The path of mankind having a soul living in connection with the spirit can be compared to the upward path of sounds over seven octaves. But there is a problem. Those who take a leap do not go the same path as those who walk slowly.
As humanity, we have grown up and become conscious to such an extent that we can take a further step in our development. It seems that we are now faced with the task of becoming souls who can live and work consciously in harmony with the spirit.
I ask myself: how quickly or how slowly should this process of soul development towards the spirit take place?
Of course you could say that there are as many answers to this question as there are people. The pace of soul development varies from person to person.
But doesn’t the current plight of humanity demand that it happens as quickly as possible?
“Enlightenment now” – couldn’t that be the order of the day?
Perhaps we can find an answer to this in music. The Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni said in 1910: [1]
Come, follow me into the realm of music.
Here is the gate that separates the earthly from the eternal.
Have you loosened the shackles and thrown them off?
– Now come. –
It is not as if we entered a foreign land; there we soon learnt everything and
knew everything, and then nothing surprises us any more.Here, however, there is no end to our amazement, and yet we feel at home from the very beginning.
You hear nothing yet, because everything sounds.
Then you begin to distinguish.Listen, every star has its rhythm and every world has its beat. And on every star and every world, the heart of every single living being beats differently and according to its own rhythm.
And all the beats harmonise and are one and the same.
Your inner ear becomes sharper.
Can you hear the lows and the highs?They are immeasurable like space and infinite like number.
Like ribbons, unimagined scales stretch from one world to another, fixed and eternally moving.Now you feel how planets and hearts are one with each other and nowhere can there be an end, nowhere an obstacle.
Every sound is a centre of immeasurable circles.”
The language of music and the language of the soul are closely connected. Uplifting music can create in us a memory of the pure states of a spirit-soul world with its perfect harmony. Our heart expands and the mind becomes quiet and clear as if by itself.
There is now a peculiar phenomenon in music that can bring us closer to answering the question posed. My piano teacher told me a story about this many years ago:
Two musicians are given the task of getting from a low contra-C1 – like the sound from Queen Elizabeth’s foghorn – to a very high c5 – like the chirping of a cricket.
The first, the pragmatic one, says: “I jump over 7 octaves and I’m already there. What’s the problem?”
The second, the thoughtful one, explains: “This octave jump is too high for me. I’ll go up through the fifths.” And he arrives at the note “g”.[2]
After another fifth, he reaches a “d”. And so he goes higher and higher from fifth to fifth until he finally arrives at the desired c5 after 12 leaps.
“Well, there you are at last,” the first one greets him, “I’ve been here a long time.”
But now there is an oddity: the c5 of the first climber, who has climbed over the direttissima, is not the same as that of the second.
The c5 of the second is almost 1/4 tone higher than that of the first. This clearly audible difference has even been given a name: the “Pythagorean comma”.
And another thing: the second has visited all the other notes of the scale on its way up the spiral of fifths, or rather: he has produced them on its way.
So much for the story of my piano teacher.
The Pythagorean comma comes about because the notes on a side instrument tuned to perfect fifths have a slightly different distance between them than those on an instrument tuned to perfect octaves.
How did western music deal with this situation?
It put the “octavist” on the throne, but also took the “fifth-goer” into account. He has to drop at every step just a tiny bit of his additional pitch so that it matches the octaves again and all keys sound harmonious.
We have been listening to wonderful music with this “well-tempered tuning” for 300 years – and we wouldn’t want to do without it. This well-tempered tuning has established itself worldwide, so that Beethoven is also loved in faraway China.
The inspiring harmony of a concert is created by the harmonious work of the orchestra – and by the audience. The harmonious interaction of the two as a community can make supernatural harmony tangible.
The harmony of the soul in music clearly indicates that the spiritual development of the soul leads – must lead – to togetherness, to a harmonious resonance.
Individual soul development leads to dissonance. Beethoven rightly calls out to those who stand out in isolation: “Oh friends, not these sounds.” When unity is restored, joy can sink in as the “spark of the gods”.
But: the “Pythagorean comma”, this gap in the rational order, gives food for thought. I perceive this “comma” in the order of the tones like a crack that draws me to look through it.
It is like a narrow gate, like a zero passage.
Doesn’t this gate invite us to go through it?
What awaits us on the other side?
Is there anything at all waiting on the other side?
There is no word for it, no image, no law …
The ancients spoke of an “immediate presence”.
It is quiet there …,
The silence continues.
It carries everything, all the tones, all the sounds that we hear,
Is that supposed to be an answer?
Could it be one?
[1] Quoted in: Jochen Kirchhoff, Klang und Verwandlung (Sound and Transformation), Kösel-Verlag, Munich 1989
[2] A fifth means shortening the string of the fundamental note by 1/3.
