One of the things that blew my mind this semester (via Systematic Theology/David Yeago) is the idea of eternity. So, God exists outside of time. He created time when he created a world that revolves and evolves. A thousand years are like a day to him because neither length of time affects him---he holds all of it in his creating and sustaining hands. It's not a matter of seeing the future, predicting and guiding---it's more a matter of holding beginning and middle and ending together in the same plane without the time factor.
I wonder what time looks like to him. If it gets boring to know the end result, like when you read the last few pages of an intense book just to find out if the person who's in mortal danger on page 53 is still around on page 129. Of course the intense mortal danger doesn't seem so bad when you know that character survives and is happier (and maybe wiser etc...) 76 pages later.
And the question that just exploded my brain a few moments ago: is music eternal in a similar way? You know how sometimes people celebrate the arrival of a song...like Five Iron Frenzy really cherishes Every New Day for the way it felt like a gift from God. Once music is given breath (literally) it's entered into time. It gets passed around and its creators take it on tour. It gets covered by other bands, it gets recorded and replayed the world over, it gets listened to by great and small alike.
Music enters time when it's received by human hearts and ears...and then it becomes timeless in its reception. So it's a mix of eternity and mortality (some music doesn't live on. Some music dies with its mortal creators. Does it really?-----hhmmm food for more thought....) and mortality and eternity (other music just lives forever. Timeless and limitless in the ways it reaches and affects its audience. For example, all the flash mob choirs singing the Hallelujah chorus on Youtube at Christmas...). Is the act of music (entailing conceiving, making, listening, enjoying, dancing, jamming, etc) a human attempt to tap into something eternal and yet accessible to human hearts and ears? Is the eternity of music something we can grasp more easily than the fact of God's eternity---but maybe it's another layer of a similar thing and it represents so much more than just a good song?
This is such a half-formed thought right now. Need to pick up the pieces of my brain and read a bit of philosophy/musicology/...what category would this question even fall under!? I want to look at music in a philosophical/theological/metaphysical perspective. Any ideas?
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PS! Not to mention, the role that time itself plays in the existence of music. It's like all these layers of factor, rolling into a snowball. Music is time and pitch (and a little more than that) and it becomes immortal due to the way that mortals receive it in and over time.
Love the thoughts! I took a Philosophy of Music course once, just for the heck of it (after I had graduated!) and it was great. Lots about music as language, less about music as eternal (although that's worth pursuing), some about what makes a tune a tune, when it's played in many different speeds, measures, keys, instruments, etc?
What's even more fascinating to me is the Madeleine L'Engle-ish idea of string theory at its heart is the idea that the universe is based on music: vibrations of strings. Lovely!
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