Music and the Mystical

The course focuses on the link between music and the mystical throughout history. By using the term mystical, we do not refer solely to mystical experiences but to practices, discourse, institutions, traditions, and the course’s focus: music. In other words, the mystical infers a broad set of meanings for which the student will inevitably have to decide – based on its relation to music - on the definition.

Thus, the course focuses on how the mystical and music coalesce by exploring the culture, tradition, experience, love, and beauty associated therewith. The course is designed in a fortnightly format, with each fortnight focusing on one of the four elements, namely, water, fire, air and earth. The four elements accepted as the classical elements in the ancient world were evident in Hellenistic philosophy and onwards to Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, among others. Taking Thales of Miletus as our starting point, the course begins with water as the most primordial substance archê from which all originates. Fittingly then, the first fortnight will focus on Classical Greece, specifically the Pythagorean tradition and Platonism.

The first fortnight will focus on the Pythagorean-Platonic musical scale and its link to their harmonious mathematical cosmology. The second and third fortnights will discuss the spiritual significance of the bells in Buddhist and Russian traditions, which includes the universal catastrophe in fire envisaged by philosophical and music luminaries such as Alexander Scriabin. In the same vein, the final fortnight of the course ‘Earth’ will orchestrate the great eschatological event: the end of the world. Thus, beginning with the secret society Brethren of Purity’s denigration of the earth and the philosophical and music luminaries of the course, the final week will culminate in the utter destruction of the world.