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As music is considered
the universal language, and archetypes are universal patterns, the effects
of the Jupiter-Uranus configurations are quite visible–often strikingly so–in
the development of music history. Music, of all the arts, might be considered
the most sensitive weather vein to the movement of the divine. Music acts
not only as a barometer of cultural trends and fads, but it is also a finely-tuned
gauge of the movement of the Anima Mundi, or World Soul, as it meanders
in and through the material world and through history.
Words cannot adequately
articulate this World Soul at work. Pictures, worth a thousand words, are
much more conducive at articulating this realm. However, nothing compares
to music's ability to capture the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the times, of a
particular cultural period. French composer Oliver Messiaen called music "a
language that can reach the secret parts of existence. It's an abstract language
which addresses the subconscious more than the conscious."(1) In this way,
music is a language of the divine, articulating and amplifying the stirrings
of the spirit of the times, which may be conceptualized as residing in the
archetypes.
Listen to recordings
of any decade of this century and the subtle emotional currents that are excited
by the act of attending to the sounds tap us directly into the archetypal
forces at work at that time.
Listening to the syncopated
bass lines of a Harlem stride pianist relays as much information about turn-of-the-century
urban America as headlines from a major newspaper during the same time period.
Similarly, the subtle glissando of a swing band trombone conveys much more
about the thirties and forties than chapters in a textbook. Finally, the
unbridled improvisations of a fusion guitarist frantically making his way
up and down the fretboard tells us more about what it might have been like
to be conscious (I use this term hesitantly given the time) in the late
sixties and seventies than almost any other source.
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