schalk,
I caught this thread on my way out the door this morning, pleased to find it having just last night heard my own music reproduced digitally for the first time. While most of my self taught playing/composing was in my mid-teens, with only a few months of time on the piano scattered throughout the last twenty years, I do consider music, both interiorly and exteriorly, central to my aesthetic life, even as a visual artist.
Not too long ago the thread Integral Frontiers of Sacred Music was started by balder on gaia.com . Some of your questions are taken up there as well.
What I'd like to bring here is a hypothesis on the AQAL rootedness of styles of musical expression.
Using the example of 'sacred' vocal music, particularly that which developed since people began singing indoors, acoustic settings with distinct insulations from outdoor soundscapes (markedly more insular than tents or yurts or caves).
There are some sounds, mainly those of the 'natural world', with which we as a species have longer histories, deeper co-grooves, with: those that most of our evolution took place with.
Among these sounds some came to hold specific survival value as signifiers. For instance, the chirpping of crickets. To our ancient ancestors hearing the sound of cricketsong likely signified a comfortably moderate temperature and that one could relax in relative safty. When crickets suddenly shut up (like caneries in coal mines) was a signifier of danger, risk of attack, that something stealth enough to fly under your conscious radar was, perhaps, way too close. ("Chrip" = peace. Chirp stop = fight or flight.)
In the UR we're 'wired' or imprinted or programed with the significance of cricketsong. I think that that ancient and deep signifier was established in direct association with the baseline in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. A foundation of the foundation of spiritual aspiration and turning leasure attention to aesthetic persuits.
Interestingly enough, when you listen to a recording of cricketsong slowed down to about 1/100th of usual heard speed, you hear the entire range of human tones used in the soprano through baratone styles of vocal music. And you hear these overlayed and harmonized in successive waves, which, to my ear, is remarkably similar to the choral styles we began to express once we got into cathedrals and such.
So I've begun to sketch out contours of what I'm seeing as the musics sometimes refered to (in flatland) as "other-worldly", or "futuristic" as (not some 'eternity' referent calling attention to an else-when, but) a fuller, more thorough embodiment of what we always already are. Furthermore, I'm positing a transposition of meaning. That one of the deep signals of peace built into us over millions of years found it's directly correlary expression in a specific style of sacred vocal music.
..to be continued,
Kerry
'takes all kinds.