The Historic Cycle of Music and Art

The Historic Cycle of Music and Art
by Don Robertson

    Are there really cycles in history, where societies continually go through the same cultural progression and regression as had similarly taken place in previous societies? Some historians believe this to be true. In this article, I show how, beginning in the 1960s, I began looking into this cyclic re-ocurrance of historical tendencies as it related to the classical music of our Western world. Enjoy.

 Music Through the Centuries  

      I wrote the book Music Through the Centuries in 2005 and embedded it in my DoveSong.com website. I have not yet re-published the book in hardcover. Instead I am re-using the material in that book for "Music Futurist" blog posts, expanding the information and bringing it up to date.

       The premise of Music Through the Centuries is that each of the last seven centuries has had its own style of classical music. I'm convinced that this century-by-century stylistic change is a part of a reoccurring cycle, although I do not yet fully understand how these centuries fit into the larger picture.

      I first started to think about cycles that covered long historical periods back in 1961, when I first wrote about the concept of cycles relating to the history of art. That year I had been reading the work of James Joyce. Through Joyce I discovered the philosopher Giambattista Vico, who in 1725 wrote Scienza Nuova (New Science), a book that has been highly influential in the study of the philosophy of history. Vico believed that history repeated itself in cycles, a concept that fits nicely with the ancient teachings of an astrological "great year." 

     I was in Mexico riding a bus in 1969 when I first began making notes for a new cycle concept. I published my findings in my 1970 book Kosmon. The following is the drawing that was featured in that book:

The Cycle 

"The Cycle" from Kosmon, by Don Robertson (1970). Drawing by John Fresques

     Studying Vico, I was fascinated by his ideas about "the re-occurrence of nations in cycles." He was not describing an exact repetition of history itself, but the re-occurrence of sociological tendencies that guided the course of man throughout time (hey, astrology again). It has been said that history doesn't actually repeat itself... it just rhymes. 

      As I mentioned, I had been thinking about Vico and about cycles already for eight years, and this had just been making sense to me. The idea of reoccurring cycles really isn't far fetched. Nature unfolds in yearly seasonal cycles, and I have already mentioned the cycle of the great year, the roughly 24,000-year procession of the equinox. 

    Vico describes the historical cycle as being divided into five positions:

1) First men feel necessity

2) They then look for utility (usefulness)

3) Next they attend to comfort

4) Still later they amuse themselves with pleasure

5) Finally they grow dissolute in luxury, becoming mentally unstable and wasting their energies.

     I had begun to compare Vico's five-position cycle with what an author named Peter Yates had written in his book Twentieth Century Music. He had pointed out that there were five positions in the path that the classical music of our Western culture had followed. In my drawing, I have combined these five positions with Vico's five positions. These are Yates' five time slices in the history of our classical music:

1) CONCORDANCE – All the intervals are acoustically correct, as were those in the modes of ancient Greece and Egypt.

Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos

2) CONSONANCE – Slight alteration in pitch and scale as during the time of J.S. Bach when new tunings for the keyboard were introduced to make accommodation for what today Western musicians call harmony (which is actually a system of harmony based upon modulation).

Corelli's Christmas Concerto

3) DISSONANCE – Wide use of dissonant intervals as during the time of Beethoven. During this period, music was frequently using such long-restricted intervals as the infamous “devil’s Interval” (the tritone (C to F#), that had been prohibited during the Middle Ages) as a part of a system of harmony that was based on a dissonantly tuned keyboard.

Richard Wagner "Siegfried - Prelude to Act II"

4) DISCORDANCE - In this period, music is based on discords. This type of music began to be written during the first part of the 20th century by composers who today are considered by the academic-music community as “modern masters,” the foremost being Arnold Schoenberg:

Arnold Schoenberg's opera "Moses und aron"

5) NOISE – An era that began in the 1940s was initiated by composer John Cage. He declared that any kind of noise should be considered to be music. In other words, any kind of sound was music and there was no distinction between, say, the sound of machines in a factory or a Beethoven symphony. This fifth position on the cycle represents the complete dissolution of music itself. 

John Cage and Yoko Ono

     In the article accompanying the cycle drawing in the Kosmon, I wrote about how various social systems around the world were acting out the parameters of any one of the five parts of this cycle and how our classical music has played a part in the overall operation of the cycle enacted by our culture.

     For Position 4, the goals of the society are pleasure, and when large numbers of European society moved from a more balanced position to seek pleasure for pleasure's sake, this was reflected in the classical music of Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose influence during the first half of the 20th century caused a change in the prevalent and accepted style of contemporary classical music, allowing the music to become more discordant.. 

      During the second half of the 20th century, we have the influence of Schoenberg's aforementioned student John Cage, who proclaimed that all sound and every noise conceivable was a type of music. This cagey guy ushered in Position 5, when music (yes and art also) entered its final dissolution, where culture found itself adrift in a sea of not knowing its true nature and its true purpose. 

     At the end of Position 5, the cycle terminates with a huge transformation back to the beginning of the cycle, to Position 1 in a new iteration. This shift from 5 to 1 is not a smooth, slowly evolving transition as were the others, but is in fact, a collapse of the socioeconomic system, which has grown so corrupt and dissolute that only a very devastating solution can cause a spoiled society to turn from a life where every kind of excess is available, to a life based on the most basic of needs: food, water, clothing, love and spirituality. It is during this shift from the end of one iteration of the cycle to the next, Vico said, that a society that was based on the lowest common denominator (a "godless" society, where all people and all acts are considered to be equal in a "spirit of tolerance," where there are no true heroes, and where all ideas, acts, and things are acceptable) collapses and the people must turn to spirituality as their only recourse. This is also the time when music fully changes, for during a time of necessity, discords are out of place.
     Having understood all of this back in 1969, and recognizing that a collapse was guaranteed at some point in the not-too-distant future, I sang about the situation in this recording of my song "Heavy Trip," recorded at Mercury Records in San Francisco during that year:

"Heavy Trip," by Don Robertson (1969)

And so, there you have it. I hope that you give some thought and consideration to an idea that I had in 1969, and still consider valuable today.  
  

© 1970, 2016 by Don Robertson

If Plants Could Sing - Serenading the Marigolds (Part 2) - Resonance

If Plants Could Sing (Part 2)
by Don Robertson
“Their savage eyes turn’d to a modest gaze by the sweet power of music.” 

William Shakespeare

© 2005, revised and first published March 16, 2016

     If we were to take the plant experiments that I described in Part One seriously, the conclusion would be that music not only “hath charms to soothe the savage breast” (to state the famous quote (usually misquoted) from William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride), but could also have an opposite, deleterious effect. This is what I am going to explore: the amazing effect that music has not only on plants, but on everything…including us.

     We already know that human beings are affected by music, that it can help raise our spirits, rejuvenate our bodies, and make us laugh or cry. Listening to music can trigger emotions that range from the greatest of sorrows to the most exalted ecstasy. 

     It is for this reason that the motion picture and television industries have invested so much money in providing background music for films, shows and commercials. It’s not for our entertainment. It's to heighten the physical and emotional response to what is being viewed on the screen. These industries know that while our attention is riveted on the action, the music is working on our emotions. Richard Wagner realized this back in the 19th century and with this in mind, he transformed the art of opera into music drama.
     Have you ever turned the sound off on your TV during a really intense action scene, where the music is moving at a fast and furious pace, or in a really creepy horror film, where the music alone is enough to fully frighten a person, and then noticed how much less you react to the action on the screen? 

     Background and soundtrack music is very powerful. Many people have become so "used to" the music that forms a backdrop for their lives that sometimes they are not even aware of it. But the subconscious mind is always aware of it…all of the time. 
     Many people today bathe in a continual sea of electronic music that plays in the background (electronic music being any music that is produced by speakers or earphones). Music accompanies us while we shop, while we drive, while we study, while we eat and sleep... music is playing when we ride an elevator or wait for a robot person to answer the phone at "customer service." I have met people who never turn off their TV sets. They have told me that the relative quiet would drive them insane!

    Many years ago I discovered the power of music, and I have worked with that power since that time to produce healthful, healing, and spiritually uplifting effects. I know that this is real. 

     When I was playing an 80-string zither tuned to the most harmonious of all musical scales, the pentatonic scale, I created music that produced amazing results. One time I put a whole barnyard of animals to sleep, chickens, horses, cows, pigs, birds, simply by performing a beautiful 20-minute improvisation on my zither. There was another time when I put a whole nursery full of hyperactive preschoolers to sleep by just playing the piano.

This is a 34-minute concert recording of my zither music from 1980

     Some may ask “How is that possible?” I will start with a simple scientific phenomena called resonance.

Resonance

     Resonance is the process known to science where energy from one system is transferred to another. In the case of music and sound, when a note is sung or played, the sound waves extend outward, like ripples in a pool of water after a stone has been thrown in. Everything in the radius of the waves of sound resonates with that sound according to the thickness of the matter, and how much in harmony the matter is with that note and its inner notes (called overtones).

     When things resonate, they are have a harmonic equivalence. Harmony is the principal of the Universe that maintains balance and cohesiveness. When we achieve perfect harmony in music, we align ourselves with the movements of the stars and the atoms.

     We have all heard about the opera singers who can shatter a crystal goblet simply by singing a note. The Italian singers Enrico Caruso and Beniamino Gigli were supposed to have accomplished that feat. How did they do it? They first tapped the glass with a spoon to determine the note that it produced, and then they sang the same note with perfect precision, causing the glass to resonate. If a singer can cause it to resonate like this while increasing the volume of his or her voice, the glass will eventually shatter. This is why soldiers are told to break step when crossing bridges. There are all kinds of projects one could delve into to investigate the relationship of sound and matter further. By means of sound alone, geometrical figures have been created in sand and water. YouTube is filled with information about these things.

     One way to demonstrate musical resonance can be accomplished with an acoustic piano. Pianos have little damper arms lined with a soft material that press against each string.  

     When you press a key on a piano, a hammer strikes the string. The right pedal on a piano is called the sustain pedal. When you press that pedal, all the dampers are pulled away from the strings. In this state, none of the strings on the piano are muted. With the strings unmuted, sing a note into the piano, where the strings are. If you sing a note that is the same as any of the notes that the piano strings are tuned to, the strings that correspond to that note will resonate. When you stop, the sound continues from the strings while you hold the sustain pedal down, then slowly the sound dies away. In fact, more than one set of strings (notes) will sound in response to the overtones of the note that you sang. 

     We are able to see that sound vibrations are powerful because of this obvious effect on other matter. The sounds, arranged to make music, effect us all…

Vibes

     We can see from our examples of resonance that sounds are waves, vibrations, or “vibes.” What is the nature of these sound waves? In the fifth century, the Greek philosopher Democritus stated the following: “Sweetness and bitterness, cold and warm, and all of the colors exist only in the mind and not in reality.” It has taken many years for scientists to realize that what Democritus was saying was true. Everything is really only the manifestation of waves of energy: matter, color, light, sound, air. We have waves of electricity, radio waves, x-rays... these we already knew about, but did you know that the big rock out in your garden was just another wave phenomenon?

     Sound is produced when atoms (the particles of matter) are set into motion and create a vibration which instigates a chain reaction among the atoms that surround them, thus creating waves of energy. These waves circle outward, like the ripples that spread in a pond of water after a rock has been dropped into it. All phenomena are produced this way, not just sound: light, heat, taste, smell, electricity, radio signals, x-rays, magnetism and all of the different kinds of radiation and rays. What differentiates one from another is the speed of the vibrating atom. This was what Democritus was saying, and this is what the Hindu texts speak of when they refer to maya: the illusion that is this world. The experience of the outer world reaches us through our five senses: waves of energy vibrating at a particular frequency, then decoded by our brain.

     The ancients knew about atomic vibration.They wrote that the elements of atoms themselves, the electrons, were actually vibrating particles spinning around the atom’s nucleus in the same manner that our planet Earth orbits the sun. Additionally, they knew that each electron spins upon an axis of its own, like our planet. But this knowledge was too advanced for the common man to understand, and so it remained veiled in the background.

Louis Victor Pierre Raymond duc de Broglie

     During the year 1925, however, a scientist named Louis Victor Pierre Raymond duc de Broglie announced this fact to the scientific community. Electrons, he said, had the same characteristics as sound, replete with overtones. No wonder plants, animals, humans, as well as pure physical phenomena such as a wine goblet or the strings of a piano, react to sound vibrations!

     At first he was laughed at, but soon, the scientific community began to take what de Broglie was saying seriously. After all, the great mathematical genius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, had written many years before: “I am able to prove that not only light, color, sound, heat, and the like, but also motion and shapes are mere apparent qualities.”

     There is an old riddle that says “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it fall, does it make a sound?” The answer is yes, because the vibrations of sound are always produced when the tree falls. 

     Realizing that everything is vibratory in its essence, and that musical sounds are vibrations that cause effects within their radiating distance might bring about some startling realizations when one gives all of this some thought!

     

© 2005, 2016 by Don Robertson

If Plants Could Sing - Serenading the Marigolds (Part 1) - Dorothy Retallack

The Story of Dorothy Retallack and her Experiments with Music and Plants

by Don Robertson

© 2005, revised and first published March 14, 2016

     “Please send me more information about the experiments where that lady was playing music to plants. I’m duplicating this for a high school project,” said the voice on the phone.

     It was another call, and like the many email messages and phone calls that I had received for almost a decade, the caller was interested in my article on the experiments where various kinds of music were played to plants, which were then observed to determine if and how the music affected the plants' growth and health. Apparently a number of young people were interested in these experiments and were attempting to duplicate them in school projects.

     Why were they interested?
     During the late 1960’s, the lady who had conducted these experiments discovered that the music of certain rock and roll records appeared to nearly kill the plants in her experiments!

     I told the caller that I knew very little more than what I had written in the article on my DoveSong.com educational website, and that a lot of scientific work on the subject had yet to be done.

     For some people, these experiments are laughable, but they interested me. If they were reproducible, they would provide substantiation for what I have been saying and writing about for decades, that music has a powerful effect on all life, either for good or not.

Dorothy Retallack

Dorothy Retallack working with her plants

     Dorothy Retallack was the wife of Denver, Colorado MD, Dr. Louis L. Retallack, and the mother of three children. A singer and an organist, after raising her children she enrolled in the Temple Buell College in Denver, majoring in music.

     One of the requirements for a degree was a biology class where she was required to perform some kind of an experiment. Her teacher suggested one involving her major, which was music. She had read about the experiments of George Smith involving the effect of music on the grown of corn that had been conducted in the early 1960’s. In those experiments, Mr. Smith found that corn seed that had been subjected to music sprouted earlier and grew into greener and bigger plants than had plants not subjected to music at all.

The First Experiment

     Mrs. Retallack decided to see what the effect of sound would be on plants. For her first experiment, she teamed up with a classmate. It was the spring of 1968. They planted philodendron, corn, geranium and radishes and played a tape recording that Mrs. Retallack had made where she played just two notes on her piano over and over. The tape was played for 12 hours each day. By the end of the 21^st day, the plants were not doing so well.

    The school had just purchased three biotronic control chambers. Dorothy decided to continue her experiments that summer, this time using the control chambers. The chambers would isolate the plants from other sounds and disturbances. For the next experiment, she provided the same kinds of plants, and again used the same repeated notes, but she didn’t learn anything new.

Bring in the Radios!

     In the fall, a classmate who had been interested in Dorothy’s experiments teamed up with her to use the school's biotronic chambers to conduct further experiments. She put some squash plants into two chambers, and a radio in each chamber. One radio was tuned to a classical station, and the other to a rock and roll station. 
     After eight weeks, Dorothy and her friend were amazed at the results. The squash exposed to the classical music had grown toward the radio and had begun to wrap itself around it. But in the chamber with the rock music, the squash vine had grown in the opposite direction.

     Intrigued by the results, Dorothy conducted more experiments during the summer of 1969. She placed corn, squash, petunias, zinnias and marigold plants in two chambers. In one chamber she placed a radio tuned to an “easy listening” station with “soothing” music, and in the other chamber, a rock station. She turned the radios on for three hours every day. Dorothy watched the chambers in anticipation. She had no idea if she would achieve results similar to those she had conducted with her classmate.

     On the fifth day, Dorothy was surprised to see that in the chamber with the easy-listening music, the plants had begun to bend toward the radio, and they were leafing and budding normally, while in the rock chamber, half of the plants had grown taller, but they had smaller leaves. The rest of the plants were stunted in growth!

     On the ninth day of the experiment, about eighty percent of the plants in the easy-listening chamber were leaning toward the radio, and the plants in the rock chamber were “bending into grotesque shapes.” 
     By the fourteenth day, most of the blooms of the flowering plants in the easy-listening chamber were bending toward the radio, but in the rock chamber, the very tall plants were drooping, the blooms having become faded, and all were turning away from the radio. 
     On the sixteenth day, all but a few marigolds in the rock chamber were dying. Just six feet away in the other chamber, the plants were blooming beautifully.

It's Time For Jimi and the Zepp

     Dorothy repeated the experiment with the same results. At this point, she decided to replace the radios with tape-recorded music.

     For this experiment, she used three biotronic chambers. Three reel-to-reel tape machines were set up, with only the speaker in the chambers themselves. In the first chamber she played what was at that time commonly called “acid rock” music by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and the rock group called Vanilla Fudge, who were popular at the time.

Vanilla Fudge

     In the second chamber, she would feature percussion music, and the third chamber would have music without percussion. For the percussion music, she used a recording of steel drums alternating with excepts from an album called Persistent Percussion. The music selections for the third chamber were taken from albums by Earl Grant that were performed by strings, piano, organ and clarinet.

     The result was that the plants in the rock music chamber leaned away from the speaker, the plants in the percussion-music chamber were leaning away, but not as much, and the plants in the third chamber were leaning toward the speaker.

This is what the plants in the rock chamber ending up looking like

     For her next experiment, Dorothy chose two types of classical music. In one chamber she played North Indian classical music, notably from Ravi Shankar’s Sounds of India album, and in the other, a recording of J. S. Bach’s "Orgelbüchlein," which were chorale preludes performed on a pipe organ. The plants “liked” the North Indian classical music the best, leaning so close to the speaker that they were almost at a 60-degree angle with lush and abundant growth and strong roots. The plants in the organ chamber leaned toward the speaker about 30 degrees.

Ravi Shankar's Sounds of India album

     She began experimenting with other kinds of music.  She tried country music, using recordings of Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Nancy Sinatra, Roger Miller, Ray Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis. She found that this was the only music to which the plants appeared to have absolutely no reaction, leaning neither toward or away from the speakers.

     She tried jazz music, providing the plants with recordings of Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, the Original Ten Dixieland Rhythm Kings, Al Hurt, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck and Pete Fountain. She assumed that since rock and roll music was said to derive from jazz music, that there would be similar effects, but the experiments surprised her. A little over half of the plants leaned toward the speaker about 15 or 20 degrees.

    In the spring of 1970, the college informed the Denver's evening newspaper, the Denver Post, of Dorothy Retallack’s experiments. The post asked her to perform an experiment that they could photograph and feature in the paper. For this experiment, she used the same ‘acid rock’ of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Vanilla Fudge as before in one chamber, and then in another chamber she decided to try something new. She would play discordant 20^th century classical music.      For the discordant music, she selected sections from Arnold Schönberg’s forth string quartet, "Five Movements for String Quartet" by Anton Webern, Alban Berg’s "String Quartet Opus 3," "Zyklus" by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and works by Harvey Sollberger and Harold Faberman. This is all very discordant music.

This is what discordant 20th-century classical music sounds like!

    The plants in both chambers, the discordant classical chamber and the rock chamber, grew leaning away from the speakers, more pronouncedly in the rock chamber. The Denver Post published a four-page article on June 21, 1970. Soon after, the article appeared in over 500 newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe through a syndication service.

Going National

    The article attracted national attention and soon Dorothy Retallack was contacted by CBS news asking if she would perform an experiment using time-lapse photography. Since the North Indian classical music and the acid rock had had the most profound effects so far, she decided to conduct another experiment using these two musics in two chambers and a third chamber that was silent. The time-lapse cameras from CBS would be trained on all three. The result, broadcast on the Cronkite Evening News on October 16, 1970, was spectacular.  She said that the plants performed “almost like they knew they were on camera.”

     Soon after the telecast, I got wind of Dorothy’s experiments. I was living in California at the time, but being a Denver native, I called her on my next trip to my home town. I was extremely interested because her findings completely matched my own personal discoveries about music: discoveries I had been making since 1968. 
     My discoveries were entirely subjective, and so I was very interested in something that could be demonstrated. It made perfect sense to me that plants would react to music, just as my own personal energy system reacted so very much to music. On a personal level, I cannot tolerate being in the room where hard rock or discordant "classical" music is being played. It completely shatters the harmonious energy fields in my body, something I happen to be very conscious of, throwing them out of balance. I was using North Indian Classical music for meditation purposes at that time, and that was having an extremely positive effect on me.

     Talking with her on the phone, she lamented that little follow-up work had been performed.
     She published her findings in a small book called The Sound of Music and Plants.

     In 1973, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird published a book called The Secret Life of Plants. It addressed the earlier plant and the music experiments that Mrs. Retallack had performed.  

Other Experiments

     The knowledge of the effects of music that we have been describing had actually long been known, but not by many people. Years before, T.C. Singh in India stated that he had proved beyond all doubt that “harmonic sound waves” affected the growth, flowering, fruiting and seed-yields of plants by his experiments of playing traditional South Indian ragas to plants. During the 1960s he had performed ragas in rice fields and had obtained 25 to 60 percent higher yields than regional averages. 
     Arthur Locker in Milwaukee, Wisconsin piped music into his greenhouse in the late 1950s and found that his plants grew straighter, germinated quicker, and bloomed more abundantly. About the same time, Canadian Eugene Canby broadcast Bach violin sonata to a plot of wheat, producing a crop that was 66 percent greater than normal, with larger and heavier seeds.

     In 1979, as I began collecting more data and had begun lecturing on the subject of positive and negative music, I created my own experiment. in my Santa Rosa, California backyard I put together a wooden frame on top of a small table and covered it with clear plastic sheeting. First I played Arnold Schönberg's discordant opera "Moses and Aaron" to the plants during the day from a boom box inside of my 'chamber,' then after they had all died, I put in new plants from the same stock and played the completely concordant sacred music by 16th century composer Giovanni da Palestrina during the day. These plants flourished.

     Since the historic experiments of Dorothy Retallack, very little followup appears to have been performed. The bulk performed by school students. 

     For example, a 10-year-old Augusta, Georgia boy named Daniel McElmurray, created a prize-winning science fair project where he demonstrated the effects of classical, country and rock music on his father’s 500-cow dairy herd.  After listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Shania Twain and non-twentieth-century classical music, the cows demonstrated that they preferred classical to country and rock by producing 1,000 pounds more milk for Daniel’s father.

     In another experiment, reported in the The San Francisco Examiner of Sunday, August 19, 1979, Chris Johnson, a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, reported that with experiments that he had performed at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, Dolphins were indifferent to Pink Floyd, but swam in a synchronized whirl to the music of Bach.

*

     I have found in my almost 50 years of work in this area that many people are absolutely afraid of discovering that perhaps the music that they cherish and listen to could actually be something that is negative. 
     It's time to reexamine the changes in culture that took place during the 20th century.

Part Two of "If Plants Could Sing" is the concluding article in this set and will be posted next.

    

© 2005, 2016 by Don Robertson

Saving The Music

By Don Robertson, 2011     

     Recently, the "60 Minutes" television program gave a wonderful presentation about an amazing woman who is focused on saving an amazing music - African American gospel! I recommend watching it here, if you have not yet done so:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-gospel-for-teens-is-saving-the-music-01-08-2011/ 

     I recognized the importance of African American gospel music in 1993 and began my voyages from Colorado to the southeastern US states, followed by my eventual move to Richmond Virginia, one of the main cities along the "gospel highway." I then began a massive collecting effort, buying rare recordings in order to preserve this music as it was quickly falling into obscurity, having been replaced by a more "contemporary" (spell that $$$$) "gospel" music that was really just the same corporate music being foisted on an unsuspecting public in other genres, but with different words and singers. This had all begun in the 1970s. A dozen or so of the legendary male quartets still existed during the 1990s and I was fortunate to be able to witness the power and importance of the real gospel music first hand, usually as the only white person in the churches and auditoriums that I visited, that is until Mary Ellen joined me in 1997 and she attended with me.

     Most of our record collection was digitized in 2007, the year that Mary Ellen and I rented a house and hired friends to turn 78s, cassettes and LPs into MP3 files. Since this time we have been working with a group of dedicated people on a project called TunesMap: an advanced software platform that will make this music, as well as much more, available on the various computing and mobile platforms throughout the world .

     I have spoken very little about the TunesMap project because of the importance of protecting intellectual property, but as a time is nearing when we will have something to show, I feel that I can at least say as much as I have said here, and to reaffirm our intentions of helping to bring about what we believe to be the next transition in the world of music: one that will obviously involve gospel music, and also so much more, as I know we already all realize.

Now that music isn't just about the "bucks," 

We are free to produce the "bang." 

Photos of the 2007 Digitizing Project

My Choices for the Top Five Western Classical Music Composers of All Time

First of all, along with all of the 20th century composers, we need to rule out the composers that had no spiritual connection. All great artists have an inner, mystical connection, because great art always comes from the higher self: what people call inspiration. I know that people will argue about this forever, but if you peek into the biographies, the signs are always there. 

Johann Sebastian Bach

No. 1 - The greatest composer who ever lived is Johann Sebastian Bach who died in 1750. All the violinists know this, because of the solo violin partitas and sonatas; the cello players all know this, because of the cello suites; the organists know it, the choir directors all know it, and all of the great pianists know this either through the elegance of the partitas and the English and French Suites, or from the unparalleled brilliance of the Well Tempered Clavier. Bach was the greatest master of the art of composition ever. His was a great spirit, that of a Pythagoras or a Michelangelo. His era was the Era of the Mind, the age of reason, and he was a great exemplar of the powers of logic. He was the greatest writer of counterpoint and the greatest writer of harmony ever, and his music is a supreme achievement.

Ludwig Van Beethoven

No. 2 – Beethoven, who died in 1827 was one of the greatest and most advanced souls that we have ever seen. His sacrifice was his outward hearing, enabling him to hear more perfectly the inner music. It was Beethoven's responsibility to open the door to the heart, unleashing naked passion onto the great molds for music that had been developed during the previous century: the century of Bach, Mozart and Haydn, who developed the sonata, the concerto, the rondo, and the fugal forms. Just as the people of Bach's time did not understand Bach, those of Beethoven’s day did not understand this master either. Brahms, Mendelssohn and Schumann wrote important works of music, but they didn't grasp the inner Beethoven.... the naked soul that he gave us in the last works... the piano sonatas and string quartets. In a troubled world, solace will not be found in the dark tones of the 1940’s Stravinsky (who no longer bothered to tune his piano), or in the agony of Bartok's disturbing string quartets. They will turn to Beethoven instead.

Richard Wagner

No. 3 – Wagner, who died in 1883, is still not understood today. First of all, most people have been deluded about Wagner because of all the trash that has been written about him since he first attacked the establishment in the 1840s. Thousands of books about him were in print when he died.... most of them negative. But Wagner was the first one to understand Beethoven's last works, considered at that time to be the works of a mad man. Wagner completely changed music and changed all of the composers who came after him. And he transformed harmony. The opening chord of Tristan und Isolde is recognized as such in all universities. But that's just one little chord. It's almost a joke to focus entire essays on it. What about Tristan und Isolde, the entire opera? There is no other work of art anywhere that can compare to it. With this work, Wagner upgraded Beethoven's passion into bliss. Wagner’s ring cycle is the greatest achievement ever staged, and his last work, Parsifal, is the most deeply spiritual drama ever created. But Wagner’s deep inward journeys scared many of the other composers, and after they absorbed what technique they could from him, they moved on into the darkness of the 20 century.

Cesar Franck

No. 4 is Cesar Franck (died 1890). As Cesar Franck is the most recent of these four composers, he is the most unknown. In fact, he is considered obscure, and even laughable in the Hallowed Halls of Schoenberg: our universities. Franck took Tristan und Isolde to a new level... not one of passion, but one of spirit. I can't say much about Franck yet, because he is so misunderstood, but I plan to write a great deal about him - to introduce this important composer to the world in general that does not yet recognize his greatness. If I had the ability to do something about any composer, I would do something about this man who's greatest works still remain unpublished! That's a very sad condition, but no different than a hundred years after Bach, when all of the cantatas were still in manuscript form. I don't know anyone in this country who understands Franck, so I have had to go to France and Germany to find them. I will say one thing at this point, something that I have not heard another person say: Cesar Franck is France's greatest composer!

Victoria and Palestrina

No. 5 – My fifth position is a tie between Giovanni da Palestrina and Tomas Luis de Victoria. Victoria, the Spanish Renaissance composer who died in 1611, is my favorite composer of all time. Perhaps I should say, these two composers. If I could only listen to one man's compositions (or two) for the rest of my life, it would be Victoria and Palestrina. I discovered them in 1971 (Franck and Wagner about 1974) and Victoria has been my favorite ever since. This is a tie, however, with his contemporary Palestrina because Victoria had a very pure spiritual connection that brought to his music something very special. Palestrina's music is a supreme and magnificent achievement. He was a master composer, studied fervently by Wagner, Beethoven and Bach. 

Envoi

I have placed this music from 16th century Renaissance as Number Five, but perhaps it belongs at Number One, because this is the MOST underestimated music of all five numbers, and yet it would be the most important to give to the people of this world at this most important time in our history. Its beauty, pure consonance, tone of human voices (especially when sung to perfection by those pure-of-heart  who love the music) coexists with the next step in human evolution. I explained this in my book Kosmon of 1970. We are at the end of an evolutionary cycle, where everything comes apart. Music and art at this point have been completely desecrated, turned into nothing of value, reflecting the state of the planetary evolution of the world, where greed and power control the masses through mind-controlling mass media and mis-education in the schools. A turning point arrives when this monstrosity of darkness has eaten into itself to the point where it crashes, and from the ashes a new evolutionary cycle begins, and this beginning is always marked by the return to pure consonance, such as that of the great choral music of 16th century Renaissance, and especially that of these two great master composers: Tomas Luis de Victoria and Giovanni da Palestrina.