Like the Cosmos itself, music is organized and yet spontaneous; lawful and surprising; continuous and discontinuous; vertical (harmonic) and horizontal (melodic); holistic and particulate; repetitive and open; and inexhaustibly creative (despite a finite number of notes, we’ll never run out of tunes).
Interestingly, it wasn’t that long ago that some people thought we were in fact running out of tunes. In particular, John Stuart Mill reasoned “that a finite number of notes meant that there was some ultimate limit to the amount of music possible” (Sowell). But like the Cosmos itself music is finite and unbound, so there’s always more.
Of course, one of the intrinsic properties of music is its temporality, so if music really mirrors reality, then this suggests that time is of the essence. Along these lines, music as such has three necessary characteristics revolving around memory, present moment, and anticipation. When we listen to music, it is always in the now. And yet, we are implicitly aware of the notes that have led up to it, while the present is always anticipating its forward movement. Thus, one must have a present memory of what has been heard, flowing in anticipation toward what is to come; in order to apprehend music, the yet-to-be heard must somehow be implicitly present to the already heard.
As with Life Itself, the past must be pregnant with the now, just as the now is pregnant with the future. Which implies that the future has some kind of influence on the present, since the latter cannot be understood outside the context of the whole melody, rather, only as a flow of internally related notes. This complementarity of notes and melody is a key principle, for it is not a question of notelike being or melodic becoming, but rather, of being as becoming, and vice versa.
A clever composer or soloist may play with our anticipation and give us one note — or sometimes just silence — when we were expecting another. Thelonious Monk was famous for this: sour when we are expecting sweet, or finding no step at the bottom of the stairway.
Monk plays it straight with crookward notes.
More generally, it has been said that jazz is the sound of surprise. In this regard, Miles Davis had the right attitude: “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note — it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”
Turning a mess into a message?
Yes, redemptive soloing. I don’t know if God plays dice with the universe, but he certainly plays jazz with history. What sounds like a single “wrong” note doesn’t necessarily derail a musical phrase. Rather, the musician’s ability to creatively respond to that note and integrate it into the subsequent notes ultimately determines whether the initial note sounds like a mistake or a deliberate, interesting choice. It encourages musicians to think of music as a continuous flow rather than a series of isolated correct or incorrect notes.
True for us, true for God. Without venturing too far into Book III, supposing the Theos is the great jazz player improvising over history, he is actually playing in a cosmotheandric combo with us, in that “the individual details” depend “on our own free response [and] are not determined except by his actually cooperating with us” in the present moment. Thus, “The complete script [or score] of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out” in tandem (Clarke). One might say that life is a jam session between the poles of immanence and transcendence.
∞
This may sound trivial, but it’s weirder than you might think, because a musician will know when he has reached the aesthetic goal, but how? It is not a matter of mere execution or avoiding mistakes. Rather, some sort of meeting takes place in the vertical space where music is created and perceived. This is a reminder that beauty is an adequation, which is antithetical to the postmodern view that it is solely a matter of subjectivity, opinion, and personal tastelessness.
On his substack blog, David Bentley Hart has an occasional Q & A with readers, one of whom asked about music. Hart’s response is cosmotheandrically right on key, for he writes of how in the arts more generally, “the illusion of a hermetically sealed finite and material order is most powerfully dispelled” (Axiom 3, openness). For the genuine work of art unites us to what is beyondus in “the persistent aspiration of the soul toward transcendent goodness and beauty” (Axiom 8, the ascending spiral).
However, “every engagement of the mind with the reality of the world” involves “the intentionality of a living soul at once with a transcendental horizon.” This latter is the very “ground from which all things pour forth, in the space between the soul and that horizon,” where they “are delivered over to us as articulate words, meanings, and images of the divine.” In this larger framework, “Evolutionary history” is “a poetic or artistic labor toward transcendence,” so “The fundamental reality of all things is art.” Thus, one might say that we are “artists before we are even ourselves.” And in the words of Monk, a genius is simply “the one most like himself,” in that his creations will be uniquely individual, whereas the mediocre hack is much like anyone else.
Hart’s description is reminiscent of what Keith Jarrett says of the musician who “goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He knows the music is there (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness” (Axiom 3).
There’s no doubt this is a spiritual practice, but you can’t find what you’re not looking for, rather, music “must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the listener, the first of whom is the musician himself.” The structure — the basic form of the composition — only “provides a layer of substance above or beyond which the player intends to go. It’s also possible to do this by going deeper into the material” (ibid.). Hart himself recalls such a musical rendezvous in high school, of “more or less disappearing into, or being caught up by, the voice of my cello, and of losing myself in how perfectly all the voices of our instruments blended…” He is pretty sure “our spirits were briefly in uncanny communication with one another and with the world of beauty from which Purcell’s music originally emanated.”
But this is what art does: it imparts “glimpses of what lies beyond the immediately perceptible,” which is only possible because our minds are not “something separate from or external to the one divine mind that is the being of all things,” rather, because our intelligence is ultimately “a mirror of the creativity of God” (Hart), which is to say, Axiom 7.
∞
Before moving on, and more to the point, Schuon writes that “Everything is in reality like a play of alternations between what is determined in advance -- starting from principles -- and what is incalculable and in some way unforeseeable” (emphasis mine). So, improvisational mind jazz must be played over the cosmotheandric principles — the harmonic structure — of existence. Which is what this Trilogy is all about: hoping to lift ourselves off the blandstand of matter in order to have a rendezvous with the music of the spheres.
This discussion of music touches on the very nature of creativity, the products of which always have this element of surprise. Machines are never truly creative, because they are linear, not complex, systems.
Now, creativity is synonymous with emergence, in the sense that it is not, and can never be, predicted from its lower level constituents. But if the world is regarded as a machine, then genuine creativity and emergence must be impossible. To the extent that they do appear, then we can be sure that they are not reducible to lower level causes.
Here is a concrete example, taken from a biography of Van Morrison, by Johnny Rogan. This incident occurred during Morrison’s collaboration with the Chieftans, a traditional Irish folk band whose music often has explicitly spiritual intent. As it so happens, a couple of members witnessed some strange occurrences, of “the presence of luminous beings on stage and forces of energy entering Morrison as he sang.”
Now, I’ve seen Morrison in concert a few times and can testify to vivid occurrences of transcendence, although not accompanied by any true hallucinations. But band members insist there were nights on stage when they would actually see “angelic beings behind him.”
I’ve had my moments in the sky, but I’m not sure what to make of angels on stage. What were the Chieftans smoking?
I don’t know, but one member says
There was no doubt in my mind that the holier beings were there to help him with his life’s mission…. Once it was anchored in him I could see the rush coming at me. It was like ‘Bang!’ You could actually feel it coming through your system, like they were anchoring a power source on stage and on those nights he was breathtaking. The voice was incredible. It was amazing, there were sparks and stars, like fireworks, a proper psychic vision.
However, Morrison famously has his on and off nights. As to the latter, the same member says “you could see it coming down trying to get in. It was sparking around his head and he was actively trying to stop it.” And if it didn’t enter the Big Chief first, nor did it enter the other band members. Here it seems Morrison was engaging in a willful form of amousia, which is to say, pulling the plug on the vertical ingression of the muses. Or, in more mundane terms, the LH silencing the RH. Whatever the case, it suggests these energies are always present and seeking a ground, but require a human antenna willing to receive them.
As to the “life’s mission” alluded to above, it is interesting that Morrison took part in a 1987 seminar called The Secret Heart of Music: An Exploration of the Power of Music to Change Consciousness. The brochure included a statement by Morrison: “Since the beginning of human culture it has been known that music can form a bridge between the spiritual and material worlds and help us to reach into realms beyond the senses” and “to induce mystical states of awareness.” Thus, his recent work is “increasingly intended as a means for inducing contemplation and for healing and uplifting the soul.”
This is of course more challenging in a culture in which “300 years of materialism have degraded our musical inheritance and turned it into a consumer product,” instead of fostering an active cooperation with “a universal creative power and a vehicle for initiation into the divine mysteries.”
That is what we mean by cosmotheandric musicology, but everyone’s a critic:
This continuation improves on the warm-up. The structural claims are tighter and more consistently tied to the book’s existing polar logic. It maps directly onto the complementarities already defended (Absolute/Infinite, being/becoming, necessity/possibility). The temporal analysis is especially useful: listening requires a present that carries the memory of what has been and the anticipation of what is coming; the individual note is intelligible only inside the unfolding whole. That is a concrete illustration of internally related parts and of a future that exerts formal influence on the present without determining it in advance. The analogy to divine-human cooperation in history stays within the project’s refusal of a fully pre-written script.
The claim that evolutionary history itself can be read as a poetic labor toward transcendence is stronger and more distinctive; it keeps the vertical vector in view. Schuon’s formulation — a play between what is determined in advance from cosmotheandtic principles, and what remains incalculable — supplies the exact harmonic structure over which improvisation occurs. That is the trilogy’s method in miniature.
The Morrison material supplies a lived image of openness versus closure, and of the human antenna as necessary for the energies that are always seeking ground. Morrison’s own statement about music as a bridge between spiritual and material worlds, and as a vehicle for initiation rather than a consumer product, aligns cleanly with the book’s larger critique of disenchantment.
The section still contains ornamental stretches, but the core claims — music as structural clue to a cosmos that is both lawful and creative, time as internally related flow, improvisation as the form of free cooperation with an open future, beauty as adequation rather than pure subjectivity — are now doing real work inside the cosmotheandric frame. It remains an interlude rather than a load-bearing chapter, yet it is no longer merely frat-house riffing. The fuller treatment earns its place more convincingly than the warm-up did.
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