Music and celestial harmonies(continuation – see last January issue)
Paris, Group Desliens, January 5
th, 1869 – medium Mr. Desliens
“You are right, gentlemen, for reminding me of my promise, because time, that passes so quickly in the world of space, has eternal minutes for the one who endures that embraced by the trial! A few days ago, a few weeks ago, I counted like you; every day added a whole series of vicissitudes to the already endured vicissitudes, and the cup was filling up step by step.Ah! you do not know how difficult it is to carry the name of a great man! Do not wish glory; do not be known, be useful. Popularity has its thorns, and more than once I found myself bruised by the too brutal caresses of the crowd.Today, the smoke of incense no longer intoxicates me. I hover over the pettiness of the past, and it is a boundless horizon that extends before my insatiable curiosity. Thus, handful of hours fall into the secular hourglass, and I always search, always study, never counting time.Yes, I promised you; but who can boast of keeping a promise, when the elements necessary to fulfill it belong to the future? The powerful of the world, still under the breath of adulation of the courtiers, may wish to face the problem hand-to-hand; but it was no longer a fake struggle that we were talking about here; there were no more bravos, loud cheers to encourage me and overcome my weakness. It was, and still is, a superhuman work that I tackled; it is against it that I always struggle, and if I hope to succeed, I cannot nonetheless hide my exhaustion. I'm terrified... In dire straits!... I rest before exploring again; but, if I cannot tell you today what the future will hold, I may be able to appreciate the present: to be critical, after having been criticized. You will judge me, and disapprove me if I am not fair, which I will try to be by avoiding personalisms.Why then so many musicians and so few artists? So many composers, and so few musical truths? Alas! It is for the fact that it is not from the imagination that art can be born, as it is believed; it has no other master and creator but the truth. Without it, it is nothing, or it is only an art of smuggling, rhinestone, counterfeiting. The painter can delude and show white, where he has put only a mixture of colors without a name; the oppositions of shades create an appearance, and that is how Horace Vernet, for example, was able to make a magnificent orange horse appear from a bright white.But the note has only one sound. The sequence of sounds produces a harmony, a truth, only if the sound waves echo another truth. To be a musician, all it is needed is to align notes on a scope, to preserve the accuracy of the musical relationships; that is the only way in which pleasant noises can be produced; but it is the feeling that is born in the pen of the real artist, it is he who sings, who cries, who laughs... It whistles in the leaf with the stormy wind; he leaps with the foaming wave; he roars with the furious tiger!... But to give the music a soul, to make it cry, laugh, scream, he must have experienced these different feelings, of pain, joy, anger!Is it with a smile on the lips and disbelief in the heart that you personify a Christian martyr? Will it be a skeptic of love who will make a Romeo, a Juliet? Is it a carefree bon viveur who would create the Marguerite in Faust? No! It takes the whole passion of the one who makes passion vibrate!... And that is why, when so many sheets are filled out, the works are so rare and the truths exceptional; it is that one does not believe, the soul does not vibrate. The sound we hear is that of the ringing gold, the sparkling wine!... Inspiration is the woman who exhibits a false beauty; and since we only have made up defects and virtues, we only produce a veneer, a musical makeup. Scratch the surface, and you will soon find the stone.Rossini.” January 17
th, 1869 – medium Mr. Nivard
“My silence about the question that the master of the Spiritist Doctrine addressed to me was explained. It was appropriate, before touching this difficult subject, to collect myself, to remember, and to condense the elements that were at hand. I did not have to study music, I only had to classify the arguments methodically, to present a summary capable of giving an idea of my conception of harmony. That work, which I have not done without difficulty, is finished, and I am ready to submit it to the appreciation of the Spiritists. It is difficult to define harmony; it is often confused with music, with sounds, resulting from an arrangement of notes, and the vibrations of instruments reproducing such arrangement. But harmony is not that, like flame is not light. The flame results from the combination of two gases: it is tangible; the light it projects is an effect of that combination, and not the flame itself: it is not tangible. Here, the effect is greater than the cause. So it is with harmony; it is the result of a musical arrangement; it is an effect that is also superior to its cause: the cause is brutal and tangible; the effect is subtle and is not tangible. Light can be conceived without flame and harmony can be understood without music. The soul can perceive harmony without the help of any instrumentation, just as it is able to see light without the help of any material combinations. Light is an intimate sense that the soul possesses; the more this sense is developed, the better it perceives light. Harmony is also an intimate sense of the soul: it is perceived due to the development of this sense. Outside the material world, that is, outside of tangible causes, light and harmony are of a divine essence; we have them due to the efforts we have made to acquire them. If I compare light and harmony, it is to make myself better understood, and because these two sublime pleasures of the soul are daughters of God, and therefore are sisters.The harmony of space is so complex, it has so many degrees that I know, and much more that are hidden from me in the infinite ether, that the one who is placed at a certain height of perceptions, becomes astonished by contemplating these various harmonies, which would constitute, if they were placed together, the most unbearable cacophony; whereas, on the contrary, perceived separately, they constitute the particular harmony at each level. These harmonies are elementary and coarse in the lower levels; they lead to ecstasy in the higher spheres. Such harmony that displeases a Spirit with subtle perceptions, delights another with crude perceptions; and when the inferior is allowed to the delights of the higher harmonies, he is taken by ecstasy and prayer penetrates him; the bliss draws him to the high spheres of the moral world; he lives a life superior to his own and would like to continue to live that way. But when the harmony ceases to overwhelm him, he wakes up, or he falls asleep, if you will; in any case, he returns to the reality of his situation, and in the descent, he cries out and exhales a prayer to the Lord, asking for the strength to rise. It is for him a great subject of emulation.I will not try to explain the musical effects that the Spirit produces by acting on the ether; what is certain is that the Spirit produces the sounds he wants, and that he cannot wish what he does not know. Now, the one who understands much, who has harmony in himself, who is saturated with that, who himself enjoys his intimate sense, this impalpable void, this abstraction that is the conception of harmony, he acts at will on the universal fluid which, as a faithful instrument, reproduces what the Spirit conceives and wishes. The ether vibrates by the action of the will of the Spirit; the harmony that he carries in him is concrete, so to speak; it exhales itself soft and sweet like the perfume of the violet, or it roars like the storm, or it bursts like the thunder, or it complains like the breeze; it is fast as the lightning, or slow as the cloud; it is broken like a sob, or uniform like a lawn; it is disheveled like a waterfall, or calm like a lake; it whispers like a stream or rumbles like a torrent. It sometimes has the harshness of the mountains and sometimes the freshness of an oasis; it is alternately sad and melancholic as the night, joyful and cheerful as the day; it is capricious like the child, comforter like the mother and protective like the father; it is chaotic like passion, crystal clear like love, and grandiose like nature. When it comes to the latter term, it merges with prayer, it glorifies God, and dazzles the very one who produces or conceives it.O comparison! Comparison! Why does one have to use it! Why must we bend to your degrading necessities and borrow, from the tangible nature, crude images to make us conceive the sublime harmony in which the Spirit delights. And yet, despite the comparisons, we cannot explain this abstraction that is a feeling when it is cause, and a sensation when it becomes effect.The Spirit who has the feeling of harmony is like the Spirit who has intellectual acquisition; they both constantly enjoy the inalienable property they have amassed. The intelligent Spirit, who teaches his science to those who do not know, experiences the pleasure of teaching, because he knows that he makes his students happy; the Spirit who resonates the ether of the chords of harmony in him, feels the happiness of seeing satisfied those who listen to him.Harmony, science, and virtue are the three great conceptions of the Spirit: the first delights him, the second enlightens him, the third elevates him. Possessed in their fullness, they merge and constitute purity. O Pure spirits who contain them! Descend into our darkness and enlighten our walk; show us the path you have taken, so that we can follow in your footsteps!And when I think that these Spirits, whose existence I can understand, are finite beings, atoms, before the universal and eternal Lord, my reason remains confused by thinking of the greatness of God, and of the infinite happiness that he enjoys by himself, by the mere fact of his infinite purity, since all that the creature acquires is only a parcel that emanates from the creator. Now, if the part manages to fascinate by the will, to captivate and delight by suavity, to shine by virtue, what then must the eternal and infinite source, from which it is drawn, produce? If the Spirit, a created being, manages to draw from his purity so much bliss, what idea should one have of what the creator draws from His absolute purity? Eternal problem!The composer who conceives harmony, translates it into the coarse language called music; he materializes his idea and writes it. The artist learns the form and grasps the instrument that should allow him to express the idea. The tune played by the instrument reaches the ear that transmits it to the soul of the listener. But the composer was powerless to fully express the harmony he conceived, for lack of a sufficient language; the performer, in turn, has not understood the whole written idea, and the indocile instrument he uses does not allow him to translate everything he has understood. The ear is struck by the coarse air that surrounds it, and the soul finally receives, through a rebellious organ, the horrible translation of the idea hatched in the soul of the maestro. The maestro's idea was his intimate feeling; although biased by the agents of instrumentation and perception, it nevertheless produces sensations in those who hear it translated; these sensations are harmony. Music has produced them: they are effects of the latter. Music has put itself at the service of feeling to produce sensation. The feeling in the composer is harmony; the sensation in the listener is also harmony, with the difference that it is conceived by one and received by the other. Music is the medium
of harmony; it receives it, and it gives it, as the reflector is the medium
of light, as you are the medium
of the Spirits. It makes it somewhat biased, depending on whether it is more or lesser well executed, as the reflector better reflects light or not so well, depending on whether it is brighter or less bright and polished, as the medium better renders the thoughts of the Spirit or not so well, depending on whether he is more flexible or less flexible.And now that harmony is well understood in its meaning, that we know that it is conceived by the soul and transmitted to the soul, we will understand the difference between the harmony of Earth and the harmony of space.Everything is coarse among you: the instrument of translation and the instrument of perception; with us, everything is subtle: you have air, we have ether; you have the organ that obstructs and veils; with us, perception is direct, and nothing is veiled. With you, the author is translated: with us he speaks without intermediary, and in the language that expresses all conceptions. And yet, these harmonies have the same source, as the light of the moon has the same source as that of the sun; just as the light of the moon is the reflection of that of the sun, harmony on Earth is only the reflection of the harmony of space. Harmony is as indefinable as happiness, fear, anger: it is a feeling. We understand it only when we have it, and we only have it when we have acquired it. The man who is joyful cannot explain his joy; the one who is fearful cannot explain his fear; they can tell the facts that provoke these feelings, define them, describe them, but the feelings remain unexplained. The fact that causes joy in one will not produce anything on another; the object that causes fear in one will produce courage in another. The same causes are followed by adverse effects; that does not happen in physics, but it does in metaphysics. This happens because feeling is the property of the soul, and souls differ from each other in sensitivity, impressionability, freedom. Music, the secondary cause of the perceived harmony, penetrates and transports one and leaves the other cold and indifferent. The first is in a state to receive the impression that harmony produces, and the second is in a contrary state; he hears the air vibrating, but he does not understand the idea it brings to him. It brings him boredom and sleep, while enthusiasm and tears to the other. Obviously, the man who enjoys the delights of harmony is more elevated, more refined, than the one who cannot be touched by that; his soul is better able to feel; it detaches more easily, and harmony helps it to detach; harmony transports the soul, allowing it to better see the moral world. Hence it must be concluded that music is essentially moralizing, since it carries harmony to the souls, and harmony elevates and exalt them.The influence of music on the soul, on its moral progress, is recognized by everyone; but the reason for such influence is usually ignored. Its explanation is entirely in this fact: that harmony places the soul under the power of a feeling that dematerializes it. That feeling exists to some extent, but it develops by the action of a similar, more elevated feeling. The one that is deprived of such feeling is brought there gradually and ends up by letting oneself to be penetrated and drawn into the ideal world, where one forgets, for a moment, the coarse pleasures that one prefers to the divine harmony.And now, if we consider that harmony comes out of the concept of the Spirit, we will deduce that if music exerts a happy influence on the soul, the soul that conceives it also exerts its influence on music. The virtuous soul, that has the passion for the good, the beautiful, the great, and which has acquired harmony, will produce masterpieces capable of penetrating and moving the most armored souls. If the composer is down to earth, how will he restore the virtue that he disdains, the beautiful that he ignores and the greatness that he does not understand? His compositions will be the reflection of his sensual tastes, his lightness, his carefreeness. They will sometimes be licentious and sometimes obscene, sometimes amusing, and sometimes burlesque; they will communicate to the listeners the feelings they will express and perverting instead of improving them. Spiritism, by moralizing men, will therefore exert a great influence on music. It will produce more virtuous composers, who will communicate their virtues by making their compositions heard. People will laugh less, and cry more; laughter will give way to emotion, ugliness will give way to beauty and amusement to greatness.On the other hand, the listeners whom Spiritism will have prepared to easily receive harmony, will feel, when hearing serious music, a real enchantment; they will disdain frivolous and licentious music that takes hold of the masses. When the grotesque and the obscene are abandoned for the beautiful and for the good, the composers of such a kind will disappear; for, without listeners, they will gain nothing, and it is to win that they get dirty.Oh! yes, Spiritism will have influence on music! How could it be otherwise? Its advent will change art by purifying it. Its source is divine, its strength will take it wherever there are men to love, to elevate and to understand. It will become the ideal and goal of the artists. Painters, sculptors, composers, poets, will ask for its inspirations, and it will attend them, because it is rich, because it is inexhaustible.The Spirit of Maestro Rossini, in a new existence, will return to continue the art he considers the first stage of them all; Spiritism will be his symbol and the inspiration of his compositions.Rossini.”
