Music as Revelation of the Sacraments I believe music is mystical: Try this if you have the patience, you won't regret it: http://www.theologyoftheages.com/content/apocalypse/ecclesiology/grace/music-sacraments-i.php Excerpt: Music is the Transcendent Language of the Liturgy TUTOR: OK, student, to get back on the bandwagon, we remind ourselves that we are progressively showing that music is revelatory, at least objectively. STUDENT: Yes, and it has been an awesome ride so far! TUTOR: Yes, it has, and it is only going to get better! Toward that end, we once again remind ourselves that countless saints have testified that the Mass contains the whole faith implicitly. And there is no denying that the ultimate language of the Mass is music, seeing as Scripture persistently testifies that the angels and holy ones never cease to not merely SAY but to SING to God their worship and praise of Him. STUDENT: Yes. For example, in a liturgical snippet of Apocalypse, the angels sing Holy, Holy, Holy, which is a reference to what we sing at Mass just before the Eucharistic prayer! TUTOR: Yes, exactly! And, moreover, whereas Latin and some Eastern tongues are marvelously poetic expressions of how to communicate in the liturgy, the ultimate transcendence of human communication is music, since immediately, if one hears an instrumental melody, the listener can already interpret some implicit meaning from the emotions, timing, and such, whereas if one hears Latin or Lithuanian or Aramaic, one will probably not understand unless one is native to that land or has studied that language. Hence, clearly, as we saw in that first essay, music truly is the ultimate transcendent communication medium. Therefore, if the liturgy perfectly communicates the essentials of our faith implicitly, and if music is the corresponding language of the liturgy, then music should, in some sense, reveal the mysteries of faith. STUDENT: Yes, and we have progressively been showing this through the lessons. More particularly, this has been demonstrated wonderfully in everything we have done so far. Toward that end, maybe you could review what we have worked on. Western Music is Not Relative TUTOR: Sure. Firstly, we showed that music is not entirely relative: that even though different cultures may divide the music period differently than the West, or hear different things in our music than we do, nevertheless, if we use natural law and harmonics, the Western scale of 12 notes follows as the simplest natural and objective music that exists. Hence, music is not arbitrary but rigorous and logical. Moreover, we have begun to establish that this same natural music contains some mind-blowing analogies of Catholic mystery and doctrine that cannot be denied objectively but only questioned about whether God intended them or not. The Greater Ages in Music STUDENT: I agree. I will chime in on the first analogy: in the second lesson, we showed that the Greater Ages of the World, both in the joys and sorrows, follow a simple musical scale, namely, from the base note of the key all the way up [or down] to the octave inclusive. There, we saw that the octave was an awesome metaphor: that just as the first and last notes of the scale are effectively the “same” note, only one octave higher or lower, so the first and last phases of human history, whether in joy or sorrow, have basically identical characteristics; how? Well, in this: namely, that the world in the beginning is totally wicked, sparing a remnant [Noah and his family], and the world at the end is totally wicked [the great apostasy] sparing a remnant [small portion of Gentiles and most Jews]. Too, the world at the beginning is destroyed by water, and the world at the end, by fire; finally, the first world is starting to be redeemed, whereas at the end, it is being utterly redeemed.
