Okay, so there are complicated elements to building a system for music & education production. The initial goal for me was to create a vehicle to untap opportunity to teach and motivate about an experiential subject: Object oriented belief. Object oriented belief is based upon belief in God;belief isn’t mandatory for experience.
I first crossed paths with this line of thinking through the introduction of the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin into my life. I was very cautious about stepping into the world of Buddhist thought because I already had a value structure, one based upon a vague notion that Christianity was/is the revelation of God. Because of all the noise in the Western World about “Buddhism” -- most of the noise being distorted thinking/assignment of individuality to “Buddha” as person & “substitute for God” -- I spent a good deal of time getting to know certain documented distinctions within the teachings before I started to actually link my mindset to the construction of thinking that flowed by “the greater vehicle” [Mahayana] teachings through the Lotus Sutra, T’ien Tai, & Nichiren Daishonin. Nichiren’s teachings are “about” [in a wide sense] ‘fusion with the Mystic Law of Cause & Effect through sound [or teachings of the Buddha]’, as those teachings flowed from the scriptural Lotus Sutra through China & T’ien Tai to Japan. It is through the teachings of T’ien Tai that the Western mind can glean a clear vision & insight into how God operates in an environmental way that is always “living”; it was this living sense that opened my eyes -- because they were not distorted to the process of seeing the light -- to seeing the light of how God “gave birth” to the Christian trinity: The Father, the Son, & the Holy Spirit. Through dynamic fusion of life and environment [esho funi], we can see the light as a living element of our life, not as a reflection. This is a distinction which is difficult for most Christians, but is “centered” around the scriptural differences between those in a Bodhisattva life condition -- those aspiring for enlightenment -- and those in the light of enlightenment.
Too often, Christians -- who should more rightfully be called “disciples of Christ” [as they are in the American “Christian Church”] -- live as if Christ is dead. From a strict human construction standpoint [of the Christ story], those Christians deny the first Commandment, which is “love God with all your heart …”. There is a timeline in the Bible & upon that timeline, which includes the New Testament, Christ died and was resurrected, and sits with God. The strict human viewpoint adopted by the vast majority of Christians puts that Christ -- the sinless human born of a virgin, crucified & risen -- into a past which is contained in a box from/into which they view “History” & confine their religious beliefs to chosen elements of print media, or, on rare occasions post Gutenberg press, oral tradition. Christ’s life is “complete” [& documented]; there is no more “living Christ” in the human world. The only element of “living Christ” in this type of construction is the transference of intent and mindset from those who seek to understand the mind of Christ [and GOD] by their interpretation and “good works”. These type of “good works” are like those of Bodhisattva’s, but they are doomed to forever deny the living Christ in GOD because they are reflection. Reflection of light is not whole light.
The natural inclination is to get very technical about interpretation of the “living” versus “dead” point; the underlying question is more important: Can GOD reveal GOD as GOD chooses, and to whom and when GOD makes that determination? If you believe that GOD is GOD, you cannot put a box up around the housing so that the concept fits your human image. This is true for any “scriptural derived” version of divinity.
At best, we can move toward a conversation with GOD.
If GOD is creator and “King” of all that is, that is GOD is GOD, then every sub-derived particle of energy ‘under God’ is a “living piece of GOD”. This does not imply that all that we experience is godly, as there is a randomness we do not understand, and evil that is at odds with GOD’s teaching of the great commandment, the ultimate in cause and effect thinking: “Love your neighbor as yourself” [in tandem with “Love God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your body …”].
If we are to move toward a living conversation with a living God, light incarnate, we are required to truly grasp the meaning of the love GOD requires of us. We are given road maps to the journey.
To deny one road map while claiming the superiority of another is to not only put self above in judgement of GOD’s creation, but also to limit GOD to a death box of human creation. GOD is not there, not entirely anyway; the living God teaches those who travel down this or that path with interaction and response which fits the GOD given capacity to understand and apply within the framework of belief in God and the path.
Inside the trail of knowledge, there is a revelation of light. The theoretical of our sciences -- those things that are foundational to our constructions -- are fusions of creation and experience, and we follow our scientific trail [of cause and effect “proof”] as far as the logic of the math remains fixed within the theory, even when the supposed is a theory of chaos, randomness, or fixed construction. We put faith in the science, because the science is created and constructed from verifiable knowledge.
Music theory teaches us how to communicate from the randomness of sound and silence into a structured “language”. One of the aspects of music theory which has not often been discussed -- in literature & published survey introductions -- is how music is an expression of language. There is talk of how the music language is constructed, from scales & modes to melody & harmony and harmonic theories, but the throughput of that language is most often implied, left for the experiential.
Besides the point of view experiential difficulty of deciphering intent of construction and presentation, there is the a problem with ‘the silent treatment’ regarding the language of music. Perhaps “everybody knows”; perhaps, not everybody knows. Part of knowing whether music -- constructed within the structure of music theory -- as language is language specific is experiential, so to answer whether it is “a living construction” can in part be solved by experimentation: Ask multiple people if they heard the same “story”. There seems to be a general reluctance to “limit” the music by revealing the secret construction of the composer’s language into the specific of the language; how many artists have stopped short of admitting that this melody line or harmony part is a simple translation of the spoken language rhythms because they don’t want to say that it isn’t, when perhaps it was an accident of theory stable construction, or to limit other interpretations that are less tied to a specific melodic or harmonic point or point of view and interpretation.
Deep within the theory there is a construction foundation. Some believe this foundation is a structure built from GOD, the creator; some believe it is some kind of random universal attraction, a cause and effect of the temporary eternal change. Predictable change is structured change, so that is not a denial of the living GOD in the construction. Ultimately , the musical composer is in charge of the translation. The listener is “the end user composer” because the construction within is composed of a response to the sound -- just as kyo [sound or “teachings of the Buddha”] is created sound motion in our chemistry of thinking. If we have a stable construction as a listener, we have access to the language. As we “compose”, we have a part in the process of creating “the sound of GOD”. For some, that is a difficult and perhaps dangerous or blasphemous proposition. “You’re equating yourself with GOD”! Of course, denial of the fusion of cause and effect is putting GOD’s proffered freedom into a dead box and killing it; letting us participate can drive us deeper into the seeking of the latent meaning of the object construction. In the fusion of the theory and the music, there is a secondary language -- that is the construction foundation which is “human” & “of GOD”.
How close we are to constructing music that creates value in the relationship we have with GOD depends upon motive and understanding. There is a gross [as in “greater vehicle”] construction which opens the language. That gross value is latent in the music theory. Fine language can be constructed without going deeper than tuning the instrument and playing in a “pleasing way”. There is however a deeper construction that is latent in the music theory and application, a “voice leading” foundation which opens the living communication between human composer and living GOD.
The composition of music follows a set of rules in the same way that writing a novel or “producing” a film does. In fact, the rules are very similar for each process. Are there exceptions? Yes, there is an avant garde type of construction in each, sometimes those constructions don’t follow any of the rules at all, or at least “not many”, but the vast of the majority of the constructions of “music” -- music, writing, film [“movie”] -- do follow a set of rules which open the living foundational structure.
As witnesses, as people who experience “music”, we have an obligation to heed the call to open the dialogue about the construction. There are fixed elements; there are interpretive elements. Through it all, there is a foundation that is inside the theory of “the rules” of the field. When we start talking about “what’s in the music”, we start discussing something that is part of the Mystic Law, of the creation of GOD, the creator …. There is the music …
