MUSIC FOR OUR TIME

 

 

Incorporating a record review of DEEP PEACE 

by Frank Perry (!Quartz 007)

 

 

The music of Frank Perry, which you may hear on the record under review, is a music composed with the conscious intention of healing in the listener the disturbing presence taken into the soul from the environment of modern society in which there is so much that is alien to human nature.

 

          Before introducing you to Frank’s music it will be salutary to reflect a little on the question of how we are affected by music so that we may better appreciate how consciously Frank has composed his music so as to be affective in the way I have described.

 

          Anyone who reflects at all on his or her experience of life knows that there is normally present in the individual of our age an awareness of being in a particular state of mind serene, joyous, unsettled, or whatever it may be. Most people Anthroposophists or not, would also be happy to agree that this self-awareness is due to the existence in us of a phenomenon we call self-consciousness of which the centre point is the ego or I am experience. We speak of the ‘presence of mind’ of someone whose behaviour witnesses the controlling action of their ego, whose ability to act responsibly is not impaired by a confused life, even though we allow that person to be as deep feeling, as inwardly vulnerable, and as capable of warmth as others whose reactions under pressure are outwardly more volatile. But however different people are in the degree of their abandon or restraint there is in the average person of today this self-conscious presence, to a greater or lesser degree, in waking life. Thus we see how, in every individual, there is the capacity to be both in equilibrium (which has to do with the ability of the ego to sort things out) and in disequilibrium; to be in disequilibrium is to have admitted disturbing elements into one’s self which the ego is insufficiently developed to cope with.

 

          Now the feeling life of the Self (or the astral body as it is known to occult science) is conscious, as we have said, because of the presence in the individual of the ego or ‘I am’ experience. And when the ego is conscious of personal experience, of sensation in the feeling life of the Self, it experiences those sensations because they are mediated to the Self from the physical environment by the etheric body. The etheric body is that which gives these elements of Earth which make up the say the physical body its form, thus distinguishing a particular body as ‘mine’ from those of other individuals (of whatever kind) and from the Earth itself of which they also are part – for on the purely physical plane we are all indivisibly one with the organism of the Earth. In the etheric body therefore resounds all the sensation which tells me what the Earth is like as a being other than my own, and it is in the ‘fluid’ element of the etheric body that those movements occur which constitute our perception of the world ‘out there’, and which is really only the discovery (or the re-membering) of our forgotten correspondences with it.

 

          Among theses sensations of which we become conscious there is, in particular, music. In listening to music these movements in the etheric body, these ‘disturbances’, come before the Ego (which is present in the act of listening) as conscious experience in the astral body (or Self), and thus they become the ineradicable substance of the soul (Self). Thus in an exact sense such listening is a kind of re-membering, a outing together again inside of something which has its original unity outside; a remembering of something to which we belong but to which, because of the development of the egohood in humanity we have no longer any ‘given’ or natural relationships. Until we have learned to be master of it, our conscious blocks our unitary being with nature, with the earth, of which we are part.

 

          In the original primeval quiet of God, before existence began or ‘moved’, there was a perfect equilibrium, and within that perfect equilibrium the first scarcely even perceptible movement (or disturbance) marked the beginning of Time. No one should doubt that in this first of all movements was manifest, like a great wave, joy; rippling and undulating ‘outwards’. In relation to that primeval peace (which we may be sure is still there in the firmament) all subsequent movement and existence is a disturbance, in the special sense in which we have been using the word, and it is the profound link with our origin in that firmament which is stirred and comes a little to mind in the creative activity which we call ‘art’. But there are true and false equilibriums, and true art disturbs only the false, returning us to the source, to that firmament, and is therefore, in essence, healing.

 

          Today there is all about us disturbance of a radically malefic kind, and there are increasing numbers of individuals who seek to escape, with as little real consciousness as possible, by a direct (transcendental) route back to the firmament. Schools of personal meditation based on oriental methods, which see the ego not as the portal through which we must pass but as an obstruction to self-fulfilment abound. But although we need a private and interior development we are above all social creatures who have not yet discovered an optimum social form, which suits both our private and collective needs. Therefore with regard to music when we encounter someone in a crowded street wearing a personal stereo we cannot ignore the feeling that there is a certain tension between the fact of being in physical encounter with many other fellow human beings in a state of such private and self-centred absorption. For those who have the will to stand and face the disquiet of our time and battle with it within themselves Frank’s music will be of immense help. It comes from the firmament indeed, but is transformed by musical and astrological disciplines, which have been imposed with the conscious intention of countering the malefic influences, which are at work in the environment of mankind.

 

          Music is the art, which penetrates most deeply into the unconscious levels of our existence: it resounds directly in the primal matter on which our being rests. It therefore does not acknowledge as clearly as do the other arts the distinction between the living and the dead, for it is into that primal matter (‘prakriti’ in the Sanskrit of the Upanishads) of the firmament (‘Brahman’) that the physical vehicle of our life between birth and death dissolves.

 

          Frank’s music is wholly percussion: every sound in his range of available raw material is made by striking physical bodies of varying structure and composition (gongs, cymbals, bells) ranging from sonorous bronze to tinkling glass; and in the vibrations that are set up resounds the internal being of the planets to which these instruments have been consciously related by the quality of their vibrations. For Frank is also a profoundly serious and learned astrologer, and his knowledge in that sphere enlightens his compositions such that he makes available to us in vibrant sound those extra-terrestrial presences which are beneficial, and which are of such consequence for the positive evolution of life on earth – compositions which help to heal those evils with which humanity, individually and collectively, is wrestling in the course of the twentieth century.

 

          What follows are, first, a paragraph from the record sleeve listing the musical equipment used in this composition and, thereafter, extracts from Frank’s commentary (provided with the record) on his music, the instruments, and his method of playing and composing, and gives a glimpse in words of what this record offers.

 

          Thankyou Frank.

 

David Khurt.          22-5-1981 (publisher uncertain)

 

Used with the kind permission of David Khurt