The Twenty-First Century
by Don Robertson

Part Two: Musical Alchemy
© 2005 by Rising World Entertainment

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As explained earlier, the twentieth century watched the abandonment of the very simple fundamentals that underpin the existence of all the music that preceded it. Tonality was renounced and discord and noise were accepted as brothers and sisters to consonance and harmony. Meanwhile, many of our institutions began teaching that music composed before the 20th century should be ignored, and this caused much composition to turn into a real free-for-all! For the pioneering music of the 21st century, we must start from scratch... and scratch is the simplicity of the rules of the game, those laws that govern music. I will begin with some information extracted from my 1969 essay Musical Numerology.

Musical Numerology

     To my knowledge, there is no religion on the earth that does not incorporate some kind of symbolic use of the quantities three and seven. My objective is to illustrate some of the mysterious relationships between the quantity three, the quantity seven, and what these quantities have in common with the basic physical structure of the universe.  
    The direct relationship between three and seven is as follows: If we have three objects, which we will call 1, 2, and 3, we will observe that the absolute number of different combinations of these 3 objects is 7; that is, we may arrange them in no more than seven different combinations, regardless of the order in which they are arranged.

    There are three primary colors in the color spectrum, plus four more natural colors that are created from the combinations of the three colors similarly to the three objects above. All colors that exist are either: a) One of the primary colors, or b) A resultant mixture of two or three of the primary colors. The primary colors cannot be created by mixing other colors, so they are rather special. The three primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. The natural, or secondary colors are those colors that are created by mixing equally the three primary colors according to the chart above. The resultant seven natural colors the colors of the rainbow, a naturally occurring phenomena that can be created using a prism to break down light. They are arranged in the spectrum as follows:

    Thus we see that the color spectrum is based on the relationship between 3 and 7. There are three primary tones of the musical scale and seven natural tones:

    The notes that correspond to the primary colors are C, E, G: the major triad, which is the most important chord in music, and the groundwork of the scale. It is important to realize the correspondence between the colors of the spectrum and the notes of the scale, as the musical scale is based on the same principals of nature (the natural overtone series) and it has been adapted in some form or another most all cultures.   
    There are three root-position triads contained in the major scale (C,D,E,F,G,A,B). These are: The major triad that is based on the correspondence with the primary colors (C, E, G) and two minor triads, based on three of the natural, or secondary, tones (D, F, A and E,G,B). Major and minor triads are the fundamental underpinnings of harmony used in the music of Western cultures.

Three Forces

     The simplest physical structure in the material universe is the hydrogen atom. It has the least number of forces at work: three. These three forces are:

1) At the center of the atom resides the nucleus, composed of a positive charge of electricity called a proton.

2)  Orbiting around this proton in an elliptical orbit is a negative charge of electricity called an electron. Since this electron has a negative charge, and since a negative charge is attracted to a positive charge, the electron is attracted to the proton.

3)  Since the electron is attracted to the proton, there needs to be a force that causes equilibrium between the two, as the electron would collide with the proton if no such force were in place. This force then is the force that governs bodies in motion, causing them to travel in an orbit. It is centrifugal force. In the atom, this is the neutron.

Some Aspects of Three

     If there is a given object that is fixed in space, this object has, as its location, three coordinates. An example of this would be the relative position of an airplane above the earth. It is calculated by longitude, latitude, and altitude, its three coordinates.   
     If someone looks into the corner of a room, where the room meets the walls, they will see three intersecting planes that are considered to extend into infinity. These are the three dimensions of space.
     There are three time zones that man senses, past, present, and future.  
     If there is space with no motion, then time does not exist, only space. But if there is no motion, then there can be no space, for there has to be space to contain the motion. The motion through space causes sequentially. The earth’s orbit around the sun and revolution on its axis causes a time sequence on earth. Thus we have three aspects: time, space, and motion.

The Law of Three

    The fact that events, laws, and all creation result from three principals is referred to as the "Law of Three" or the "Law of the Triangle." This law is illustrated by the example that every effect has two causes: one passive, and one active.

Some Aspects of Seven

     During the late 1700’s, some chemists began identifying certain chemical elements. About 1800, they began to determine the atomic weights of some of them. In 1808, John Dalton suggested that atoms were physical objects with specific weights. In 1829, Johann Doebereiner showed that particular elements could be arranged in groups of three. In each group, the elements had similar properties and the weight of the middle atom of the group was close to the average of the other two. These were said to be chemical equivalents to the musical triad. 

The Law of Octaves

     In 1864, John A. Newlands grouped all the known elements in the order of their atomic weights. He then divided them into groups of seven elements each. He showed that when the atoms were put into order with their weights increasing, there was a repetition in the similarities according to the musical octave, the same found on the keyboard. When he talked to chemists of this time about his newly found law of octaves, they laughed.  
     But octaves are the substance of the musical scale, the same musical scale that was demonstrated by Pythagoras and used today, with slight modifications according to culture. It is a naturally occurring phenomena. The basis of the musical scale is the octave, the repetition of the vibration of the set of seven notes that occurs as the fundamental vibration of the first note, the basic note of that scale, is doubled.  
     In 1869, Mendeleev compiled a “Periodic Table of the Elements.” This table was arranged according to atomic weights. Mendeleev found, as had Newlands, that the chemical properties of the elements reoccur at definite intervals. He concluded that these were the periodic functions of their atomic weights. According to Daniel Morris, in his article Music of the New Spheres in the December, 1969 Chemistry Magazine, Mendeleev’s arrangement of the elements came to him while listening to a performance of Schumann’s exquisite piano quintet. He was seated upon a sofa, apparently mulling over Newland’s and Doebereiner’s arrangements of the elements, when all of a sudden he jumped up, sat at his desk, and arranged all of the elements according to a new plan. Morris' feeling was that there was a definite relationship between the quintet and the periodic table in the repetition and development of the seven-note melody of the quintet.

Vibrations

     It was in 1925 that French scientist Louis Victor Pierre Raymond duc de Broglie discovered that the electron was actually a wave of vibration. These waves properly follow the same property and characteristics of vibration as the vibrating string of a musical instrument, the waves being complete with overtones. (We are familiar with the presence of overtones on the vibrating string from the experiments of Pythagoras and his monochord – a single-stringed instrument he built to display how musical scales were produced by the natural overtone series). 
     An atom such as uranium has more that 90 electrons, each capable of its own harmonies, and all this can be recorded by a spectroscope. From this, one can conclude that all matter is made of waves. Therefore, we, and the world we live in, are vibrations…just as the children of the 1960s discovered while taking large doses of LSD! But this should not be too surprising. Our understanding of the world around us is through perception of the five senses. What we experience is actually taking place in our brain, interpretations of waves of light, taste, smell, feeling, and sound. Are we really living in a world, as we suspect, or is this simply a world created in our brain, similar to that when we dream? And if spectral and aural vibrations obey the same law of octaves that applies to the physical makeup of the universe, then perhaps it is all just a part of one large keyboard of vibrations, with particular sensations and manifestations taking place in particular octave ranges. Light, heat, magnetic and chemical vibration are all subject to the law of octaves.

     The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus wrote:

Sweet and bitter
Cold and warm,
As well as all the colors...
All these things exist
But in the opinion
And not in reality.

What really exists
Are unchangeable articles: atoms,
And their motions in empty space.

     And the great German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said: “I am able to prove that not only light, color, heat, and the like, but motion, shape and extension too are mere apparent qualities.” Many scientists and philosophers have come to the conclusion that everything exists in the mind: stars, planets, atoms. Einstein showed us that even space and time were forms of intuition.

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