[Ikrleprl]

hello everyone,

if this has already been touched upon, please direct me to the appropriate thread.

i'm a (quasi-professional) musician and composer with an undergraduate education in piano and composition. i'm quite fascinated by the esoteric and "divine" properties of music as the ancient greeks (like pythagoras) knew them. is there anyone here who is knowledgeable about this subject? i have recently come across dr. stephen m. phillips's work and have just barely begun to try to comprehend it. any suggested readings and/or links would be much appreciated.

thanks!

[Tam04xa]

may i ask which genre of music? as you said, divinity in music is an old concept and in the present day there are many people with varying opinions as to what would constitute "divine music".

in my opinion, olivier messiaen (b. dec. 10, 1908, avignon, france.d. april 27, 1992, clichy, near paris), for instance was such an illuminary. his "trois petites liturgies de la présence divine", written in 1943-44 is such a work. rarely have i heard such strains which had the spark of the divine present and accounted for, but this piece has it. it has the x factor.

there are many others like olivier messiaen who had the same effect on me.

[toreesi]

i listened to dave's music on his myspace page today, pretty good stuff, a little "darker" than larry seyer but very dreamlike...

[Ikrleprl]

yes, the stuff on myspace is rather dark. that is just a small sample and i do indeed have many brighter pieces.

symbolon: i was really just referring to what it is about sound that people such as pythagoras, the ancient greeks, the ancient hindus, etc. believed to be "sacred" and/or "divine."

i understand the mathematics of harmony, intervals, scales, etc. mathematics is a language and i am wondering what aspect of this language which relates to music people used to (and still do) think of as "divine."

as far as great composers and musicians, there are countless people who were and are able to intuit what sorts of combinations of sound and rhythm elicit spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and/or philisophical responses in some people. these seem to be far from universal, as it is my experience that musical taste is rather arbitrary and affects people differently depending on their consitution and biases. i enjoy messiaen a great deal too and am quite familiar with his work.

related to this subject also is the many famous composers who were initiates of secret societies (debussy and satie were rosicrucians; mozart was a mason) or obsessed with esoterica (scriabin, messiaen). i'd be curious if anyone had any insights into this as well.

[CathBraun]

hello dave,
welcome! may want to see thread in this forum, "sound of music", started by rhonda. i added there how this has been research area for me too. you most likely saw the references to music in ra material(bk 3,session 54, tone poem, hand of creator to pluck harmony) i found this one, from cayce meaningful:
cayce reading 1469-1:
"for the entity, as each soul, is a portion of the whole. thus, though a soul may be as but a speck upon the earth's environs, and the earth in turn, much less than a mote in the universe, if the spirit of man is so attuned to the infinite, the music of harmony becomes as the divine love that makes for the awareness in the experience of the creative forces working with self for the knowledge of the associations with same."
i have found rudolf steiner's anthroposophy helpful and have many fine links available here in "christ jesus" thread, as overall introductions, in particular, books by edward smith.
much available if you go to www.rsarchive.org
search music, pythagoras, rosicrucian,etc
this is from "christ and the human soul" chapter 4. (it speaks to me. in my research, i quote from st. bernard of clairvaux who writes of "the music of the heart")... nina

"when man takes christ into himself, so as to feel permeated with christ, he is able to say to himself: “the endowment which the gods had allocated to me before the luciferic temptation, but which owing to the temptation by lucifer had to remain behind in the cosmos, enters into my soul with the christ. the soul becomes whole again for the first time by taking the christ into itself. only then am i fully soul; only then am i again all that the gods intended me to be from the very beginning of the earth.” “am i really a soul without christ?” man asks himself, and he feels that it is through christ that he first becomes the soul that the guiding divine beings meant him to be. this is the wonderful feeling of “home” that souls can have with christ; for out of the primal cosmic home of the soul of man the christ descended, in order to give back to the soul of man that which had to be lost on earth as a result of the temptation by lucifer. the christ leads the soul up again to its primordial home, the home allotted to it by the gods.

that is the bliss and the blessing in the actual experience of christ in the human soul. it was this that gave such bliss to certain christian mystics in the middle ages. they may have written much which in itself seems to be too strongly colored by the senses, but fundamentally it was spiritual. such christian mystics as those who joined bernard of clairvaux, and others, felt that the human soul was as a bride who had lost her bridegroom at the primal beginning of the earth; and when christ entered into their souls, filling them with life and soul and spirit, they experienced christ as the soul-bridegroom who united himself with the soul; the bridegroom who had been lost when the soul forsook her original home in order to follow lucifer along the path of freedom, the path of differentiation between good and evil.

when the soul of man really lives into christ, feeling that christ is the living being who from the death on golgotha flowed out into the atmosphere of the earth and can flow into the soul, it feels itself inwardly vivified through the christ. the soul feels a transition from death into life.

so long as we have to live out our earthly existence in human bodies — and this will continue far into a remote future — we cannot hear directly the music of the spheres or have direct experience of the cosmic life. but we can experience the incoming of the christ, and so we can receive, by proxy as it were, that which would otherwise come to us from the music of the spheres and the cosmic life.

pythagoras, an initiate of the ancient mysteries, spoke of the music of the spheres. he had gone through the process whereby the soul passes out of the body, and he could then be carried away into the spiritual worlds. there he saw the christ who was later to come to the earth. since the mystery of golgotha we cannot speak of the music of the spheres as did pythagoras, but we can speak of it in another way. an initiate might even today speak as pythagoras did; but the ordinary inhabitant of the earth in his physical body can speak of the music of the spheres and of the cosmic life only when he experiences in his soul, “not i, but christ in me”, for the christ within him has lived in the music of the spheres and in the cosmic life. but we must go through this experience in ourselves; we must really receive the christ into our souls."