Music and the Power of Sound: The Influence of Tuning and Interval on Consciousness - Hardcover

Daniélou, Alain

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892813369 ISBN 13: 9780892813360

Publisher: Inner Traditions, 1995

Synopsis

Music has always been esteemed for its power to speak directly to our higher consciousness, a power founded in the purity of simple harmonic ratios. In this book, Alain Danielou traces the development of musical scales and tuning from their origins in both China and India, through their merging in ancient Greece, and on to the development of the Western traditions of modal and polyphonic music. Understanding these potent harmonic relationships offers a way for today's musicians to transcend the limitations of overly rationalistic music by drawing on its metaphysical roots.

About this title

From the Author

Alain Daniélou (1907-1994) was without question a Renaissance man. Following his early years as an artist, dancer, and musician in Paris (Cocteau, Diaghilev, and Stravinsky were among his friends), Daniélou settled in India, where he spent fifteen years in the study of Sanskrit, philosophy, and music. After numerous university appointments in India, he returned in 1963 to Europe, establishing the Institute of Comparative Music Studies in Berlin for the reevaluation of Asian music. Daniélou wrote more than thirty books about the philosophy, religion, history, and arts of India, including Gods of Love and Ecstasy; Myths and Gods of India; Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation; While the Gods Play; The Phallus; and The Complete Kama Sutra.

From the Inside Flap

MUSIC

Music, above all other arts, has always been esteemed for its power to speak directly to our higher consciousness. Based on unchanging laws of number and proportion, music also embodies the fundamental metaphysical principles underlying everyday reality. How do these two aspects of music’s power, it’s twin roots in consciousness and mathematics, relate to one another? And why does each of the world’s music systems seem to have its own unique effects on consciousness?

Music and the Power of Sound is a new and thoroughly revised edition of Alain Daniélou’s pioneering Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales, an important book that for many years has been virtually unobtainable in the West. In these pages, Daniélou traces the development of musical scales from their origins in both China and India, through the merging in ancient Greece of those two systems, and on to the development of the Western musical traditions of modal and polyphonic music.

Because musical pitches have specific frequencies, their relationships can be expressed numerically as ratios of greater or lesser complexity: the simpler the ratio, the more euphonious the harmony. The musicians of antiquity understood scales to be either cycles of simple intervals (China), arrays of varying intervals around a central pitch (India), or a combination of the two (Greece). Any one of these methods of construction resulted in a multitude of contrasting scales, each capable of expressing distinct emotional and spiritual states. Those scales, Daniélou argues, not only reflected but also influenced the spiritual values of their parent civilizations.

In the purity of simple harmonic ratios can be found the secrets of music’s affective power. These potent harmonic relationships offer a way for today’s musicians to transcend the limitations of our overly rationalistic musical system and fashion a synthesis with the metaphysical roots of the most eternal of arts.

ALAIN DANIÉLOU (1907-1994), the founder of the International Institute of Comparative Musicology in Berlin, elucidated for tens of thousands of readers the meanings of the arts and religious traditions of both East and West. He was an accomplished player of the vĩnã and taught in the music department at the University of Benares. His numerous books, the product of a career spanning six decades, include: The Myths and Gods of India; Gods of Love and Ecstasy; While the Gods Play; Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation; The Phallus; Yoga: Mastering the Secrets of Matter and the Universe; and The Complete Kãma Sữtra.

Edition details

• Publisher: Inner Traditions
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0892813369
• ISBN 13: 9780892813360
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 192