Julien Coupat in his short text Dialogue avec les morts (2018) reflects, based on Gianni Carchia's analysis, on Orphism and how they related to their Greek contemporaries. In this exploration of Orphism, Coupat exposes a void in the West that has been there since its beginnings in ancient Greece and that little by little, generation after generation, has been filled by a narrative, that of the Greek response, that of the response of philosophy. This response is that of an incipient city that seeks to establish a whole series of norms and rules that would establish a way of life far removed from the inherited tradition and its relationship with the dead and the Greek gods.
"The meson has become the empty place of public speaking only because the spoils have been dematerialised. With the League of Delos, the status of citizen becomes a profitable reality. Man is a wolf to man, ever since Aesop's famous fable; and in the Arcadian tradition, it is Lycaon, the werewolf, who founds the first city, Licosura, the "Mount of the Wolf"."
This response, of a hegemonic approach, is philosophically embodied in the two great philosophers of ancient Greece: Plato and Aristotle.1 Both thinkers propose an ideal political system, describing point by point the way of life from childhood to adulthood, where music is somewhat of a problem. On the one hand, Plato condemns poets and mythology,2 although he retains its forms to convey his message of ascetic reform.3 On the other hand, Aristotle proposes a completely controlled system and with regard to education dictates exactly what content and how that cultural heritage is to be taught.4
"From the ancient Greeks to the Americans of today, the West is defined by one gesture: that of appropriating what can no longer be felt. Occidere: to kill, to tear apart, to annihilate - so many ways of radically appropriating what lives outside us. To what extent the greed of the civilised is due to the emptiness that has been created in him is what we have not yet understood."
The Orphics rejected this institutionalisation of their culture and the way of life that these new large cities, later known as city-states or "poleis", proposed. They rejected the civilisation of the city, its juridical-culpable individualisation, its rhetorical-political games, its division between rich and poor, its exclusions. They rejected its institutions, which found in sacrifice a moment of false community under power. One of the most important expressions of their rejection of this new way of life in the cities were the rites and the music that they preserved and accompanied them. The Orphics, through their music and the different instruments they used, sought to invoke, or refer to, the gods and myths that defined their culture and their way of life, in which death was a continuity in a full whole.5 The relationship with the world of the dead is not the centre, the centre is the continuity between worlds, the sensibility where body and soul communicate and are tuned and tempered by music.
"The way of salvation is the way of effort: it is the way of Meleteia, of the long askesis, of the exercise of memory" (Marcel Détienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece). If philosophy still has any connection with healing, it is because living with excessively erroneous conceptions makes one fatally ill. The experience of the Orphic circles clearly belongs to the tradition of the vanquished. It has come down to us through who knows what subterranean channels, through their own repression, of which the archive has preserved the trace."
The idea of this essay is to start from the problem that Coupat points out and how the Orphics rejected the life imposed by the new cities. In order to do so, we will see how music has been a method of confronting the void that Coupat spoke of at different times. This essay consists of two brief reflections, both based on the different moments of the practices carried out at the Non Identified Video Observatory (Desorg Punto Org), and their possible relationship with music and the full existence that Coupat and the Orphics speak of. This aspect of art as a way is important because what this essay proposes is not that of music as an art pour l'art of which W. Benjamin warned: ""Fiat ars, pereat mundus", says fascism, and hopes, like Marinetti's faith, that war will be able to offer an artistic satisfaction to sensory perception transformed by technique. This, it seems, is the culminating moment of "l'art pour l'art",6 but to understand music as a power to fill the void of the West of which Coupat speaks.
“And since then, we have not yet seen «an ethically satisfactory arrangement of human coexistence emerge from the elements and factors of present and past political experience». It is well known that Unger saw salvation only in the constitution of a «metapolitical universitas» which would signal, through the affirmation of a properly spiritual intensity, a secession from those metaphorical, inconsistent collectivities which are societies and nations. I was thinking of a great migration that would undermine the existing political units, of a subtraction of healthy people from the democratic and civic ethos.”
The harmony of the world and music as a way to the existential fullness of the world.
Today, when Kepler's laws are taught in schools, what is taught are the physico-mathematical relationships between: the distance the planets travel in their orbit around the sun, their distance from the sun and their rotational speed. However, this is a purely mechanistic view that neglects what Kepler really meant by these laws. For Kepler this relation between the planets and their orbits is an expression of the full reality of the cosmos, which is the will of a geometrical and creative God who, through music and harmonies, of the orbits of the planets hitherto known formed the music of the spheres.
This idea of the music of the spheres is a formulation whose origin is believed to come from Pythagoras, although there are also interesting studies that seek to relate this idea to the Hebrew myths of creation.78 However, no texts or direct testimonies of Pythagoras himself remains. One of the first systematised proposals of this music of the spheres is found in Plato, although his system was rather basic compared to Kepler's and was based on his theory of the five solids (fig. 1)9. From Plato onwards, many over the centuries would attempt to recreate a model of the music and harmony of the spheres.10
Kepler's case is interesting because, although he was not the only one of his time to try to find this music of the spheres,11 the laws he derived from this search are laws that are still taught in schools all over the world, even if it is only the mechanico-mathematical application of them. Another interesting aspect of Kepler's search for the harmony of the world is that, as Alexandre Koyre reports in his extensive work La révolution astronomique, Kepler gives an exhaustive account of the theoretical process he follows, so that the interested reader can easily follow his search step by step.12 Finally, it is worth noting that the calculations Kepler derives from his laws to assign certain harmonies to the different planets are very close to later calculations about the rotational speeds of the different planets.13
But leaving aside the historical and pedagogical aspects of Kepler's work and returning to the musical aspect of it, Kepler's quest was made possible by the fact that he received advanced musical education and could play the monochord, an instrument that Pythagoras also played, with relative fluency, so that he was able to present his results both mathematically and musically (fig. 2).14 This implies that Kepler's quest was made by combining his musical knowledge with his astronomical knowledge, i.e. he did not conceive the need to create divisions between art and science. Thus, Kepler, with this union of science and art, could experience a fuller existence of the universe than the mechanistic teaching of the laws he posited as they are taught today.
Sufism and music, the plenitude of the human condition.
Sufism, in the aspect that is intended to be discussed in this essay, is: a mystical, philosophical and theological tradition within Islam, which covers practically the whole of the Islamic world.15 A historical overview of this tradition is impossible for a text such as the one proposed here, so I will only recommend the text Sufism by Jamal J. Elias, as it not only makes an excellent compilation of sources about different Sufi masters throughout history, but it is also an enjoyable read of just nineteen pages. On the other hand, if one is looking for a concise exposition of the philosophical, and mainly ontological, approaches of Sufism, the late Toshihiko Izutzu's Sufism and Taoism is a very good text in which the relationship between the absolute and the perfect man is discussed. However, the aspect of Sufism that we want to present in this essay is its musical aspect and the ritualistic character of its music, as described by Jordi Delclòs Casas in his work La dimensión terapéutica de la música en el sufismo
Within the ritualistic character of music in Sufism, we find the “dhikr” ceremony and more specifically the communal “dhikr”, which, unlike the silent “dhikr”, which is individual, does have a musical aspect.16 The “dhikr” is a moment of remembrance of divinity in such a way that the subject approaches that totality in such a way as to achieve a real understanding of being, beyond the phenomenal world which, although it is the world in which one lives, is not the ultimate reality of being and therefore does not offer a full understanding of life.17 A very interesting aspect of this ritual is that it demonstrates a profound influence of Greek philosophy on Islam. On the one hand, the concept of remembrance or recollection of Pythagoreanism and Platonism.18 On the other hand, there is the Stoic and Epicurean aspect of impulse control as a way of dealing with the world.19 As a final reflection on this point I include a reflection on a short film by Abu Ali (Toni Serra) that can be found on the O.V.N.I. website.20
Six minutes and four seconds, in this short time one can enter into a “dhikr” ceremony. In this ceremony of Sufism, the mystical-philosophical branch of Islam, the whole community comes together for a moment of shared musical trance, in which the divinity is remembered. From the women and their loud chanting to the crowd that surrounds but does not touch the animal, to what would be the master of ceremonies, who performs the sacrifice, the whole community enters into a moment of union. For a Western spectator it is a peculiar image. The powerful chorus that resounds throughout the ceremony, culminating in the death of the animal, is striking. The closeness one feels to the death of an animal can also be shocking, especially when one is used to buying the meat one consumes in one's local supermarket without having to deal with a live animal or the consequences of its death.
Another very interesting aspect of music within Sufism and Islam is the therapeutic music known as the science of “makan”. The capacity of this music as a healing tool lies in the fact that it has a much wider formal sonic scope than Western music.21 The idea of “makan” was the application of specific rhythms and sound scales for specific physical and mental ailments, and in specific cases someone well versed in “makan” music could start from a specific and established rhythm towards a sound improvisation that would help the sick person.22 The most interesting thing about this therapeutic conception of music is that in modern patients suffering from different pathologies: patients in coma, patients with chronic pain and patients in a terminal state; they have shown symptoms of improvement in their pathology or in the case of terminally ill patients their conditions of well-being.23
The aim of this reflection is to show how through music, in Sufism, a fuller conception of the human being is achieved. From the "dhikr" where music is a way of connection with the absolute, so that the subject transcends his subjectivity of the phenomena and the immediate senses. To the science of makan, where music is a way of connection between the discomfort of the body and the discomfort of the soul, so that the treatment of the latter by means of music serves to treat the former.