The Occult in Music (Article in Current Opinion) 1921
OCCULT FORCES AT PLAY IN MUSICAL COMPOSITION
OCCULT FORCES AT PLAY IN MUSICAL COMPOSITION
See also The Science & Appreciation of Classical Music - 175 Books on DVDROM and Fairy Legends & Faery Mythology - 75 Books on DVDrom
PSYCHIC investigation of late has been concerning itself with the fine arts, especially music, and some of the published revelations are interesting and stimulating, if not mystifying. Psychic sight, in revealing to its practitioners that space is peopled with countless entities which the man in the street is unable to perceive, not only detects color and form in music but detects forces described as Devas (nature spirits), which are, as it were, the cogs of music. It is these entities, asserts Cyril Scott, the English composer, pianist and essayist, that inspire the composer, even tho he may be quite unaware of their presence. Many times Mr. Scott, who has been called the English Debussy, has sat with a highly trained clairvoyant during the performance of “really inspired playing,” and, he says, in the Boston Transcript, the clairvoyant “has seen these wonderful Devas around the musician, inspiring him all the while; whereas, when cold and indifferent playing is being done, no Devas could be seen at all.”
The Transcript prints verbatim a lecture on “The Occult In Music” which Mr. Scott recently delivered by invitation of the Division of Music at Harvard. Tracing the Devastatic evolution of music and going back to some of the earlier musicians of Europe, this “composer and believer” states that, prior to the time of Johann Sebastian Bach and with the exception of Palestrina and a few other religious composers, musical compositions were merely sensuous in essence; that is, they afforded pleasant sounds which tickled the senses and had little or no other effect. But “a time came when the masters of wisdom saw that conditions were ripe for other music for higher purposes than this, so they inspired the immortal Bach to produce a type of music the essence of which was no longer sensuous but mental — an epochal step forward.” Bach having reached the very heights of the mental in music there came that reaction which we see in the simplicities of Mozart and Haydn. From an occult point of view, these two composers do not possess great significance. They acted more as a purely musical foundation for greater ones to build upon; and the first of these greater ones was Beethoven, who was used by the unseen forces to express every type of human emotion and passion as differentiated from non-human and superhuman emotions.
“Thus, Beethoven depicted every emotion from the very depths of despair to the heights of rollicking happiness. He was a musical psychologist par excellence. No shade of emotion escaped him, including, even, the bizar and the riotous. As a psychic, his life was a difficult one with such varied forces playing through it. One reads in his biography that he was always having to change his lodgings, that his landladies were always giving him notice, or vise versa, and it is hard to know whether or not to sympathize more with him or the landladies.
“The successors of Beethoven, from Schubert to Brahms, inclusive, were, occultly speaking, following the same lines of expressing human emotions. However, Brahms varied more towards the mental than did his predecessor. Indeed, the mental element played a very large part in his musical make-up. For this reason his music appears scientific and staid, and therefore appealing to persons who are averse to getting thrills down their spines and being worked up to highly emotional states.”
Coming to Wagner, who is pronounced a very different type of musician, both in the musical and occult sense, we are told that the Wagnerian state of consciousness is, in occult parlance, the Buddhic, meaning a high station on the Buddhic plane. The Buddhic plane is one of spiritual unity or brotherhood, of divine love totally devoid of selfishness, and Wagner was “used by the unseen powers to express this Buddhic emotion in music.” Even he, however, is admitted to have reached this high estate only occasionally, as at the end of “Tristan and Isolde," but: “He stands as the
inspired soul who has given to humanity the foretaste of unity, of what is termed the Buddhic in music. One day, no doubt, there will be composers who will write music which is entirely Buddhic, but that time is not just yet, altho I am told by the masters of wisdom that it is to come before the present century has run its course.”
Mr. Scott ingeniously explains that a large number of modern composers, who are styled “futurists" and whose music is discordant to a degree, are trying to express in sound the actual conditions of the astral plane; in other words, to depict another dimension in music. As to the discords attending their efforts, whereas some parts of the astral plane are said to be very beautiful there are parts which are greatly the reverse and “some of these composers have got into touch with these particularly unpleasant spirits instead of with the higher ones.” Debussy, among modern composers, is seen from the occult point of view to be essentially a tone-poet of the nature spirits - the fairies, salamanders, Undines, gnomes, and pixies — which “people who possess enough psychic perception for the purpose are able to see in the woods and plains.” There is, Mr. Scott declares, such a thing as fairy music, however much the material-minded man may deny it, and that music is subtle, precious, illusive, fanciful - exactly like Debussy's music itself. “It never reaches the note of great passion, or majesty, or grandeur, for such qualities do not belong to fairies and sprites. It is just exquisite, sparkling, and nearly always entertaining. Debussy once said to me, ‘Alas! I never get any further; I never get strength and power; I am too much in one group.' And yet, if he had been consciously psychic enough to know the occult, he would never have expressed himself as he did. He was intended to be the tone-poet of music, the voice of the fairies translated into earthly music. Thus, if he had defects, they were simply the defects of his qualities and his limitations were the natural outcome.” Apart from the actual feelings which music may inspire in its hearer, this British composer and Harvard lecturer lays stress on the color values of music which are perceptible to the clairvoyant who has trained his pituitary body or pineal gland.
PSYCHIC investigation of late has been concerning itself with the fine arts, especially music, and some of the published revelations are interesting and stimulating, if not mystifying. Psychic sight, in revealing to its practitioners that space is peopled with countless entities which the man in the street is unable to perceive, not only detects color and form in music but detects forces described as Devas (nature spirits), which are, as it were, the cogs of music. It is these entities, asserts Cyril Scott, the English composer, pianist and essayist, that inspire the composer, even tho he may be quite unaware of their presence. Many times Mr. Scott, who has been called the English Debussy, has sat with a highly trained clairvoyant during the performance of “really inspired playing,” and, he says, in the Boston Transcript, the clairvoyant “has seen these wonderful Devas around the musician, inspiring him all the while; whereas, when cold and indifferent playing is being done, no Devas could be seen at all.”
The Transcript prints verbatim a lecture on “The Occult In Music” which Mr. Scott recently delivered by invitation of the Division of Music at Harvard. Tracing the Devastatic evolution of music and going back to some of the earlier musicians of Europe, this “composer and believer” states that, prior to the time of Johann Sebastian Bach and with the exception of Palestrina and a few other religious composers, musical compositions were merely sensuous in essence; that is, they afforded pleasant sounds which tickled the senses and had little or no other effect. But “a time came when the masters of wisdom saw that conditions were ripe for other music for higher purposes than this, so they inspired the immortal Bach to produce a type of music the essence of which was no longer sensuous but mental — an epochal step forward.” Bach having reached the very heights of the mental in music there came that reaction which we see in the simplicities of Mozart and Haydn. From an occult point of view, these two composers do not possess great significance. They acted more as a purely musical foundation for greater ones to build upon; and the first of these greater ones was Beethoven, who was used by the unseen forces to express every type of human emotion and passion as differentiated from non-human and superhuman emotions.
“Thus, Beethoven depicted every emotion from the very depths of despair to the heights of rollicking happiness. He was a musical psychologist par excellence. No shade of emotion escaped him, including, even, the bizar and the riotous. As a psychic, his life was a difficult one with such varied forces playing through it. One reads in his biography that he was always having to change his lodgings, that his landladies were always giving him notice, or vise versa, and it is hard to know whether or not to sympathize more with him or the landladies.
“The successors of Beethoven, from Schubert to Brahms, inclusive, were, occultly speaking, following the same lines of expressing human emotions. However, Brahms varied more towards the mental than did his predecessor. Indeed, the mental element played a very large part in his musical make-up. For this reason his music appears scientific and staid, and therefore appealing to persons who are averse to getting thrills down their spines and being worked up to highly emotional states.”
Coming to Wagner, who is pronounced a very different type of musician, both in the musical and occult sense, we are told that the Wagnerian state of consciousness is, in occult parlance, the Buddhic, meaning a high station on the Buddhic plane. The Buddhic plane is one of spiritual unity or brotherhood, of divine love totally devoid of selfishness, and Wagner was “used by the unseen powers to express this Buddhic emotion in music.” Even he, however, is admitted to have reached this high estate only occasionally, as at the end of “Tristan and Isolde," but: “He stands as the
inspired soul who has given to humanity the foretaste of unity, of what is termed the Buddhic in music. One day, no doubt, there will be composers who will write music which is entirely Buddhic, but that time is not just yet, altho I am told by the masters of wisdom that it is to come before the present century has run its course.”
Mr. Scott ingeniously explains that a large number of modern composers, who are styled “futurists" and whose music is discordant to a degree, are trying to express in sound the actual conditions of the astral plane; in other words, to depict another dimension in music. As to the discords attending their efforts, whereas some parts of the astral plane are said to be very beautiful there are parts which are greatly the reverse and “some of these composers have got into touch with these particularly unpleasant spirits instead of with the higher ones.” Debussy, among modern composers, is seen from the occult point of view to be essentially a tone-poet of the nature spirits - the fairies, salamanders, Undines, gnomes, and pixies — which “people who possess enough psychic perception for the purpose are able to see in the woods and plains.” There is, Mr. Scott declares, such a thing as fairy music, however much the material-minded man may deny it, and that music is subtle, precious, illusive, fanciful - exactly like Debussy's music itself. “It never reaches the note of great passion, or majesty, or grandeur, for such qualities do not belong to fairies and sprites. It is just exquisite, sparkling, and nearly always entertaining. Debussy once said to me, ‘Alas! I never get any further; I never get strength and power; I am too much in one group.' And yet, if he had been consciously psychic enough to know the occult, he would never have expressed himself as he did. He was intended to be the tone-poet of music, the voice of the fairies translated into earthly music. Thus, if he had defects, they were simply the defects of his qualities and his limitations were the natural outcome.” Apart from the actual feelings which music may inspire in its hearer, this British composer and Harvard lecturer lays stress on the color values of music which are perceptible to the clairvoyant who has trained his pituitary body or pineal gland.
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