The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909Besant, Annie
Religion
The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909
Besant, Annie
Theosophy; Theosophy -- Study and teaching
And so we shall see it also in music. That is beginning to show signs
of the coming art—subtler harmonies, minuter distances between notes,
tendencies to quarter-notes as well as half-notes, quarter-tones; and
already there are one or two musicians who are beginning in their
melodies to play with these subtler kinds of tones, making strange new
music—music which the public ear is not yet accustomed to, which it
challenges when it hears it, but which is the Music of the Future, when
a vaster range of sound shall appeal to ears more finely organised than
ours, and when the ears of a new race shall demand from its musicians
greater delicacies of musical sound than have yet been mastered amongst
us; and there is a new possibility there. That has been seized in India,
although little put at present into music that the West would love. If
you go to India you will find some strange rules of music there: there is
music for the sunrising, and music for the high noon, and music for the
evening hours, and music for the stillness of the night. Nature has her
sounds in all the different times of her unfolding, from dawn to sunset,
and sunset to dawn, and these finer notes are attuned to these mysteries
of Nature, so that unheard melodies may be mirrored in the music of human
instruments. The Indian musician would not play to you a melody of the
dawn when the sun was setting; he would say it was against religion to do
it, for to him all things are religious. It is a subtler harmony between
man and Nature; and not without significance, again, was it that, at the
Congress I have just spoken of, a Russian lady teacher—for the Russian
is very sensitive, a young nation with possibilities of the future in
it—brought to us what she called “coloured sounds.” She had learned to
translate into musical sounds the colours of the sunset and the colours
of a forest, so that in music she could play sounds that made arise in
the mind the same emotions as would be aroused in the mind that looked at
the glory of the clouds in the sunset, or that sat in the wood and saw
the delicate shadings of the trees; the same emotions in the one case
seen in Nature, in the other heard in music, and both changeable the one
into the other, eye and ear, and ear and eye. Along those lines many new
possibilities lie—new melodies, new delicacies, new exquisite harmonies
in sound.
So art will go forward here, with these keener, subtler organs, further
even in one way than science along the line of observation, for art
reaches out by emotion where science is only observing, and so the poet
is very easily the prophet, and the artist very easily the seer; and as
these powers increase and multiply, a new race arises in which the powers
are inborn. Can you not dream some of the new possibilities in Religion,
in Science, and in Art?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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