Music as a Symbolic Process

The Best-Known ikon of the Lord Shiva shows him as Nataraja, Lord of the Dance. The Lord himself dances, according to his poet devotees, wildly and ecstatically, with his matted locks flying in the wind. This dance represents the unbounded energy of the cosmic process, the ceaseless round of becoming and passing away, of birth and death. Dancing presupposes the accompaniment and the arousal afforded by music. But there is more music here than just the divine dance itself. The Lord holds in one of his right hands a small drum; with this he creates the world. For when shaken, this drum produces the mystical sound Om which causes the phenomenal world to evolve from its primal substance. For the Shaivite then, the world is created by rhythmic sound, and the essential activity of God is typically symbolised in terms of music and dance.

In the Christian tradition, God himself is not a musician, but music is the proper mode in which to praise him. Not only man, not only the angels, but the whole universe at its birth and at its ultimate redemption joins in song (Job 38.7, Rev. 5.8f). For reason and language unaided are inadequate vehicles to express the creature's total response to the ground and goal of its being. According to Augustine, jubilation (i.e., wordless song) is the appropriate way to praise the ineffable God: ‘If you cannot talk about him, and it is improper just to keep silence, why, what is there left for you to do but jubilate—with your heart rejoicing without words, and the immense breadth of your joy not rationed out in syllables?’ (AUGUSTINE 2).

What is here expressed theologically can also be approached in developmental terms. Experimental evidence suggests that the human foetus in the womb can hear; that it can remember subsequently what was heard in the womb; and that the predominant sounds heard within the uterine environment are from the mother's cardiovascular system (DRIFE 5). The beating of the mother's heart may not be melody, but rhythm it certai