Theurgy is Chymical Tetris in Reverse

A quick thought from the Shrine

Is music like a game in that there's structure, agreements about rules, and win/loss conditions, or is it more like purposeless play? Certainly it can shepherd us to the non-game ecstasy.

Atonality Bargain: The App

cheap guitars and weird tunings

[Sonic Youth] could only afford cheap guitars, and cheap guitars sounded like cheap guitars. But with weird tunings or something jammed under a particular fret, those humble instruments could sound rather amazing – bang a drum stick on a cheap Japanese Stratocaster copy in the right tuning, crank the amplifier to within an inch of its life, and it will sound like church bells.

—Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life, pg. 243

Have Yourself A Double-Dip Recession

Have yourself a double-dip recession
let the tax cuts die,
now our expectations will be not so high.

Have yourself a fiscal cliffjump session,
speculators pray.
From now on austerity will be the way!

Here we are, as in recent days.
Congress gridlock days of yore.
Faithful cronies, lend an ear to us,
fear the boom and bust no more.

Through the years
the deficit will pile up
If the Fed allows.
Some think Congress must be muddling through somehow,
so have yourself a double-dip recession now.

Moina Mathers at the Rite of Isis

Kepler's Planetary Melodies

Music isn't what it used to be.

"A study of music from the '50 to the present using the Million Song Dataset has concluded that modern music has less variation than older music and songs today are, on average, 9dB louder than 50 years ago. Almost all music uses just 10 chords, but the way these are used together has changed, leading to fewer types of transitions being used. Variation in timbre has also reduced over the past decades."
via Slashdot

Bohmian Trajectories for the Two-Slit Experiment

 (to be interpreted as a musical score)

Parodicality Aphorism

Counterpoint means never having to ask a dissonant interval how it expects to resolve back to the dominant.

Overtone Stacking as Tower of Babel

"How much room?" depends on how many subdivisions

Jam Session as Scriptorium

Medieval Download Muse

Composition as Profane Illumination

All illuminated manuscripts are not gold. But this one shines!

Harmonics of the Furnace / Heating Space Design

Every Element in its Own Ideal Heating Space

Gift Idea: Cool art book filled with medieval sacred geometry and music theory

I saw this at the used bookstore and it's delightful. Had seen its sister book on music theory at the Museum of Jurrasic Technology. Great for browsing and bibliomancy. Buy it for the esotericist in your life through this link to support my blogging, research, and this webcomic.

Theorist as Astrologaster

Renaissance Artists really knew how to poke fun at totalizing symbolic regimes.

Kircher's Planetary Music Theory

The distances between the sun, earth, and planets are such as to balance the sun’s heat with the moon’s coldness. For example, in summer the sun is strong, the moon weak, causing a variety and mixture of consonance and dissonance. The influence of the sun and moon is like a perfect octave. However, God has added Venus to give support with virtues such as vary the lunar influences; meanwhile, Mercury modifies that which is noxious in the sun. The changing distances from the earth bring about different effects.

Moreover, God has placed two dissonant bodies, Mars and Saturn, from whose pestiferous evaporations all the earth’s ills come. Yet between them is the benign star of Jupiter. The malefic planets act like caustic medicines which attract sick matter and liberate it, so that there is no ill in nature that does not turn to good.

In musical terms, Mars and Saturn are dissonances, tied in perfect syncopation to Jupiter, while Mercury sounds a dissonance between the concords of Venus and the moon. The seven planets together give a perfect “tetraphony” or four-part harmony

Joscelyn Godwin, Kepler and Kircher on the Harmony of the Spheres

Alchemy and Music Theory

Alchemical metaphors have much to offer music theory--theorizing by means of colors and subtle changes, attention to time, geometry, and measurement generally. Just as chemical changes happen "like magic," the effects of music are mysterious and we tend to require a mythic map in order to approach them with soul grokking.

Philip K. Dick on Music -- Beethoven expanded the hologram (time, inner space, and alchemical music theory)

[47:626] Music is normally a temporal process, but Beethoven, uniquely, uses it to enclose space, the most vast volume of space possible. Thus Beethoven literally expanded the hologram for anyone understanding his music, and he was part of a historic movement involving the abrupt evolution of the human being in terms of
so-to-speak relative size vis-à-vis his reality. This is the inner firmament of Bruno (or Paracelsus—whichever). Ah! The microcosm is transformed briefly into the macrocosm; and a slight but permanent expansion of the person, the microcosm, occurs: perhaps an altered relationship to the macrocosm, in terms of identity. Beethoven's music as a means by which the alchemical Verklärung can take place: thus it is directly related to the Hermetics.
...
This is a radically different way of experiencing the self (microcosm) and reality (macrocosm). Memory and inner space. There is some relationship. Memory involves vastly augmented time which is then converted into space.

-Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis



For more about Philip K. Dick's weird religious and philosophical ideas check out his Exegesis, and also my blog Philip K. Dick and Religion