Only a very few people, if indeed any, can be considered as wholly unsusceptible to the influence of music. But because of its intangible and indefinable properties, the value of this influence, when considered in its aspect of moral guide and character moulder — is mostly underrated. Music as an instructor is sui generis and employs a method all its own, differing fundamentally from another method, through which intelligence can be imparted to the human understanding. Thus it is not through reflection or ratiocination that the element of music enters our consciousness, but on the contrary depends for its true appreciation upon the suspension of these very functions. Evidently there are centres in the human constitution, that do not require the slow and cumbersome machinery of thinking and reasoning to transmit impressions into our consciousness. If we read a poem or study a painting, our profit of the mental and moral wealth contained in these art presentations, is directly proportionate to the extent our intellectual faculties — our perceptive, reflective and reasoning faculties have been employed in the process. A poem or a painting, however exalted its character may be, must be intellectually understood in order to be thoroughly appreciable, while when listening to music every effort to analyze its technical make-up unfits us at once to partake of its inner moral sense.
The account which Mozart gives of the mode and method of his musical conceptions may serve as a case in point for the likelihood of the view here taken. The wonderful conceptions of his master-genius which he embodied in musical compositions, entered his consciousness without — as he himself tells us — any assistance of the intellectual faculty. The several elements of the composition appeared to him before his inner vision as the flitting scenes in a moving panorama, presenting detail after detail, the one passing out of his consciousness as the other entered, until the whole totality, full-orbed and rounded out in all its details emerged from the unknown and invisible, to pass in dramatic order before his mind. This final review, when the entire composition in its minutest details and in all its glory appeared upon the scene, he describes as resembling the pictorial representations of a strong, fine dream and carrying with it a feeling of the most absorbing rapture.
Thus music seems to draw its elements from a source far beyond the reach of intellection, and carries on a direct communication between the human soul and the Universal soul. The intelligence thus received might be called "direct knowing," attained to without the agency of the lower, intellectual mind. The painter and poet, notwithstanding their own intuitions, can reach the consciousness of their fellow men only through reason and reflection, inasmuch as their genius in order to be intelligible must be clothed in form or symbol. Descriptive arts such as poetry, painting and sculpture, refer to the estimates of a weighing and balancing reason, and though the forms and figures assumed by these arts, may strike us as new and original, in their details they are nevertheless copies obtained from the phenomenal world. Hence we may hold, that the truths revealed by the pencil, chisel or word, can reach our consciousness only through individual thought processes. Thus the word in which the poet finds a vehicle for his ideas, depends for its more or less true appreciation upon the discerning and judging capacities of the reader's mind. The musical composer depends upon no forms or verbal limitations when paving his way to the consciousness of his fellow men; his creations have no patterns in the world of form, but are the limitless expressions of original spiritual vision, delivering the intuitional messages without the distorting medium of ratiocination.
The value of music as a moral guide is therefore easily conceived. The moral idea when reaching us through the instrumentality of intellection becomes more or less colored by its intermediary channels. But through the agency of music we are ushered directly into the sanctuary of divinity and receive the moral idea in undefiled purity, serene and holy as its source. Language fails utterly to describe or even to hint at the thrills of silent bliss that pierce our being when we listen to the magic of harmonic sounds. An indefinable feeling of oneness or identity with every unit of existence creeps over the soul; we experience a sense of boundlessness, and disappear in the universal. Lifted up by the mighty, soul-stirring waves of rhythm, we feel as if carried through spheres of love and beauty towards the altar of eternal truth. There, with the stormy bursts of passions and desires silenced, with the whole sensorium of the mind in a temporary suspension, spiritual verities become exposed to the gaze of the soul, as we drink from the ever flowing fountain of holy truth the exhilarating draughts of moral and spiritual regeneration. Through the medium of music our souls are made to vibrate in unison with the World-soul, and its mighty reservoir of purity and love pours out on us its riches. We become suddenly filled with a sense of exalted morality and sympathy for the forces and powers that make for good; feelings of self and personality, ever attendant on our ordinary life, dissolve in such moments into compassion and a limitless largeness of heart — like the flitting shadows of night melt away to a rosy dawn when the sun wells up an ocean of light over an awakening world. The moral impulses received during such "journeyings with deity" are of highest order, and furnish an ideal guide for human conduct. It is true that these exalted notions do not always obtain a permanent seat in our ordinary consciousness, but give way to other influences when the music has ceased to rule us with its melodies; but it is also true that every repetition of subjecting oneself to such elevating influences, traces deeper and more defined channels in our mind until finally a direction of thought has been established, and the tide of our moral nature turned permanently towards the good and the ideal.
The influence which music exerts upon the animal creation is another evidence of its super-intellectual source. For were music an output of intellectual processes, it would have remained wholly lost to the animal consciousness, especially to those of the less developed order, as in the latter there can hardly be suspected any elements of thought and reason. Therefore it must be through the instinct, which is identical in essence, though not in degree, with the human intuition, that the harmonies of music can find a response in the animal consciousness. And it is further to be noted that the lower the position the animal occupies in the natural evolution, and the less it can be suspected of possessing reflective powers, the more susceptible is it to the influence of music. Thus the snake charmer has in his pipe or flute a power to which the most dangerous reptile finds itself compelled to surrender. Rats and mice are extremely fond of music, and may under its influence expose themselves unconcernedly to impending dangers. The skylark and the nightingale whose musical presentations are not without technical precision must, in lack of any other instructor, be supposed to obtain the notes for their musical performances directly from the great conservatory of "the harmonies of the spheres."
But not only animals are susceptible to music. The movements of the molecules that constitute what is termed material substances are regulated by the rhythm of sound. I once heard an old German professor affirm that in the grand organ in one of the European cathedrals — I think the Strassburger Minister — is to be found, a note, which if sounded alone would shatter the Temple to dust. This stupendous power of sound has already entered the region of more or less recognized facts. Already have ordinances been issued by a number of cities both in the United States and in Europe in which music bands are prohibited from performing on iron bridges. This universal power of music to introduce changes in the constitution of things and objects exposed to its influence indicates irresistibly the interrelation in which all nature's products stand to each other, from the atoms of a piece of metal up to the highest arch-angel — united through the universal medium of rhythm.
To the ancient this mighty instrumentality for the play of universal energy was by no means unknown. Orpheus, we are told, moved the birds in the air and the fishes in the deep by the melodies from his godstrung lyre. Even trees and rocks yielded to the magic of his divine overtures and moved in accord with his melodious strains, yes, even the grim visage of the ferryman on the river Styx relaxed its deadly sternness, when Orpheus upon his journey to Tartarus, let his instrument vibrate in the dismal regions of the underworld. In the fabled theatre of Orpheus, where all kinds of beasts of prey assembled to form his grotesque audience, is likewise indicated the power music exercises over the brute creation. As long as the performance proceeded, the various instincts and appetites of the animals were held in check, and species — at other times the most irreconcilable enemies, fraternized in a spirit of touching brotherhood; but no sooner had the last strain died away before their native promptings asserted their power, and a warfare of everyone against everyone set in with all the fury of murderous instincts.
Amphion, another interpreter of Apollo, is credited with having built the walls around Thebes by causing rocks to move in accord with the tones from his flute and to assume the shape of symmetrical structures. These and a multitude of kindred traditions seem to indicate that mankind once were in the possession of an insight into the potencies of sound, and of power to manipulate them, but lost these attainments by their heedless pursuit of the sensuous and purely material, and by their neglect of the intuitional and divine, as it is only through the activity of the latter that we can succeed in bringing into play the dormant powers which lie as germs in the mysterious depths of human nature.
Thus music would seem to serve as a link connecting the visible to the invisible, being a vehicle or means by which man may obtain knowledge concerning his divine ancestry, and be guided by it when entering upon self-conscious relations to spiritual forces. What, then, is the character of this marvelous element — all pervading and all controlling — i. e., what is the genesis of music?
The manifestation of all life and consciousness, of form and substance, proceeds through the endless flow of impulse welling out from an unknown and indefinable source. It is this undifferentiated, ever-moving energy, lying back of and engendering all motion, that is included in the term monad. The latter can therefore not be thought of as a monad, but as the monad, as the contemplation of its essence and mode of action conveys to one's mind the idea of a wave of vital force that moves from shore to shore of universal life — if the expression be permitted — casting up infinite varieties of form and substance. Each of these manifestations — be it a pebble, a worm, a man, or angel — expresses in terms of form and substance the degree of development attained by the monad in its course through universal evolution. Though in itself invisible and unknown, the monad reveals to us the course and character of its movement by bringing about conscious relations between its essence and the available senses of our nature. Thus the monad addresses the physical being through his fivefold sense-perception, as sound, light, smell, touch, taste, each of these functions expressing but the different aspects of one and the same original energy.
In sound, however, we find a substratum to all the other elements of sensation. For as the key to growth and development lies in motion so the character of motion is contained in the mystery of sound. Thus in sound we find a register of motion — an index, so to speak, in which the whole sweep of universal motion has an appropriate correspondence. As for instance, to use a rough explanation, the sound following a bullet whizzing through the air, describes the course and movement of the bullet, so the monad, moving through Universal evolution must give rise to what we might conceive of as ideal or undifferentiated sound. That a force-current however, may be manifested, its course must be disturbed, like a smoothly flowing body of water reveals it course and strength by the ripples produced by an obstacle placed in it. Likewise electricity, magnetism, heat, gravity and a number of other forces become known to us only through disturbances caused by terrene conditions in the current of some cosmic energy. The sound or rather its abstract conception moves in mighty waves through the various planes of cosmos, ever registering the course and character of the monadic movements. To our physical ear this "sound" however is ideal silence as its currents sweep through our auditory nerve centres without conscious appreciation by the latter. First through a disturbance of its homogeneous essence set up by mechanical changes in the medium through which it flows, this "sound" becomes audible to our hearing-apparatus, and from subjectivity passes into objectivity.
From the definite relations always existing between a cause and its effect, it follows that a given disturbance of the subjective sound wave must elicit a corresponding objective sound; and a sympathetic arrangement of these disturbing causes would naturally give rise to facilities, through which an intelligible interpretation of this inaudible sound might be brought about. Such a systematic arrangement is found in our tone-scale, and by striking a series of notes on an appropriate instrument we succeed in setting up such disturbances in the sound substratum that its responses address our ears as music.
If this be so, the influence of music cannot possibly be overestimated. For if we admit that sound holds in its bosom the method of monadic unfoldment, it must be through and by music that we possess an instrumentality by means of which we are able to elicit from old mother nature an answer to the questions of life and death. Thus by setting up a vibration that could disturb the movement of the life energy at work in fashioning — let us say — a flower, the consciousness ensouling that flower would be elements of our knowledge. Similarly with other objects of natural and spiritual evolution. The soul would be capable under the magic guidance of music, of entering into self-conscious relations with the numberless lives and essences that surround her.
This is the grand mission of the musical genius: to succeed in arranging such a system of mechanical agents that the vibrations set up by them may elicit just such revelations of the World-soul that correspond to and express his ideal conceptions. He must possess the entirely intuitional power of discerning the relations existing between the symbol and the idea; between divine thought and material form. Through his intuition, the composer obtains an idea from the Universal Mind — i.e. — he permits a ray of the eternal true to reflect itself in his soul. Next he feels the want of imparting this divine message to his fellow-men. But to refer them to his own source and method of information would be of little use as only a mind endowed with the same purity and responsive readiness as his own could enter into a direct relation to the ideal. So the genius proceeds to define his idea and to trace its silent current in the monadic stream. His art he now applies, and by skillfully producing a series of mechanical sounds, corresponding to the character of his spiritual vision, he creates a disturbance in the mystic "silence" and interrupts the current in which his idea floats. Thus interrupted, the idea manifests in terms of tones and melodies, and reveals its meaning to listening mortals.
To the extent the composer has succeeded in evoking vibrations that correspond to his intuitions, to that extent is his composition true; and to the extent his mind has been pure and holy, to that extent is his composition ethically exalted, as only the morally developed mind is capable of reflecting the moral idea. And this at once leads us to the conclusion that as well as music pure and elevating, so there must likewise be music impure and degrading. Yet as music in itself — in its own eternal essence — must ever be considered as perfect, ever divine — it follows that all discords and impurities which we meet in a great number of modern compositions must be attributed to the defective nature of the composer. If he has a morally exalted nature; if the principles which constitute his moral, mental and physical make-up are harmoniously developed and capable of giving an adequate response to the elements or principles potentially inherent in music, his compositions will be divine, and he a teacher of highest order.
Such is the music of a Wagner and others, whose creations, be they elaborate symphonies, religious hymnals or popular melodies re-echo in the human heart the infinite harmonies of pure, untainted Being. Again if the moral nature of the composer is only partially developed, enabling to catch only disconnected and disproportioned aspects of the fullness he attempts to interpret, his productions will reveal only distorted ideals to his listeners, and in place of being morally elevating, his music becomes morally corrupt. For evil is but misconstructed or misrepresented good, and an unequal stimulation of the seven centres or principles in the human constitution disturbs the balance of soul-growth, by causing an overplus of potency in one principle, and a corresponding atrophy in others.
Music therefore, like all other manifestations of the perfect through the imperfect, has its two poles of expression, has its pair of opposites, its good and evil sides — guiding and directing the individual either to heaven or to hell as the case may be. And being thus exposed to an energy which by its very nature eludes the deliberations of reason and reflection, the individual finds himself to a large extent at the mercy of his composer. For through the mighty agency of rhythm the latter can sway the minds of his listeners as completely as a hypnotizer can control his subject. According to the character of the music so will the person subjected to its influence find his several constitutional principles affected.
If the composer's inspirations are of a wholly kamic order, the evoked vibrations will solely affect the kamic principle of the listener and arouse its activity in an abnormal degree. And as no stimulus is given to the remaining principles, the balance of the inner man is disturbed and the mind plunged into a state of moral chaos. Dormant appetites will awaken and clamor for gratification, and finally some favorite passion obtaining control of the victim hurls him headlong into the commission of deeds, which his nature, left in its ordinary balance, would never have sanctioned.
As such moral convulsions of the individual mind may seriously retard, and even inhibit the evolution of the soul, it becomes of eternal importance to mankind to avoid all kinds of impure music. The music furnished by our saloons, variety theatres and even at times by military bands, by their one-sided pandering to the nurture and growth of some one or other passion and appetite, at the expense and starvation of nobler promptings add in a baleful measure to the sum total of human wretchedness. When society as a whole shall have learned to realize the stupendous power active in music, either for good or for evil, the moral forces of this world shall become equipped with a new armament in their crusade against the powers of darkness.