Good Vibrations: Part I

Music, Mysticism, and the End of the World

The words “music can change the world” are likely to provoke an eye roll or a sneer. The hippie delusion that people could stop the Vietnam War by taking drugs and having sex in the mud at Woodstock has pretty clearly been discredited. Even though charity concerts probably have done a lot of good, the position that many cultural critics take towards the legacy of Live Aid seems negative: just another opportunity for megalomaniacal rock stars to convince themselves of their own messianic self-image. I should note that I don’t share this negative assessment and wouldn’t criticize anyone for engaging in such massive charitable efforts, but skepticism is common enough in this area. Music, or indeed any art, can seem like a pretty flimsy instrument when wielded against the dark, ageless mass of accumulated suffering in the world.

But there is a far stranger version of the “music can change the world” thesis. This is the theory that music itself, in a specific combination of notes played with a specific feeling, could induce a radical change in consciousness in the listener. It could even end the world.

In one sense, this just represents a further development of what everyone already knows music can do. Its effect on the audience is likely greater than any other art form, and its ability to create new emotions in a listener is notoriously powerful. In Indian Classical Music, each raga (scale) is meant to evoke a specific feeling or mood, but they are only meant to be played in certain seasons and at certain times of day. Only then can they have their desired emotional effect. The qawwali musicians of India and Pakistan also aim to alter the consciousness of the listener significantly, leading to a trance-like state called wajd or “forgetfulness.”

The fact that music accesses the hidden springs of emotion seems to make it more controversial. Back in the ’80s and ’90s, in the heyday of Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Council, politicians seemed to get even more upset about violent messages in rap music than in violent messages in movies. Presumably, this is because music seems to have more internal reach than movies. It informs the essence of being.

In fact, the power of music is so strong that certain ascetics have rejected it entirely. The most rigid interpretations of Islam, like the Salafist school, generally abjure music. Even Leo Tolstoy, in old age, said that he resented the power music seemed to have over his emotions, to feed a life into him that wasn’t authentically his own. He was perhaps taking it all a little too seriously, but the fact that music can suspend our ordinary emotions and replace them with new ones is obvious. It can seed people with impulses and ideas the same way that hypnosis does.

That is the ascetic take on music: it should be avoided because of its hypnotic power, its function as a magical enchantment, a way of seducing the listener with the illusory glamor of the world.

But what if music can do something else? There is another approach to music, one which suggests that it can be used to break the spell that we are all already under.

There is a common idea in mystical literature, the idea that we are under an enchantment and need to wake up. Meister Eckhart wrote, “We are all asleep in the outer life,” and the Greek-Armenian mystical teacher, G.I. Gurdjieff, similarly argued that we are all in a state of somnambulism, mindlessly obedient to cosmic laws, merely imagining that we are free. We grow up, work, marry, copulate, give birth, raise children, start and end wars, and die all while in a state of sleep, deluding ourselves into believing that we are in control of the process when we are really only slaves of our biology and environment.

However, certain mystical schools, like the Chishti Sufi Order of India and Pakistan, Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way,” and certain strains of Theosophical thinking held that music, approached in a specific manner, could put the listener in touch with a higher level of reality. Earthly music was but a reflection of the higher music—the sounds of heaven, the Music of the Spheres—and could lead one to an apprehension of this more rarefied strain of song. The same idea is present in the work of Eastern Orthodox composers like John Tavener and Arvo Pärt.

The idea that the world is made of “vibrations” is an ancient idea, as demonstrated by Patanjali’s two-thousand-year-old Yoga Sutras, which argue that reality is comprised of vritti (vibrations) in chit (consciousness). Around five hundred years earlier, Pythagoras was already teaching that music had something to do with the essence of existence. In the present, a folk version of these ideas is a well-established part of popular culture. “Vibe” has been hailed as the most over-used word of our era, a catch-all way of describing the essence or tone of any situation or aesthetic experience. The Beach Boys certainly helped popularize the term with their 1966 mega-single “Good Vibrations,” and the songwriter, Brian Wilson, said he was inspired by his mother, who used to say that dogs could tell if people had good or bad “vibrations.” The Southern Californian setting in which this insight was imparted points towards some sort of spiritual influence, maybe Theosophical.  

If reality is indeed made up of “vibrations,” then it would follow that, by changing those vibrations, one would change reality. As W.B. Yeats, himself a Theosophist, put it, “[…] this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem, / Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme.” He saw this as leading to a condition in which “everything that is not God” would be annihilated, “consumed with intellectual fire.” Music could thus be a method to alter reality by altering the mind’s theme, even making it disappear entirely. In tune with these ideas, another Irish bard, Van Morrison, recently released a song that spoke of “breaking the spell of the lower vibration,” referring in large part to the spell cast by our electronic devices.  In an era when we are virtually held prisoner by vibes, by continually shifting moods that are altered almost at random by whatever scrolls by on our feeds, perhaps this idea holds a certain appeal.

In the next installment of this essay, I plan on considering three major examples, three musicians who tried to dissolve the entire frame of reality with their music. The first is the mad Russian genius, Alexander Scriabin, followed by the mystical space jazz pioneer, Sun Ra, and Pete Townshend of The Who.