music and spirituality ‘If you allow meaning and tone to disappear, what do you then hear?’ One of the great, eleventh-century Zen masters asked this question. In the Zen monasteries of Japan, this question has already been asked for ages. Tone and meaning of music is the subject of this article, and is viewed in the context of a possible path of spiritual development.
M
USIC AS MIRROR IMAGE OF MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM
Before we create music with our voice or with an instrument, the sound has been generated in us. In the sound or tone, just as in other phenomena, the macrocosm is mirrored in the microcosm. With regard to the macrocosm, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, Kepler had already understood that the planets did not move in circular orbits, but rather in elliptic orbits. From the infinite number of possibilities, the planets appear to follow those elliptic orbits that correspond to the order of the harmonics in music. They have the same sound relationships. The sound of any instrument is determined by a fundamental, while more or fewer harmonics resound with it. Sometimes, harmonics are more dominant. If we listen to the sound of an instrument, we therefore always hear a fundamental with its specific series of harmonics. The higher the harmonics, the less the sounds within that tone belong together. At the beginning of the series, we find the most harmonic relationships between the tones, like the octave (1:2), the fifth (2:3) and the fourth (3:4), but at the end of the series, we experience the tone relationships second (7:8), seventh (12:23) and the tritone (12:17). We may also refer to the intervals by proportions corresponding to proportions we encounter in nature and in the cosmos. This is why the acoustic relationships have a kind of cosmic character. Every movement in the cosmos 26 pentagram 5/2012
produces a tone, however soft. These points of departure of order apply to the macrocosm and the microcosm as well as to music. In music, the proportion of the golden section (1.618), known in nature and in architecture, corresponds to the interval of the sixth (between 12:19 = 0.63 and 12:20 = 0.60) Every organic form, as well as crystals, have been built in such a way that their spatial proportions correspond to the number ratios of diphthongs in music that sound harmonious. These proportions may be expressed by simple, whole numbers, as Pythagoras and Plato already more or less suggested. A special study showed that over a thousand different tones can be distinguished between the highest and the lowest audible tone. In music, only a small part of them is used. For instance, an average piano has only eightyeight keys. The tones that we use correspond to the laws of nature and the cosmos mentioned before. If those tones slightly deviate from these laws, they are nevertheless experienced as ‘pure’, and heard as ‘correct’. On a piano, it is not possible to strike slightly deviating tones, like quartertones, because there are no keys for them. On instruments, on which we ourselves can form the tone freely including the human voice, this is in principle possible. Oriental scales (22 tones), too, offer a structure, within which quartertones resound. The tones within an octave can actually not be tuned purely. This is why a piano tuner
