Music & Silence

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music." Aldous Huxley

I've been meaning to post on music for awhile. I don't play much myself, just some fiddle tunes and an odd piece or two from classical or neoclassical music. However, several good pieces on music can be had. Spengler (Daniel Goldman) wrote a piece on Augustine, Time & Eternity, & Music for First Things (now archived), and OneCosmosBlogspot had some meditations on music last Fall (09). I'll try to post excerpts or links at some point. In any event, the consensus (and this is a thought that had occurred to me a while back in a nude form) seems to be that music evokes (literally) as if by magic the presence of eternity and allows us (for a moment) to hear that which is invisible to the eye. Music allows one to see God. At least, in a form analogous to the actual seeing of God with the inner, third eye, or the virtual seeing of God with the eyes of faith. Music may be the highest actual form of "Platonism for the masses" (credit to Joel Dietz for that thought in embryo). Music allows us to truly aspire to God, in a purity denied to the other senses. There is Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, Bach's Messe H-Molle, and many, many other pieces of music that summon portals into the precincts of heaven, which give one the sense of looking in.