A World without Music


Imagine a world without music or poetry or fiction of any kind. This sounds like some kind of Orwellian nightmare, but such a world was partially created in Afghanistan under the Taliban as this extremist Islamic group forbade the playing of music of any kind. There are many scientists today who regard science or even their own specialty subject as omnicompetent and able to provide all meaningful paths to knowledge, so that activities like poetry are quite useless. Poetry books may just as well be burned along with books on religion as such texts only provide ‘entertaining self-deception’. We are told that while ‘poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates’. Some scientists seem to counter their insecurity by portraying their subject as unintelligible to anybody other than specialists in the same field: this is especially true of physics which now involves much high-powered mathematics.

The publicity surrounding the four television programmes by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins has highlighted what the English physicist and novelist C.P. Snow called The Two Cultures. In two pairs of programmes Dawkins has taken issue first with religion then with alternative or complementary medicine as being vacuous. He sees anything outside of scientific rationalism as fantasy or nonsensical superstition. Because of his eloquence and easy style of presentation, Dawkins has become something of a figurehead for this philosophical movement, but he is by no means its only representative or even the most extreme. A fellow Oxford don, chemistry professor Peter Atkins, who is quoted above, takes an even more aggressive stance towards frivolous activities like poetry.

But science is not omnipotent: it does not provide the only route to meaningful knowledge. There is a deeper wisdom that touches the spirit and this can only be provided by mystical experience and an awareness of the aesthetic dimension of human existence. Our ability to reason is far above that of other animals, largely because of our sophisticated language skills, but it is the humanities that comprise the defining characteristic of being human.

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Musical forms

Deryck Cooke in his book The Language of Music described music as ‘the most articulate language of the unconscious . . . the expression of man’s deepest self’. Cooke believed that music reflected qualities of other arts – of architecture in its formal pseudo-mathematical structure, of literature in its expression of emotion, and of painting in the representation of physical objects. These qualities are reflected in music as it evolved from the medieval period to the present-day.

The music of the medieval, baroque and classical periods prized formal structure: sonata form, the string quartet and the symphony all developed during the 18th century classical period with composers such as Joseph Haydn and W.A. Mozart. The Romantic period in music, as in literature, focused on the expression of emotion. The use of minor keys became a feature of music intended to convey sadness or nostalgia. The Impressionists in music, like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, were so-called because their output generated the same kind of aesthetic atmosphere as their artistic counterparts, Claude Monet and his contemporaries – a nebulous mysticism. Debussy and Ravel are to music what Monet and Sisley were to painting. In the 20th century, with the arrival of serialism, structure or form again became dominant, but the emotionalism expressed in the previous century in music refused to die out and tonal romantic compositions are still among the most popular today.

Music, like poetry, reflects the ambience of the society in which it is created. The Romantic poets expressed their unease at what they saw as the cold precision of Enlightenment rationality and of the graft and grime of the Industrial Revolution. European music of the 19th century is full of the warmth of emotional feeling of the Romantic movement. Much English music of the 20th century is redolent of the soft and verdant countryside that inspired its composition, often expressed through lush strings and gentle woodwind. Russian music of the same period however is characteristically harsh, often dissonant, and full of percussion and blaring brass, reflecting the ethos of the cold and brutal Communist regime.

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The Emotional Element

Music is surely the most expressive of the creative arts in conveying human emotion. Appreciation of painting is instantaneous, though that is not to say that other layers of meaning do not emerge with subsequent study. The enjoyment of poetry is an extended experience but is essentially solitary. Music provides extended aesthetic pleasure that can be shared socially with others and to a greater extent than poetry or painting.

The realm of music provides perhaps the most intense and universal source of spiritual joy, and recent research suggests that it may well improve cognitive skill too. For both the composition and the appreciation of music involve the emotions and the intellect of composer and listener. Music represents soul-to-soul communion between composer and listener. As conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim commented in his first Reith Lecture: ‘Music can and should become something that is used not only to escape from the world but rather to understand it’.


Moved by the Spirit

Many creative artists, composers and writers believe that the creative process, though expressed by the individual, has its source in the spiritual domain. Austrian composer Gustav Mahler was one who saw the process of composition as part of this mystical interaction. When speaking of his Second Symphony, popularly known as The Resurrection, he said: ‘Creative activity and the genesis of a work are mystical from start to finish, since one acts unconsciously, as if prompted from outside, and then one can hardly conceive how the result has come into being’ and ‘For me, the conception of the work never involved the laying down of a process, but at the most of a feeling ...The parallelism between life and music may be deeper and wider than we are yet in a position to understand’.

In an interview on U.S. TV, the Russian born composer Igor Stravinsky said of his composition of The Rite of Spring: ‘I heard, and I wrote what I heard. I was a vessel through which Le Sacre [de Printemps] passed’. These composers believe that such creative inspiration derives from an external spiritual source and that they tap into that spiritual domain in their compositions. Cellist Steven Isserlis similarly sees a divine origin for inspired composition. In an interview with Oliver Condy for the BBC’s Music Magazine, Isserlis was asked about his preparation for performance as to whether or not he listened to other recorded performances. Indicating his preference to go back to the manuscripts themselves Isserlis commented: ‘Why get your instruction from a vicar when you have a chance to talk to God?’

Many writers feel this same sense of inspiration derived from the spiritual realm. Looking over what has been written, we may not be able to trace a logical path: the ideas have simply materialized from air, as it were, channelled through mind and body, just as Mahler expressed above. Music has been used since earliest times as an integral part of many tribal and folk traditions, such as religious ceremonies and gatherings for rites of passage. Such ceremonies frequently involve dance as well, as another expression of spiritual communion.

In other spheres, we can touch the soul of the universe through our sense of awe and wonder at the beauty and grandeur of Nature, and through the fulfilment of human loving. It is not necessary to have visions of the divine in order to become aware of a connection with our spirituality. It is not the dogma and ritual of organized religion that provide the spiritual dimension of holistic living but this experience and expression of innate spirituality for which music provides the most universal medium.

Many healers use music as an accompaniment to their healing; dentists use it to soothe their patients, and there are surgeons who claim that it is beneficial to the smooth running of operations in theatre; it is especially good for patients if surgery is to be performed under local anaesthetic or acupuncture. For the rest of us, once the ear is attuned to music, it can be the most powerful agent for reducing stress and producing relaxation and joy.

Immersion in the aesthetic world of music, poetry, painting, or natural beauty allows us, for a while, to become independent of the physical world that rules our everyday lives to seek and hopefully find joy in a personal psychic dimension of our own. We can do as the mystics of Eastern religious philosophy encourage us to do and lose ourselves in our own meditative paradise within the material world – to enter our own mystical castle as St Teresa and contemporary mystic Carolyn Myss would say.

Science has come to present a view that only matter is real; the numinous is subjective and meaningless to others. But the mystical is as much uniquely characteristic of what it is to be human as the rationality of philosophy and science. There is no material stuff called culture or pleasure or joy, but our life would be unfulfilled without them. Though other animals can indicate clearly whether they are contented or stressed, aesthetic experiences are uniquely human aspects of a holistic life. Religious ideologies can be divisive, but music speaks to all nations and creeds in an international language. A world without music and the humanities is cold and arid, whatever knowledge rationality gives us and whatever material benefits our scientific and technical skills may provide for us.

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This article appeared in The Tree of Life Magazine in Summer 2008.