Music and its Properties

May 29 2008

Posted by: 阿偉 in Culture

In today’s world, we are surrounded by what is called ’music’. Such ‘music’ has spread to such an extent that nobody is free from it. Whether one is shopping, sitting in a taxi, or even making a phone call, it seems that music pervades all spaces in life and is unavoidable.

Thinking back to my days as an amateur classical violinist, I enjoyed solely classical music, and found most other music to be mere noise. I regarded his as a given fact, and did not consider the reasons behind this.

To answer this question, one may look to history. Let it suffice here, for the purposes of this discussion, to say that there are certain degenerative forces within the discourse, as there are with all arts. At first, when music (note here that a recitation of the Qur’an sounds melodic, but is not strictly musical) was used in ceremony, it created order from disorder based on a strict mathematical precision, and thus gave mankind a connection to a order higher than oneself. Thus, the preceeding world of the musical arts grew from the tradition that expressed the Volkish soul in such a manner to imbue man with the power to commune with the raw force of nature; such was ritual music of our earliest rites. Early music, once it had progressed from its primitive stages, therefore posessed an intrinsic value which was sacred and spiritual on one hand, and but also, as Wagner points out, organic on the other. Music continued to progress, and in the Western world, florid compositions were created for use in the Church. Beyond this, secular music still represented order and the creative genius which God had imbued with into man.

There can be no doubt that the rise of America as a power and the world’s subsequent acculturation to the cultureless state had an effect on every aspect of culture, music included. America is a society which, as oppose to Europe, and because of its particular racial situation, never developed a sense of Volkishness. The closest approximation was a society in which minds were open to indoctrination and where, to quote Evola, “everything has the characteristic of being fabricated”. From the inexpressionless music in which we find the formal idiosyncrasies of all the schools, there arose a new form. This replaced the old themes of mankind’s noble struggle and replaced them with banal subjects. Gradually, even these ideas waned, in favor of glorification of unculture, in particular violence and promiscuous sexuality.

I think we are all familiar with today’s ‘popular’ music and the way in which it aims to creates arousal, passion and excitement, and also leads to various physiological changes in the person. It is a psychological proven fact that two things are instrumental in arousing the human sexual desire, one being the voice of a female (for males) and the other music. The aversion to so-called “popular” music is therefore well-understood by the Sages; were the intent of today’s music noble, containing pure speech, then there should be no problem with it. Whereas music once held our noblest ideas in the age of Kings, Emperors and Sultans, it now has become an arm of the tyranny of what the Americans consider “multiculturalism”. Tyranny, of course, referrs to that same sort of cultural imperialism, which is not limited to music, but all facets of American culture. But as for music itself, like all other American “art”, it appeals only to those who do not think, but are and is best avoided, especially when it involves content which is contrary to ethical and moral life.

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