What is the view of the various denominations on the ontological status of music? [closed]

Question

In the cosmology of Tolkien, the Ainur appear to be the parallel of the members of the Divine Council in the Bible. One of the remarkable things that Tolkien imagined in his works was that before Time, the Ainur composed a Great Music, and that this music was the template for the history of Arda. See here.

In our world, with our Bible, the concept of music preceding the creation of the earth (but not necessarily the material world?) is mentioned in Job 38:7. (A question needs to be asked about what "foundations of the earth" in Job 38:4 refers to. Just the earth, or is it a metaphor for more?) In any case, may one assume that the Biblical account supports Tolkien's "music is more primordial than matter" idea, or is there no rigorous Biblical justification for this? For the remainder of this question, perhaps one can, for the sake of discussion, use Tolkien's idea for discussion? (Apologies about that, I hadn't thought enough about what Job 38:4 meant.)

IF music were more primordial than matter, then that would seem to indicate that music would have remarkable properties. What would the denominations, or various theologians or Christians have to say about the notion that music is "greater than the sum of its parts?" Suppose one adopts a naturalistic perspective (As a Christian, I'm compelled to say that I like to think, and do believe, there is more than just naturalism), only for the sake of discussing what is to follow. One would then say that well, one can give various explanations of how consciousness experiences music by breaking down the analysis into neuroscience and the effect of various frequencies of sound waves on various parts of the brain, and so on.

But if music is more primordial than matter, perhaps no amount of such treatment can suffice to do justice to the "experience of music by consciousness"? Perhaps all this too can be said of "consciousness" itself. For example, personally, music plays a huge role in my perception of God.

It's probably impossible to do justice to this immense subject here. What have the various denominations said about music?

Answer 1

I guess I view the universe in a much more mundane manner than you do.

I take the "foundations of the Earth" in Job 38:4 to be a reference to the bedrock under the Earth's surface or something of that sort. The point of Job 38 is that God is rhetorically asking Job if he was present when God created the Earth, if he knows how the Earth was physically built, etc.

Job 38:7, "the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy?" is generally interpreted to be a reference to angels celebrating when God created the world. If that is meant literally, then okay, there was music at the time the Earth was created. That doesn't say that there was music BEFORE the Earth was created. So I guess the question at that point becomes whether music existed before the Earth was created, or if both were invented at about the same time.

A big question becomes what existed before the universe was created. One theory is that "in the beginning" means that God created time, and there was no "before" Gen 1:1. You can't meaningfully talk about the time before time began. If that's the case, then at most music existed for at most less than a day before the creation of the world.

If you take a theory that SOMETHING has existed forever, then perhaps in that forever before the world was created there was music.

I don't know of anything in the Bible that directly says one way or the other.

Answer 2

Let's take the common standard that A = 440. You might ask "440 what?" The answer is 440 hz. Each note we play corresponds to a specific number of hertz, which is the number of full-period cycles that the sound wave makes in one second.

Why is this bit of mathematics relevant to a historical/theological SE site? Well, to ask whether music existed before the Earth, one must ask: "What is music?" so that we know for what it is we are searching. That being said, we can say for certain: part of what we call music is mathematical in nature.

Indeed, not only does each note have a specific frequency, composition of musical pieces is accomplished through varying patterns of repetition. Each note in a scale is a certain frequency above the last note in the same scale. You can play (theoretically) any scale or pattern in any key. To play a song or scale in a different key simply means that we adjust the starting frequency of our scale to another number of hz, and then we play the notes of the scale with the same offsets they had in the first key. We can listen to the same scale played in different keys and recognize their "ontological" (as you put it) structures as being distinct (after all, they may never share a frequency between any two notes in the entirety of the two scales) while their relative mappings from a given frequency to next frequency remain the same.

Let's assume for a second that light can be converted from its ontological structure into a mechanical form that we call sound. Let's assume that at least in theory it's also possible to go the other way, from sound to light. What this means in effect is that we could "transpose" Martin Luther's "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" into a different key: one whose starting "note" exists in terms of light and not sound. Our song would be "played" by altering the frequency of the light, according to our transposed score, that is emitted from our source just as is done in the mechanical world of guitars and pianos.

So from this perspective, this is a relatively simple question to answer: ontologically, music is sound, or at least some specified forms of variation on an energy wave through a certain medium. There must be mediums through which to source and send the variations. This means (in our standard definitions) that ontologically, music did not exist before there was anything by which we could reveal a score.

Now, there's a different question, which is the one I think you are meaning to ask. Ontology aside, could the principles of music have existed before the creation of the Universe? After all, the principles of music can be applied in many places.

In information theory, we consider the "quantification of information" (phrase is ruthlessly stolen from wikipedia). What is information? Information is "a sequence of symbols that can be interpreted as a message." As such, we can quantify (extract and/or extrapolate meaning from) it. If we had time, ability, and desire, we could analyze all symbols in the universe (think beyond molecules: for instance, why could you not apply the principles of music to compose a piece written in the medium of "time?" Perhaps in this medium A = 440 nanoseconds). Martin Luther's famous hymn might (and probably does) actually exist in several places if we could apply the correct techniques to extract it and the creativity to look for it.

So from a logical perspective, one need only have information and the ability to quantify the information in order for the principles of music to exist. From a philosophical perspective, there is no definitive answer regarding the question as to whether or not the principles of music exist if either or or both of information and a quantifier are absent.

From the Christian point of view, the philosophical question is meaningless. God always was and is. The quantifier has always been present. In order for God to "think," this must also mean that symbols have always been present, as mathematically speaking thinking is the processing of symbols. Even though the symbols God processes originate from Himself, they are present nonetheless or He would have nothing on which to act. He would be insentient.

This demonstrates that in whatever medium God chooses to operate, the principles of music have always existed.

Edit:

Minor nitpick of the question. It's a good topic in general but it's sort of all over the map and ends with the too-broad question about denominational views on music. I've interpreted it as "could music have existed ontologically before creation?" I can understand how others would have an urge to answer a different question.

Answer 3

I am not sure how you are deriving the idea that music is prior to matter as this is physically impossible, as music is created by vibrations of matter. Matter must come first, then when it vibrates music is derived.

I suspect that the reference to the angels (called morning stars) singing in praise while beholding God as he drew up the design, measured out the model and built the secret underpinning of everything that we see, you saw 'music before matter'. In this sense music was before matter only because angels existed before matter. Therefore, angels, their voices, the way of existence all existed before matter. This does not mean earthly physical music came before earthly matter.

The ideas of Tolkien are actually similar to ancient Greek philosophy which might possibly relate music to the logos of the universe. Music was always tied into mathematics in the old world of philosophy and these patterns and harmonics were like a fabric of the logos holding the universe together by triangles, according to Pythagorus, and other shapes according to others, if I remember correctly.

The only semi-spiritual aspect of music is that is does naturally invoke emotion and is by those natural means early on that music was used to assist the worship of God, but you will not find grand denominational views as a far as I know that would give music a metaphysical elevated appreciation that would blur the sharp division between the spiritual and material. In a negative sense there are some superstitious thoughts along those lines that I have encountered. For example, there are a few odd people who think certain kinds of music is actually evil in itself, but one can't find any doctrinal support for such a concept. It is probably because certain kinds of music may evoke certain seeming bad emotions that this idea is formed. I recall in the early days of Christian rock music, some extremists actually called it 'devil music' and it was so sad as the arguments were also racists saying that this 'devil music' had origins if African drums.

In any case music is just mechanical vibrations but as God has made everything, even these vibrations have meaning in our life that goes beyond the recognition that can ever be made by raw science, and all the universe glorifies and sings the praises of God.