto is one of spiritual decadence and death. Tristan, originally a solar hero, is undone by infatuation with a woman and consequently becomes a weak, pitiful figure whose inner sense of wholeness and integrity is completely undermined by his obsession. He seeks to shun the day and be absorbed in night, and this represents the overcoming of the spiritual strength of the sun by lunar forces which is essentially the overcoming of spirit by matter. 

That is the very reverse of the true spiritual path, especially the masculine path, in which the self is raised to godlike potency through conscious alignment with divine reality. Instead, Tristan seeks to be merged back into the chaos of pre-creation from whence his soul emerged. Overcome by his sensual passions and losing control of his inner centre, he seeks a return to the emasculating arms of the primeval matriarchy and a pantheistic dissolution instead of following the path of becoming a radiant centre of light himself. 

In this path he could still have loved Isolde but would not have let that love overwhelm his spiritual integrity. He would have been master of it although, in the context of the story, he would not have acted on it since she was betrothed to another man so he not only betrayed his oath of loyalty to the King, as related in King Mark's desolate lament, in my view the spiritual heart of the opera, but he also violated the sanctity of marriage.

This does not form part of Wagner's treatment of the legend but the story serves as an illustration of a test for an initiate (Tristan was a hero so at a high level of spiritual development) which he failed. There is no sense of this in the opera which is a straight paean to romantic love which, although ending in tragedy from the worldly point of view, sees the two protagonists finding their fulfilment in death with the implication they have moved onto a higher plane. But have they really or have they succumbed to idolatry? Real spiritual attainment only comes when the soul turns away from seeking fulfilment in creation, any aspect of creation, even a lover as soulmate, and looks for it in the Creator. Then the soul can turn back to creation and move in its confines without attachment or suffering.

Love is an excuse for anything runs the Romantic creed, a creed we have largely adopted today. But this is an illusion. There is love and then there is love. Jesus said that the greatest love is to lay down one's life for one's friends. Tristan and Isolde lay down their lives but not as acts of personal sacrifice. They are seeking the delights of heaven not renouncing these delights for the love of God. Only those who are prepared to sacrifice heaven for others are worthy to enter it.

There is a close parallel with that other Arthurian story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Here too sexual obsession and infidelity are the cause of spiritual failure and destroy an ideal kingdom. Lancelot was the greatest of knights but he proved unworthy at the final test, and, because he was the greatest, his downfall impacted the whole world in which he lived. Arthur's kingdom was destroyed. But unlike Tristan, Lancelot worked out his fault through renunciation and repentance as he lived the rest of his life as a monk just as Guinevere, his adulterous lover, became a nun in contrition for her part in the sin. Love does not justify everything. At least, what is called love does not do so. There are higher values which even love must obey.

Wagner's words may carry a misleading spiritual message because his metaphysical understanding was limited. He adopted Schopenhauer's misconception of Nirvana as non-being as Tristan's credo, and saw that as the peak of spiritual realisation. However, in Tristan & Isolde his musical understanding and power of expression exceed his intellectual and philosophical grasp as they also did in Parsifal which is a curious and unsatisfactory mish-mash of Christianity and Buddhism from the story point of view but contains music in the Prelude and Good Friday section that is amongst the most spiritually profound of anything heard in this world. Tristan & Isolde also has music that reaches further into the higher planes than practically any other, but one can see why some people have problems with Wagner. The music can seem too intense while the themes of some of his operas, and Tristan especially, do have something spiritually self-indulgent about them. Nonetheless, Wagner was clearly used by the powers that be to bring through something entirely new and open up higher levels of reality to the physical plane. He was certainly not a saint but then how many saints are creative artists of genius?

Some Music for the Nativity

 This is Nesciens Mater by the 16th century composer Jean Mouton. Technically, it is a quadruple canon at the fifth with a delay of two bars between lower and higher voices but that's just the way it's constructed. The heart of it is its shimmering beauty in which time seems to be suspended and which conveys the awe and humility of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the face of the miracle of the Incarnation like nothing else. It is a halo of light in musical form.

Version 1

Nesciens mater virgo virum peperit sine dolore salvatorem saeculorum. Ipsum regem angelorum sola virgo lactabat, ubere de caelo pleno. Knowing no man, the Virgin mother bore, without pain, the Saviour of the world. Him, the king of angels, only the Virgin suckled, breasts filled by heaven.

The piece is so lovely it's worth hearing in 2 quite different versions. Surely this is music to convert the most hard-hearted of unbelievers.

Version 2

A Foretaste of Heaven

 Apparently at the first performance of Handel's Messiah in Dublin, which took place in 1742, a member of the audience was so moved by Mrs Cibber's performance of the aria "He was despised" that he rose from his seat and exclaimed, " Woman, for this, be all thy sins forgiven." I feel similarly about the Agnus Dei from the Missa L'Homme Armé Sexti Toni by the 15th century composer Josquin Des Préz.

Agnus Dei

This version by the Tallis Scholars was the first I heard. It's from their famous recording of the two L'Hommé Armé masses* but there's another by Oxford Camerata which is a minute longer and possibly even more sublime. It's the third Agnus Dei (starting at 3.41) which is so heavenly. It's 5 minutes of bliss but it's also a technical masterpiece for in it Josquin increases his 4 voices to 6 and then "combines a retrograde canon based on the armed man cantus firmus with two other canons moving at one beat's distance."

* The whole recording of the two masses is here.

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.

Bach's Cantatas

 There are people who say they would rather have Bach and no one else than everyone else and no Bach. I am not of that camp but I can understand where those who are might be coming from. There is something about Johann Sebastian that answers every musical need from profound contemplation to intellectual fascination to, last but not least, toe-tapping danciness. I have known and loved Bach since I began exploring classical music seriously and among the first classical recordings I bought were performances of the Brandenburg Concertos and some harpsichord bits and pieces. 

Until recently I had a couple of dozen of Bach's cantatas on CD and had heard maybe a dozen more but I only set about listening to the whole lot a few months ago. There are over 200 if you include the secular cantatas but the great majority are on religious themes and the texts are often deeply touching. But the music is the thing and I have been astonished at the non-stop stream of creativity and inventiveness Bach shows in these pieces. Although there is the odd instrumental sinfonia they are mostly based on the format of choir, recitative, aria and choral. Some are for one voice, some for several and there are a range of obbligato accompaniments in the arias, usually violin, oboe, cello, flute, trumpet but other instruments too. Within the relatively restricted language of the 18th century baroque Bach never seems to repeat himself. His melodic inspiration never fails and he brings out the meaning of the text with unmatched skill and emotional depth. Without denying the marvels of his keyboard, chamber and instrumental music or the wonders of the B minor Mass and two Passions, I have now come to the conclusion that it is in his cantatas that Bach's musical genius is best displayed.

There are several complete recordings but I have collected them from a variety of performers, the famous Harnoncourt/Leonhardt recordings with boy choirs and sopranos, and those of John Eliot Gardiner, Ton Koopman and Masaaki Suzuki which are all excellent but I rather like the budget priced edition of Pieter Jan Leusink with female sopranos and the Holland Boys Choir which seems to capture the Lutheran idiom very well even if it can be a little rough vocally in places though that does give it a certain homespun authenticity such as one might imagine you might have heard in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig which is where Bach composed the bulk of his cantatas when he was the Kantor or musical director there from 1723 to 1750 though most of the works were composed during the first few years when he would sometimes be turning out a cantata a week for the appropriate days in the church calendar.

The cantatas are referenced by BWV numbers starting at BWV 1 and going up to BWV 215 though a few in that list have turned out not to be by Bach. The last 15 are secular and the rest spiritual. I think it would take you several days to listen to the lot and that's if you carried on day and night so here are some of my favourites which you will be able to find in decent performances on Youtube. I've deliberately left out some of the more famous ones such as BWV 147 which is the Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring one.

1,4,6,8,10,11,18,22,26,29,30,32,36,45,49,51,61,66,80,82,83,86,88,94,113,121,123,125,132,156,163,178,184,188,202,211,215.

In that list BWV 4 is the first he wrote around 1707 and BWV 30 among the last in 1738 but the great majority were written in Leipzig between 1723 and 1726 in what must have been one of the most extraordinary bursts of creativity by anyone ever.

All the performers I mention above use period instruments but slightly older recordings were those of Karl Richter and I have a soft spot for these because of the excellent solo singers and spiritual insights of someone who actually served as the organist of the same Leipzig Thomaskirche where Bach had been musical director for 27 years. Also because among the first classical music records I bought was an LP of highlights from the St Matthew Passion conducted by Richter and I still prefer this to any version I have heard since, especially the aria Mache dich, mein Herze, rein (Make thee clean, my heart, from sin) sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Listening to this really does leave one feeling spiritually cleansed, for a while at least until the world closes back in again.

Mache dich The aria start at 2.35.

You might wonder why in a post about the cantatas the only musical link I provide is to an aria from the St Matthew Passion but the musical language in the same in both genres, and there are just too many superb arias in the cantatas for me to be able to pick one or even several. This was among the first Bach arias I ever heard and it remains special for me for that reason and also for its great spiritual beauty.

Stabat Mater

 There are a number of wonderful settings of the great 13th century hymn describing the sufferings of Mary at the foot of the cross on the first Good Friday. It obviously inspired many composers and still does if you look at the list of those who have put it to music. Among my favourites are those by Josquin, Palestrina and Pergolesi written when he was only about 25. But my very favourite is by an English composer and not, I hasten to add, for patriotic reasons. It really is extraordinary and contains some of the first word painting which is normally thought to have originated about 100 years later at the dawn of the Baroque period with masters like Monteverdi.

This composer lived in the latter half of the 15th century and his work is preserved in the famous Eton Choirbook which is a collection of sacred music for liturgical use, mostly dedicated to the Virgin Mary and including several Stabat Mater Dolorosas. John Browne may have a common name but his music is anything but ordinary. In fact, it is some of the most dramatic religious polyphony ever written with one famous example being his setting of the words Crucifige, Crucifige in which the clamour of the baying mob seems to depict the hammering of nails into the cross. But this alternates with more peaceful and reflective passages of great beauty, and Brown juxtaposes the full choir sections with settings for reduced voices with extraordinary skill. The piece is about 15 minutes long and not a note is wasted.

I actually found the first version I ever heard on Youtube and here it is. It's an early recording of The Sixteen directed by Harry Christophers and for me has the passion of youth before professionalism takes over. Not that they aren't very professional here.

Stabat Mater

The Crucifige section is at 8.10. But little earlier at 6.54 the music shifts gloriously into the major at the lovely words Stabat mater, rubens rosa (the Mother stood, a blushing rose). And as with many of these English pieces of the period there is an extended Amen starting at 14.10 which brings the whole piece to an exhilarating conclusion. This is one of the most extraordinary musical compositions of any period and if you think that is hyperbole have a listen.

Music and the Mind

Yesterday I listened to a Shostakovich string quartet which I appreciated but couldn't really say I enjoyed. Then, to cleanse my musical palate, I put on some consort music by the Elizabethan composer John Dowland. What a relief! Whilst I do admire Shostakovich, listening to the string quartet was something of an effort because of its gritty angularity and feelings of threat and disorder. On the other hand, the Dowland was pure pleasure. Everything was right and breathed cosmic harmony. This reminded me once again of the damage Beethoven did to Western music with his introduction of psychologically unsettling states, jarring emotions, rage and sometimes near despair. Yes, I know he brought in profounder ideas of the human psyche taken simply as the human psyche but his music, notwithstanding its splendours, was much less wholesome and spiritually clean than what had gone before. For all his revolutionary impact he didn't come out of nowhere as first baroque and then classical music introduced much more of an earthly human element. But Beethoven took music, and hence art and even human consciousness, to the next level, shifting the focus entirely from God to Man.

This was necessary and intended. To be actively spiritual we had to become more aware of ourselves, and the Romantic movement, of which Beethoven was an extremely significant part, was crucial in bringing this about. We cannot blame Beethoven for the fact that music and art eventually descended into an obsession with (fake) originality and the celebration of ugliness or that second-rate artists decided that, not being particularly creative themselves, their purpose was to shock, épater les bourgeois being their guiding motivation. But his was the seed that grew into a poisonous weed because it was fertilised by corrupted ideology and thought. Moreover, his music already contained elements of the spiritual decadence that would follow after him in a more explicit and developed form.

What should have happened? Having become more aware of self and its creative potential, human consciousness and art (each feeding into the other) should have turned back to God, now seeing him as immanent as well as transcendent. This began to happen to a partial degree but not enough and instead the whole process was thrown off track by the growing atheism and materialism, the consequences of which are still ongoing and developing.

All contemporary art and music is, to a greater or lesser extent, corrupt. If we want to breathe a purer air our best bet is to refresh ourselves, as I did with the Dowland, with music of a previous era. This will not be perfect but it will be spiritually healthy because it will come from a time when the truth of divine being was recognised and not just recognised but primary. Here's a piece to start you off. It comes from a polyphonic mass by the 16th century Italian composer Palestrina. It's the final Agnus Dei of his Missa Brevis in a particularly heartfelt performance. There is still great beauty in the world.

Missa Brevis Agnus Dei II

Palestrina has rather a noble face too.

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.

The Glastonbury Festival

The Glastonbury music festival took place recently. It's named after Glastonbury even though the site is about 6 miles away from the town. Presumably this gives it some kind of mystical cachet and admittedly it does sound better than Pilton, the original name in 1970. The festival has become extremely popular since then and is now celebrated as something that shows modern Britain in one of its best lights. Music, joy, love, peace, what could be better?

It is well known that the dark forces try to corrupt sacred sites by co-opting the spiritual power to be found there and using it for their own ends. Firstly, because there is power in these places, but secondly, so that its spiritual effect is nullified and negated. Glastonbury has been a particularly unhappy victim of this tendency and the festival is currently one of the main tools the devil employs to this end.

I'm not going to try to justify this what many would call extreme, if not mad, statement. If you don't already see that contemporary pop, rock and related forms of music are almost entirely negative from a spiritual point of view (though some, such as rap, are a good deal worse than others), there's nothing I could say that would convince you. I might mention that this music stimulates lower, primitive elements in our psychological make-up, especially by its use of beat but also through electrification and volume. I might point to the separation of crude physical sex from love, never mind marriage, it promotes. And I might mention the effect that it has on its audience which reverts to a kind of mindless mob mentality in which the individual is swallowed up by the crowd, just the reverse of what should take place in a true spiritual experience of which this is clearly a parody and distortion (see love and peace above). I might mention these things but they should be obvious. I'm not saying all this music is bad. I still like some from when I was young myself, but a great deal is and it's getting worse with the artistic elements diminished and all the negative aspects augmented.

I believe there is a strong case to be made that the corruption of music has played a big part in the corruption of the human soul and its separation from higher things over the last fifty years or so. When jazz first came in a hundred years ago it was regarded by many people as a very decadent musical form and things have certainly moved on since then. Plato thought that the introduction of new forms of music would have an effect on society, and while I don't think this plays out quite as simplistically as sometimes envisaged with decadent music causing decadence in society, there clearly is a link. Music has a definite effect on the human psyche even if it can only bring out or stimulate what is already there in some form. You are not made a good or bad person by music but you can be helped to rise or fall and so, in the broader sense, can a whole culture or civilisation.

Popular music has a relation to freedom, physically, emotionally and mentally. Freedom is regarded as a universal good but it depends what is being freed and what it is being freed to do. Is the sexual instinct being freed to be expressed in any way it likes, are the emotions being freed from judicious control so that lower instincts run riot and the higher impulses are blocked from coming through, is thought being freed to enfeeble itself in pointless speculation and chase after illusion, is the self being freed to pursue its own ends at the expense of submitting to the soul? Ultimately the only true freedom is to be found in God but for that freedom to be known many lower, apparent freedoms must be renounced. Much that comes under the umbrella of pop music does offer freedom of a sort, freedom to the lower self in its various guises, but if the listener is not careful it can chain him to forces in that same self it appears to  liberate. Higher realities are completely obscured. 

Music is one of the most powerful forces known to us but it can be used for good or ill. At the moment, we are in the strange position of having access to a vast amount of music, music of all styles and all periods, but contemporary popular music, that which is listened to by the majority of people, is the most spiritually harmful music there has ever been.

Cyril Scott and Music

A post on the esotericist and composer Cyril Scott who must be considered one of the forerunners of the idea of a spiritual awakening in the West even though the form in which his spiritual understanding was expressed, Theosophy, will now be seen as something of a false start.

https://albionawakening.blogspot.com/2019/03/cyril-scott-and-music.html

Music, Sacred and Secular

This piece derives from a conversation I had with someone about what constitutes spiritual music. That is to say, music that potentially expresses a spiritual reality and might even be conducive to helping a listener experience that reality, to a degree anyway. He said that if the composer had a spiritual intention then his music could be called spiritual, and he further thought that words of a spiritual or religious nature could transform any sort of music into spiritual music. I disagreed. The intention of the composer is irrelevant if he lacks insight into what the spiritual really is and interprets it in the light of his subjective limitations rather than being sufficiently open to the objective reality of it. Of course, no one has full insight but there is a big difference between the composer whose imagination, and even soul, is really open to spiritual truth and one who merely aspires to that or who forces it to fit his own idea of it. Moreover it should be obvious that a profane style of music does not become sacred merely by having some spiritual words overlaid on top of it. That might have some ennobling effect but, by itself, it is not enough.

The form of music has its own meaning and influence, and different types of music speak of different psychological states and convey different, sometimes very different, messages to the listener. Words can be added to music and shape the surface message, but they cannot fundamentally alter its basic tone for the music already has its own natural language which remains the primary form and is the keynote to its atmosphere and effect.

Therefore, if you take a musical language that has developed to express physical or emotional states of a particular kind and simply add some religious lyrics, you are not making spiritual music. The words may be saying one thing but the underlying language is saying something quite different, and it is the musical not the verbal content that speaks more deeply to the soul and expresses the real message of the piece.

Most forms of profane music cannot be used to communicate genuine spiritual emotions or states merely by being given a superficial outer coating any more than Gregorian chant would be an effective medium for a pop song.

If you use the style of a profane form of music in a spiritual context then, whatever your intention and whatever words you might employ, you are still making profane music. And the more the musical form you use is linked to lower levels of being and consciousness, the truer that statement is. So, while a Renaissance madrigal, which expresses refined emotion in a refined way, may largely be a secular form of music, its form is certainly less antipathetic to spiritual expression than the crudities of, say, rap to take an extreme example. The musical language of the former is capable of communicating elevated emotion, that of the latter is more to do with physical aggression, and its popularity speaks volumes for the degradation of culture in our day.

Regarding the division between sacred and secular that I have set up here, I should say two things. First of all, it is not absolute. There is a gradation between the two even if they relate to different orders of reality. There is also a cross-fertilization. For instance, Renaissance composers would take a bit of melody from a secular song and weave that into the underlying theme for a polyphonic mass. However, they so transformed the theme in doing this that very little of it was left, and the resulting musical piece was completely in the style of sacred polyphony. A similar thing arose when Bach or Handel re-employed something from secular music in a piece intended for religious use. But, more to the point, the gulf between sacred and secular was not so wide then as it is now. There could be some sort of legitimate interchange. That is not the case with the great bulk of modern pop, rock and jazz and similar 20^th centuries musical styles all of which are much more deeply connected, through their strong focus on rhythm, with the physical, and therefore they are more separated from the spiritual than traditional secular music. 

Spiritual music should elevate the soul just like spiritual architecture. It is not intended to excite the emotions or stimulate the passions or arouse the body in a sensual or sexual way which is the aim of much modern profane music.

The music we listen to reflects the sort of person we are, but it also makes us a certain sort of person. It’s a two-way process. Music tends to make us become more like what it is. People will gravitate towards the sort of music that expresses their hopes and desires but then this music will also foster hopes and desires within the listener that correspond to its own language and form. Those who seek the beautiful and the transcendent will look for music that expresses this and they will tend to avoid music that actively rejects those things. Those attached to the body and lower emotions will gravitate to music that satisfies those desires. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive but the more someone is interested in the former, the fewer forms of the latter will attract him and some might actively repulse him.

A huge problem today is that many people are never exposed to beautiful music. Their taste is often formed (and corrupted?) when they are young by the commercial and fashionable product of the day, and they then become so attuned to this basic level of musical inspiration that they are unable to progress to something that speaks to a deeper level and demands more input from the listener. There is nothing wrong with profane music (profane means outside the temple) but it should exist within a spectrum of music with the higher clearly denoted as such and the lower (as in relating to more immediately accessible aspects of the totality of the self) also known for what it is. In this way every level of our being is catered for and brought out rather than being over-emphasised or denied. Of course, if this really were the case then many forms of profane music would not be made at all because it would be clearly seen how antagonistic they are to proper all-round development of the soul. I repeat, there’s nothing wrong with romantic music or dance music or even martial music or any sort of music. We actually need all these different types of music. But that does not mean that any sort of music is good. There is music that tends to healthy self-expression and there is music that corrupts and degrades just as there is music that inspires and exalts. You don’t need me to tell you what sort dominates now.

Music is perhaps the most profound of all the arts. It is certainly the most affecting. Its power to uplift or debase is enormous.