The young Thomas de Hartmann, in search of a spiritual teacher, came to Gurdjieff in 1916 and soon became his disciple. Since Gurdjieff was in no sense a trained composer, de Hartmann also became the ideal instrument for the expression of Gurdjieff’s musical thoughts. He began by harmonizing, developing, and fully realizing Gurdjieff’s music for the sacred dances, or Movements, which were an integral part of Gurdjieff’s teaching. Some years later, de Hartmann collaborated in a similar way on Gurdjieff’s musical works that were independent of the Movements. Amazingly, these latter pieces, very considerable in number, were almost all composed between 1925 and 1927 at the Prieur? in Fountainebleau. In 1927 this musical work came to an end and Gurdjieff never composed again.
Gurdjieff’s views on the subject of music, and indeed on art in general, stem from his differentiation between what he terms subjective and objective art. Most of the music we know, he says, is subjective. Only objective music is based on an exact knowledge of the mathematical laws that govern vibration of sounds and the relationship of tones.
In either case, the particular configuration of sounds will evoke a response in the human psyche in which the relation of the tones and their sonic qualities will be translated into some form of inner experience. This phenomenon appears to be based on a precise mathematical relationship between the properties of sound and some aspect of our receptive apparatus.
It is difficult to speak of the response to what could be considered objective art. It would appear to transcend the ordinary associative process which we have all experienced. In most of the music we know, at least within the common experience of a given culture, certain progressions and qualities of tones as well as their combination and spacing in time will evoke in the listener particular sensations and emotions that are shared in common with others. This phenomenon is as undeniable as it is seemingly inexplicable. It must result from a sympathetic resonance activated within the listener which can, moreover, also trigger associations with past experience, even when the connection between the sound and the memory is obscure or unknown. In most art, this power of vibration is used with only partial knowledge of the process and its consequences. Limited by his subjective consciousness, what the artist transmits can produce no more than an equally subjective response.
It is therefore Gurdjieff’s contention that the results of this subjective expression are accidental, and even produce opposite effects in different people. “There can be no unconscious creative art,” he asserts.
Conversely, objective music is based on a precise and complete knowledge of the mathematics determining the laws of vibration, and will therefore produce a specific and predictable result in the listener. Gurdjieff gives as an example a nonreligious person coming to a monastery. Hearing the music that is sung and played there, the person feels the desire to pray. In this instance, the capacity to bring someone into a higher interior state is given as one of the properties of objective art. The effect, depending on the person, differs only in degree.
What is paramount, then, in objective music is the exactness of its intention and the mastery of means to realize that intention. All the arts, according to Gurdjieff, were in ancient time related to the laws of mathematics and served as repositories of higher knowledge about man and the cosmos, encoded in various forms and thus preserved from later distortion. Even if the inner meaning were for periods of time forgotten, the “text” remained intact, the essence within waiting to be rediscovered.
This view of art is reflected in the cosmological side of Gurdjieff’s teaching, and especially in his use of the musical scale as a model of the universe, mirroring the two great laws which govern all cosmic processes. The form of music is seen as a microcosm, expressing on the scale of sound perceivable by the human ear the same dynamics that comprise all cosmic movement.
Thus the law of three with its positive, negative, and reconciling forces is echoed in the triadic structures of music, in which combinations of three tones constantly give birth to new combinations, with certain tones in common. Moreover, the law of seven, manifesting in a chain of octaves stretching like a cosmic ladder down from the ultimate source of Creation through increasingly dense orders of being, presents the specific form of the major scale in music, with its succession of tones and semitones. The semitones form the “intervals” that block or deflect the progression of any process and which require new sources of energy in order to be bridged, allowing evolutionary movement to continue. The subtle vibrancy of the “energy field” that exists between mi and fa and between si and do is palpable to any sensitive musician.
Thus it seems clear that in Gurdjieff’s view the mere enjoyment of pleasant musical sounds, however serious and exalted, does not even remotely approach the ultimate function of music as a science as well as an art, as a kind of diagram of higher knowledge, and as a possible food for human growth and evolution. It was principally in the East that Gurdjieff discovered art fulfilling this original and sacred purpose, the embodiment of truth. Ancient Eastern art could be read like a script. It was not for liking or disliking, he said, but for understanding. |
