Den blendende musikken
Abstrak
In this essay I explore the religious potential of music via ideas taken from Olivier Messiaen. I first present his categorization of music and the concepts of sound-colour and dazzlement as the ‘directional meaning’ of music. I then show how Messiaen relates this to the phenomena of natural resonance and afterimages, and based on this, I present – via Goethe and Rudolf Steiner – the notion of an etheric, evanescent or incorporeal matter. This understanding and experience of matter is then brought to bear on music. In this context the notion of a ‘religious experience’ can be understood as both referring to content and sentiment related to a religious belief, and, in a more general sense of religare (‘to bind’), as a deeper bond with the material-temporal flow of nature. This gives way to a Johannine vision of Messiaen’s musical thinking where the creative-sounding logos or ‘word’ is both spirit and matter, and where music may represent a potential awakening to this reality.
Penulis (1)
Torbjørn Eftestøl
Akses Cepat
- Tahun Terbit
- 2022
- Bahasa
- no
- Sumber Database
- CrossRef
- DOI
- 10.23865/noasp.177.ch15
- Akses
- Open Access ✓