How music reflects and continues the created order
A Society for Classical Learning Partner Feature
released 6/6/2024
Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos, participating in that order as it relates to form, harmonia (right relationships), time, history, psychology, geometry, physics, philosophy, and theology. In this lecture, Wilbur argues that music must be taught asmusic — not as “sound pictures” — with its own alphabet, grammar, rhetoric, and technique. Attention to music’s form and proportionality yields creative possibilities that reflect the ordered cosmos. Wilbur perceives a need to teach an understanding of cosmological harmony in which music is not divorced from the cosmos. He illustrates the power of music through examples of its effects on the body, mind, and soul, revealing our need for its harmony and “higher architecture.” The title of Wilbur’s lecture is “The Music of the Spheres and the Hidden Places of the Mind.”
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For 2,500 years in the West, music was understood as a work of discovery, as an expression of something present in the structure of the cosmos. Despite changes in musical styles, the ways composers and musicians arranged melody, harmony, and rhythm were assumed to be expressive of some objective reality in the nature of things. As Robert R. Riley summarizes this view, “Music was number made audible. Music was man’s participation in the harmony of the universe.” In the 20th century, that view was abandoned by courageous pioneers of the avant-garde, and “musical art was reduced to the arbitrary manipulation of fragments of sound.” In this essay, Robert R. Riley contrasts these two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996) and the American John Adams (1947-).
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