MONOGRAPH No. 1
Gnostic acoustics
(Wednesday March l3th l990, Madison.
First concert l0:15 - 11:30)
"This marvelous, marvelous unattainableness that the emotion of music has for people"
Morton Feldman
Welcome to the Wednesday Night Experimental Music Programs at the SPACE CAFE PERFORMANCE HOUSE. Tonight we are beginning a new series of performances which will occasionally begin with preliminary talks on the various aspects of our current work. The concerts are sponsored by the GIORDANISTI PRESS and EIDOLON TAPES and represent the continuing work of the EMERGENCY THEATER founded at Chicago in l980. That group of artists stated in their first manifesto their intention to make experiments on the "magical imagination" taking a term from one of the illustrious personages in their lineage: Giordano Bruno. Through ceremonial invocations of a discontinuity of atavistic imagery and pheumatic music their purpose was the transmission and reception of certain occult formulae which would deepen and intensify introverted reality. Our work tonight continues the investigation of what has become known as Gnostic Acoustics. By way of introduction and perhaps to suggest what the forgoing sounds may enliven in your thoughts, let me offer a very general plan for ideas to rise in the form of historical documents. According to ancient cosmogonies the world was created from an acoustical substance, an initial sound which became light. Eventually part of this light became matter. This materialization however was never completed because each material element still retained some of the sonorous substance out of which it was created. This implies some hidden influence which is affecting us today, moment to moment.
The Pythagorean idea of a Music Of The Spheres implies a similar influence. They theorized that as the planets of differing size, distance and activity push their way through etheric space they force subtle modulations and vibrations to penetrate throughout our Solar System. To the Ancients the sacred planetary number was seven, however as this philosophy evolved more were added including invisible ones until all puncitiform space was filled with metaphysical planets. The same fate was met by black holes in our own time by the Diabolicals.
Pythagoras reasoned that if sound exists as a natural element in the universe, the movement of the celestial bodies can be expressed as mathematical ratios in resonating bodies on Earth. The early partials of the overtone series arising from that resonating body eventually became our musical scales. Since music and consciousness depend upon the same principles of frequency, these ideas have increased to become a conceptual web for musicians and philosophers alike. The search still goes on well over a thousand years later to correlate sounds with corresponding things whether they be colors, gem stones, planets or chakras. However in the meantime people were listening to other forms of artistic invention. Thirty thousand Greeks were capable of following performances of the tragedies of Aeschyus with unflagging interest because of an alliance of all the arts uniting in a common object. Centuries later melodic phrases, leading motives and their thematic transformations referring to persons, things, sentiments or events quickened the attention of several hundred listeners to Wagners Operas.
The Music Of The Spheres idea went underground surfacing now and then in Gnostic Chant or Renaissance architecture. The "sacred sound" found in nature became systematized, first by Priest craft then by secularist tradition both overwhelmed by the first few partials- shutting out the higher and less audible ones. There could as easily be a case made for corresponding the higher partials of the harmonic scale with those heretical sects that were abhorred and equally banished: the Gnostics, the Templers and Alchemists, all thought of as being 'dissonant' to civilized progress. The association of good and evil put upon certain intervals by renowned composers like Stravinsky, or the lecturing of Leonard Bernstein on the subject of the first half of the 20th Century as being an "unhealthy" period for Mother Earthís tonal goodness, is only a continuation of an older fear of the dissonant. Remember the earlier stigma put upon the eleventh partial as the "Devils Triad"? Considering that the tri-tone (dim.5th/aug. 4th) is the glue that hangs together equal tempered harmony (making modulation possible), could Western classical music be a vast Satanic conspiracy? There are those who would argue that the tonic-dominant resolution is indeed an evil symmetry. This fear is not innate however, and is only built upon a few hundred years of musical habit directed by composers and specialists in their search for the elusive Goddess of Beauty. Perhaps an artist is like a fowler, he or she does not produce beauty but knows how to capture it. Here lies the aesthetic dichotomy- it is a matter of knowing whether Pythagorean ratios constitute beauty, or whether they are only a preparation for it- whether the rational organization or the spiritual charm inherent in the sensible is art. I tend to feel that a conscious embrace of Pythagorean spheres or "world music" results as Morton Feldman noted "When music is universal it never gets beyond its freshman level." (Arnold Schoenberg had said basically the same thing: "If it is art it is not for all and if it is for all it is not art"),Yet the temptation to tie into some cosmic scheme or claim angelic or demonic overshadowing at the site of your improvisations looms ever strong. Gnostic Acoustics merely wishes to map the range and reach of the "aesthetic arrest" (Joseph Campbell's term), where one may enjoy as listener or player conceptualization, as well as experience where all contrived meaning has ceased. Sometimes it ís hard to tell the difference- or maybe the latter is impossible.
ADDENDUM
Following the holographic model
of Pythagoras, who many site as the Father of our Western esoteric tradition,
what we find in the harmonic series are serial modifications of a primal
energy. Taking "Middle C" as a fundamental tonic or root monad (Kether
in Atzilut), we travel four octaves away through the four Kabbalistic worlds
and arrive at the eleventh overtone (the "Diabolus in Musica") said to
be the most dangerous interval. 
This
is, according to Lurianic speculation situated in ëthe world of shells
(olam h-klipot) the farthest reaches of cosmic catastrophy (shevirat h-kelim)
or the "breaking of the vessels." It was after this shattering or "fall"
that all phenomena began and the "nations of the world" were produced from
its cortices. Practitioners of the Thelemic Religion assign the number
eleven to their "new aeon magick," the "once beyond ten", because it is
situated at the core of what most needs redeeming. Dane Rudhyar indicated
that the eleventh partial represented the key-note of the Atlantean Race
and its ultimate fall into black magic adding that the element of occult-fire
is the basis of "true magical operations." (Liberation Through
Sound, A Course in 10 Lessons , Dane Rudhyar,Brookline, Mass.
Hamsa Publications, Mimeograph.)What Rudhyar's insight was trying to
shape (following Blavatsky) is nothing less than the panorama of history
through the symbolism of harmonic overtones. He portrays our species as
evolving millions of years through a series of drifting root races with
certain tones signaling evolutionary epochs. (Fig.2) He calls
the relationship between the tritone E and B flat (5th and 7th harmonics),
"the revelation" for its "inner workings" and perhaps because it pulls
out of existence the dominating power of the tonic from its home world.
Considering the enigma that the eleventh overtone has with the tonic, the
11:7 ratio tells us in kabbalistic terms the vanishing nexus that could
result if the holographic model is fully reified to collapse in a state
of non-being. AIN 711.
During a sitting with the Chicago trance-medium Princess Andraes in the early Sixties there was an interlude of unexpected synesthesia. When notes accidently sounded on a piano in the room, she spontaneously responded with an intersense analogy-- gustiferous in nature. Quietly moving to the keyboard hoping not to break her trance, I began an impromptu research in the analysis of intervals all of which resulted in some fairly precise information which convinced me she was actually tasting each interval. Thirds and sixes transformed into various modifications of sweetness. The Perfect fifth was neutral, almost tastless, a minor seventh had a "dissolving bitterness." Then too quickly perhaps I sounded an augmented fourth (11th partial); first she looked totally bewildered then recoiling in a choking manner grabbed her throat and exclaimed she was being poisoned.
Research and experimental procedures could go on indefinitely and not bring any kind of spiritual conversion. What is all this heaping of esoterica in correspondence for? What is it a sign of? If it is to build lists of similes and catalogues, or give metaphor for poetry then the most powerful magic is lost and Pythagoreanism is indeed dead in our time. The essential identity through the introspective experiment that the Pythagoreans of the 5th century B.C. and the Neo-Platonists after them made, is a recurrent pattern-intuition of a field-type reality. (Reality and Empathy, Physics, Mind and Science in the 21st Centrry, Alex Comfort, Albany N.Y. SUNY Press 1984 p.30). They completely identified mathematics, music and philosophy. This constituted their state of knowing (gnosis). If an idea is eternal than all expressions of it are essentially the same. "A piper and the cosmos might sound the same note." (The Music Of The Spheres, Jamie James, New York Grove Press, 1913). The identity of the Greek soul with this scheme was clear and solid. The Modern Gnostic revisionist can still make the introspective experiment but the "same note" can reveal other data. In a few hundred years, as James points out , the soul identity became increasingly unclear. In the age of Freud and William James music and mathamatics had no more inherent meaning than "smelling a rose or cutting one's finger," (ibid p 211), and an influential composer like John Cage could teach "to more and morecompletely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves" (A Year From Monday (Juilliard Lecture, John Cage, Middletown Conn. Wesleyan 1967, p 100), But I ask you-what is this a sign of? Isn't it a heaping on of another kind of exoterica? The first extreme is Wagner's wanting everyone to get the same message (German obedience), the second is total lack of a common denominator among diverse sounds of Cage's post-metaphysical world. The latter is perhaps more in line with the latest physics hypotheses however unstable, of what "themselves" might be. But then theres the point of getting a better view of the attributes of diverse things not only independent of a particular vantage point but to determine their final nature. No matter how much Cage took appart things in order to let them "be", they still cannot escape their antecedent contingence. This nit-picking does not detract from his genious or the idea of "music of chance", on the contrary Cage has set the stage for a yogic analysis of momentariness.(An objects quality of disintagrating moment by moment is its subtle impermanence. Appearance & Reality, Guy Newland,Snow Lion Publications p 30).
When the Gnostic Revisionest implements the unresolved tri-tone drone, the very scales of impurity in the depths of the universe may peal off to reveal the so-called "cosmos" as really a cosmetic-job, a cover up. [In Gershom Scholem's seventh lecture on MajorTrends of Jewish Mysticism, New York Schoken Books 1961, he speaks of the deepest roots of the klipot existing already before the shattering of the vessels, these being mixed up with the sfirotic lights (residue of Ain-Sof in primordial space). One may ask, when was their ever "cosmic order"?] What suddenly rouses to reality is a reeling blood-drenched gnashing Chaos, out of control and ready to burn us up. Rudhyar in his lessons on sound, states that the harmonic eleven is the "pulsating heart", quoting Blavatsky, the "bundle of electro-magnetic forces of maya," meaning the illusion that phenomenon has true existence. The Gnostic will realize this assessment includes the whole harmonic scheme, where even the "sweetness" of a universal Father-tone eventually putrefies, and like the depleted billows of a cosmic organ exhausts itself as the impetus of his karma fades.
This interval in the possession of a skilled Alchemist can be the basis of the current Hermetic Opus, in that it expresses an inscrutable tension, having qualities of non-duality with an androgynous fever, as the axiom of the Alchemical Dragon goes: "the exact poison to cure poisoning". Remembering that C-F sharp is in the middle of our tempered scale, dividing the octave exactly in half, unreconciled opposites within the Desire Realm may be solved by a "Centrist" philosophy that avoids resolution into the stifling requirements of an eternalism and the dispiriting nihilism of mechanistic reductionism. See The Central Philosophy of Tibet, Robert Thurman, Princeton University 1984, p 24
ADDENDUM II (Figure 2 )
