Creative Resonance
On the creative filaments that connect the subjective to the objective; harmonizing shared instinct across space and time.
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” — Carl Jung
Intentional or not, the impressions we make upon the world around us have the potential to reverberate in ways and distances that transcend space and time.
Literature, for example, captures and packages up a lot of the conscious human experience — as does art, science, even architecture.
Different methodologies speak to different minds and lead to different impressions — some more or less effective and some more or less meaningful.
But in all cases, a kind of harmony is achieved, regardless of proximity between persons or events, and regardless any particular reasoning altogether.
Even chaos will eventually and inevitably enact some kind of harmonization that propagates forward in time upon the momenta of meaning.
One of the most potent adhesives to any shared experience is music.
Nothing else so efficiently aligns wavelengths and conveys meaning, whether reverberating through a stadium or flowing out of a vinyl groove.
There is, through mediums like music, a felt creative harmony that transcends the boundaries of space and time. Bundled up melodic impressions carry with them ideas, concepts, and perspectives that pulsate with a resonant meaning that synchronizes the human experience.
And things become more interesting when such music not only packages up a particular experience for future reference, but does so by way of riding the waves of an existing impression (more an expression) that seems intent on being heard; where the composer is a conduit, catalyzing a message.
Bach’s Spiritual Symmetry
While the blending of mathematics, spirituality and classical music offers little to the imagination when it comes to investigations of metaphysics and consciousness, there’s a lot going on between the lines.
Symmetry, like it does through some pretty strange intersections of physics, tends to also mean a lot on the auditory side of our experience. Bach goes full throttle with thematic inversions that have prompted scholars to approach his work as a mathematical puzzle of geometric perfection, with each piece seemingly able to fit perfectly into an overarching structure that fractals out from its constituent micro and macroscopic parts.
Our brain — a converter that filters the chaotic nonsense of an entropic reality into something more digestible — adores patterns. And so Johann Sebastian Bach’s music has long been associated with an elevated sense of intuited allure because of this overwhelming dedication to symmetry and ordered disorder, one that bleeds into mathematics and spirituality alike.
It only makes sense that if you build something atop a foundation of perfect equilibrium, using frameworks of Fibonacci sequences and golden ratios, the bones behind the walls will eventually flood the rooms with the intended meaning.
The design always becomes clear, even if it has to surge through a pair of headphones three and a half centuries later.
Holst’s Interplanetary Estuary
Where Bach taps into a shared human experience via a reverent mathematical universality, Holst’s does so in a more idealistic way.
Despite numerous health issues and a reported aversion to the fames and fortunes of 19th Century Edwardian England, Holst successfully translated the movements of celestial bodies into a symphony of human observation, finding inspiration at the gas-lit intersections of cosmology and creativity.
Taking the cumulative knowledge of astronomy that had built up over generations — knowledge that dates back farther than has been recorded throughout history — Holst presents our galactic neighbors using nothing but raw, instinctive expression.
Worth a listen.
Each planet of his celestial symphony is infused with expression and characterized through an individualized production of drums and harps, concertos and crescendos; intensive battle drums amidst enflamed piano scoring tell the chaotic story of Jupiter; fluttering trumpets and quirky violins detail the whimsical existence that surrounds Neptune.
On a surface layer, it may seem simple and almost cheesy. But looking deeper, something bigger emerges: the constellation of a communal experience, an enterprise that weaves together fact and myth, objective reality and subjective meaning.
And one that’s really difficult to describe with any linguistic effort.
Our neighbouring planets have influenced our civilization as much as about anything else has — from the formation of folklore and religion to our modern understanding of the universe as we know it. That their origins and narratives can be captured and transcribed into something so relatable by all the minds who later experience Holst’s creation, tells us something about the synergistic universality at play.
Planet hopping along in lockstep to Holst’s interpretation allows us to sense something that’s not easy to feel between the lines of our reality.
Stockhausen’s Crazy Cosmos
I’d like to tell you to listen to the 27 minutes of whatever it is that Karlheinz Stockhausen created, but you probably wouldn’t come back to this publication if I did.
A show and tell project on steroids, the electro-synthesized trip through space may induce visuals of too-artful folk doing too-artful things.
But, even here, beneath the guttural poetic dialogue overlaid with awkwardly imposed sounds-of-winter, there’s much at play to be appreciated.
Within the piece, Stockhausen databases his evident interest in Sirius as an ancient astronomical bearing on cultures throughout Africa; as a venerated symbol of cosmic renewal in the annual Nile flooding; of the Theosophic “sun behind the sun”; and as, to Stockhausen, a quite literal beacon of extraterrestrial life.,
Stockhausen saw music as a manifestation of vibrational principles that govern the universe — an interplay between frequency and time. He believed that frequencies of sound (measurable in Hertz) could correspond to cosmic vibrations, aligning our awareness with the ‘language’ of the cosmos.
He effectively used this composition to retell and reframe humanity’s relationship with the enigmatic star, creating his own mythology that he flambés his interpretations into something informationally-digestible, allowing us to taste a variety of cross-sections of a collectively-felt experience.
Through the astronomical and anthropological streams of knowledge, garnished with something extraterrestrial, he aligns (or harmonizes) a wide scope of perceptions that ride through history and cosmology alike.
In his own words:
“Music is the language of the universe. It transcends all limitations of speech and culture and can communicate the inexpressible.”
Beethoven’s Joy of Odes
I’ve written before on Jung’s knack for intuitive logic under a context of his lifelong fascination with alchemy.
And so his near obsession with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy roped me in as part of his powerful patchwork of curiosity. Evidently, Jung found Beethoven’s work to be something existentially transformative.
From an interview I conducted with psychoanalyst Murray Stein, a scholar of Jung’s work:
“The alchemists were not projecting personal unconscious material about their repressed childhood wishes and traumas. They were revealing the most fundamental patterns of psychological transformation, which apply to human beings universally.”
Jung’s interested in the piece highlighted the eerie ways by which it tapped into the collective unconscious, prompting the idea that music can tap into a universal well of human experience, much like quantum physics suggests interconnectedness at the subatomic level.
This pursuit of universality is the halo around Beethoven’s №9 in D minor, with Ode to Joy repeatedly described as an anthem of unity and transcendence amongst many notable figures throughout history.
Richard Wagner referred to it as a “monumental work that transcended ordinary music to express the ‘universal.’”; Composer Leonard Bernstein described it as “a musical statement of universal brotherhood”, later conducting it at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; Nietzsche too had noted Ninth Symphony’s aspiration toward the “sublime” and its capacity to express a unifying and life-affirming vision.
Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is thus an ode to the universally felt impressions, something that breaks free from the subjective realm and finds eternal primacy in the objective.
Any imprint made into the collective stream of knowledge will have a resonant effect that harmonizes perceptions through time — whether via eyes on words or ears on notes.
It’s a given.
But once in a while, we can sense the almost palpable filaments that appear between the individual and the collective with such pieces — creative works that flow from the objective world into the subjective mind, and project back out to the objective world.
It may be a testament to the fact that instinctive creativity seems to be the bridge between both spheres of our mysterious existence.