The Meaning of the Musical Tree

About the Book

INTRODUCTION. WHAT DOES IT MEAN? We had the experience but missed the meaning —T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets What does it mean? How many times we ask ourselves that question! Frankl wrote that to find meaning in one’s life was the primary motivational force in man. Gurdjieff’s fundamental question was ”What is the meaning and purpose of man’s life on earth?” Without meaning, life becomes only a dreary disillusionment, a mere stopgap between birth and death. Since our human nature abhors a vacuum, our common search turns toward filling the ever-present inner void. Our humanity urges us to fill in the empty space between the two points. What urges us is the will to meaning: Who am I? What am I? Why am I here? The Mysteries not only address these wrenching human questions, but afford them objective, mathematically provable answers. The Mystery teachings are all about the science of mediation. Mediation means the mean between the extremes. Without the calculable knowledge of the mean, we are the halt leading the blind; and all fall into the ditch of ignorance and discord. From ancient times, the keynote of the special training into the Mysteries concerned the vibratory laws of harmonics. Harmonics is the language of initiates. Even today, our scientists, peering into the ineluctable mysteries of Nature, recognize how the knowledge harmonics unveils the hidden, mysterious, underlying substructure of the visible material world in which we live. They call it string theory. However, they see only the tip of the iceberg and fail to comprehend the vastness of the structure lying below the surface. Consequently, their results give no real meaning to their discoveries. As ancient cultures well knew, unless understood with a special cast of mind, the arid and secular (Ital. secco, dry) knowledge of mathematical harmonic ratios lead only to pedantic factual data that no one, except perhaps the pedants themselves, care to peruse. The sacred meaning is lost. Meaning, one might say, is the value computed by dividing the sum of two extremes of a range of values by 2? Both means and meaning are valuable as the connectors that join together the proverbial two ends of the octave stick. Means are what come in between. As the ancient musicians were at pains to point out, means provide the middle position. As the reconciling force, they represent the distinctive and valuable aspects of our human nature. In the Timaeus, Plato expresses the importance of the mean that mediates between the two incommensurable things: mind and body, allegorized as fire and earth. However, the universal frame was not simply a surface plane (for which a single mean would have sufficed). Rather, it was a solid, and solid bodies are always compacted not by one mean but by two.Therefore, God placed water and air in the mean between fire and earth, and made them to have the same proportion so far as was possible(as fire is to air, so is water to earth); and thus he bound and put together a visible and tangible heaven. And for these reasons, and out of such elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonized by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of harmonia, having been reconciled to itself,

About the Author

Mitzi DeWhitt is a music theorist, piano teacher, composer, and the author of the landmark books, Aristoxenus’s Ghost, Nearly All and Almost Everything, Gurdjieff, String Theory, Music and The Meaning of the Musical Tree. She resides in the Philadelphia area.