Water Everywhere, But Who Will Slake Our Thirst?

A God enthroned beyond time in timeless eternity would have to renounce music... Are we to suppose that we mortals, in possessing such a wonder as music, are more privileged than God? --Victor Zuckerkandl

Turns out I didn't make up the word "theomusicology." 

It's difficult to track down a precise definition, but it it has more do with the cultural and anthropological interface between music and the sacred, as opposed to our concerns, which are more metaphysical in nature, going to how music as such reveals the nature of God and of ultimate reality.

Again, we're looking for clues in a book called Theology, Music and Time: it

shows ways in which music can deepen our understanding of the Christian God and his involvement with the world. The author explores rhythm, meter, resolution, repetition and improvisation, and through them opens up some of the central themes of the Christian faith -- creation, salvation, eschatology, time and eternity, eucharist, election and ecclesiology. He shows that music can refresh theology, giving it new ways of coming to terms with God.

Thus far I can't give it an unqualified raccoomendation, because it's simultaneously rambling and pedantic, a reminder that I could never be one of these academic types. Only a blogger? True, there are no minimal qualifications for being one, but nor is there an upper limit. Like music, come to think of it. Anyone can do it, but comparatively few do it well, am I wrong? 

WHO ARE MY COMPETITORS!

Thaaat's right, Petey. Name another blog that features tips, quips, and insults from a discarnate frenemy. 

Let's flip.

it is clear that music is one of the most powerful communicative media we have, but how it communicates and what it communicates are anything but clear.

True, but the mere fact that music "clearly communicates" is what we want to focus on. In the past we have discussed Christopher Bollas' theory of idiom needs, whereby objects in the external world in-form us about our interior world: everyone has

their own idiom for life -- a blend between the psychic organization which from birth forms the self's core.... we spend our time looking for objects of interest -- human or material -- which can serve to enhance our particular idioms or styles of life...

We are perpetually looking for those external objects that evoke a kind of re-collection of our own interior. For me, this is proof enough of the soul. 

Bollas also calls these "transformational objects" whereby one is "metamorphosed by one's interaction with the object world." That music speaks to us at all indicates that it is just such a transformational object. That it can also communicate the sacred presupposes this idiomatic/transformational structure, very much like a key that unlocks something inside us. 

This is no different from art in general, which, according to Schuon, 

has a function that is both magical and spiritual: magical, it renders present principles, powers and also things that it attracts by virtue of a “sympathetic magic”; spiritual, it exteriorizes truths and beauties in view of our interiorization, of our return to the “kingdom of God that is within you.”

Thus, art is at once an exteriorization of what is interior to us and vice versa. Otherwise to hell with it. Its ultimate purpose is "so that the human soul might, through given phenomena, make contact with the heavenly archetypes, and thereby with its own archetype." Again, a transformational object. It is "a movement from ourselves to ourselves, or from the immanent Self to transcendent Being" (ibid.).

Talent. Plenty of people have it, but as the Aphorist reminds us,

Mere talent is in literature what good intentions are in conduct.

Same with music. There are many more virtuosos than artists. Which is why so much music is inadequate, beauty being an adequation, precisely. "The modern conception of art is false insofar as it puts creative imagination -- or even simply the impulse to create" in the place of an adequation to the object of beauty:

a subjective and conjectural valuation is substituted for an objective and spiritual one; to do this is to replace by talent alone -- by talent real or illusory – that skill and craftsmanship which must needs enter into the very definition of art, as if talent could have meaning apart from the normative constants that are its criteria (Schuon, emphasis mine).

We are drowning in talent, in creativity, in imagination, that only make us more thirsty for the real thing -- a real thing that is again both interior and exterior. 

Words do not communicate. They remind.

Same with music: we know it when we hear it. And we know it when we hear it, for it's a two-way communication or it's not communication at all. It is a Platonic re-collection, such that

The purpose of art is not a priori to induce aesthetic emotions, but to transmit, together with these, a more or less direct spiritual message, and thus suggestions emanating from, and leading back to, the liberating truth (Schuon).

Boom. Can't put it more clearly and concisely than that. Except to say that

It is not the sole obligation of art to come down towards the common people; it should also remain faithful to its intrinsic truth in order to allow men to rise towards that truth. 

Sacred art is made as a vehicle for spiritual presences.... profane art on the other hand exists only for man and by that very fact betrays him. 

We're still just tuning up. I guess we haven't gotten very far, but then again, we've already gotten all the way to the toppermost of the poppermost. Not only is God not bereft of music, but we say he is the nonlocal source and pattern of music as such. To be continued.