“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”[1] Life has a way of trimming us down to size, and broken dreams are part of the bargain. It’s no fun to feel small. To get run over and crushed by wayward circumstance.

Almost as if it were a comment on the hidden blessing of feeling small, The Incredible Shrinking Man, a 1957 Hollywood movie with a dismal storyline, ended on an upbeat note. Scott Carey, a man accidentally exposed to radiation and now growing smaller every day, eventually becomes so small that his wife has difficulty keeping track of him. Meanwhile, the pet cat chases him downstairs and there he fends off a predatory spider. Not a promising beginning to the life that awaits him as a submicroscopic human. In the final scene of the movie, the still-shrinking Carey contemplates his future while looking up at the stars through the basement window. Then it hits him: “The infinitesimal and the infinite” are really “two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet—like the closing of a gigantic circle.”[2] And with this flash of insight, his former presumption and misunderstanding turn to enlightenment:

I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God’s silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends in man’s conception, not nature’s. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist![3]

Laboring under a condition that made him highly self-conscious, Carey first saw the seeming catastrophe of his life through the pinhole of his pain. Then in a moment of release he in his tininess slipped through the pinhole to experience the “vast majesty of creation.” Somehow reality got turned inside out. The amazing thing is that this happens all the time, and we all love these moments of transposition and release. If dreams were not broken, though, it would never happen.

Don’t Worry, Be Sad

Music can be therapeutic. Happy music brightens our mood and calm music relaxes us. What about sad music? This is an inflection point, a moment when things get turned inside out. “From an early age I knew the blues contain truth,” recalled Willie Nelson. “They are an honest expression of the human condition.”[4] Why then do we sing and listen to the blues? “To process grief,” Nelson insisted. “The contradiction never ceases to work: you sing the blues to lose the blues. You lift the burden by transferring it into a song. I [don’t] know why or how the miracle takes place, but it always does.”[5]

Musical immersion in pain and sadness is the very antidote thereof because the story-filled songs expansively align us with a vast crowd of fellow sufferers, most of whom we will never know, except sympathetically. When experienced by oneself, pain can be deadly because nothing is heavier than feeling completely alone in suffering. By globalizing our suffering—that is, by initiating us into the universal fellowship of pain—the blues bring peace and compassion. The heartfelt realization that all suffer is deliverance from individual, self-centered suffering.

The Persian poet Rumi agreed: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”[6] Music teleports us into the light of shared suffering faster than any other artistic medium. We all know what Willie Nelson is talking about when he sings that his life is a “scene from the world of broken dreams.”[7] Or this stanza from “Danny Boy,” a song understood to express an aged parent’s longing for reunion with a son who has gone to war:

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,
Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say an Ave there for me.[8]

It is an odd scientific fact that sad music does not make us sad, at least not in a negative way but rather in a pleasurable, sympathetic, expansive way.[9] One reason for this, researchers suggest, is that it is sad but safe; we therefore can let it wash over us without feeling threatened by it. A second, related possibility is that sad music entails vicarious emotion—the emotion of all others who, like us, have suffered loss and sorrow. This view comports with Willie Nelson’s response to the question of why we sing the blues. We are reaching for the post-blues blues, the blues raised to a higher power, or what Kahlil Gibran called “the pain of too much tenderness,”[10] the higher wounding that occurs with the realization that all are wounded.

Hence the unexpected deliciousness of sad music. “And we are put on earth a little space,” wrote William Blake, “That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”[11]

Broken Symmetry

My wife Janet, a visual artist, tells me that focal objects in paintings should be a little off center. Unless symmetry is broken, everything appears pat and artificial. We may love symmetry, its perfect balance and reassuring predictability, but only up to a certain point. Too much of a good thing becomes monotonous and sterile.

Symmetry breaking is not just a rule of thumb in art; it is a scientific principle and, arguably, the spark of life.[12] Too much balance, too much repetition, can be deadening. In the Middle Ages, Jean Buridan imagined a perfectly symmetrical donkey (with no preferential inclination to turn left or right) standing equidistant between two perfectly identical piles of hay.[13] Buridan argued that the donkey would eventually starve to death owing to its inability to decide which pile of hay to eat first. Now students of symmetry happily assure us that the donkey would not die, because reality is more subtly textured than Buridan supposed. Something in nature, a tiny spontaneous fluctuation, would break the symmetry. At the micro level, the universe is inherently dynamic, even creative. Always resisting the stasis of perfect equilibrium.

This perhaps is why focal objects in art are generally placed off center. The broken symmetry suggests that the scene is not dead or frozen in time. Life is moving on. The donkey, so to speak, has broken the deadlock because something interesting has happened. Think of fairy tales, which threaten to produce boring sameness but then break the pattern. The first two little pigs have their houses blown down by the big, bad wolf. The second scene perfectly repeats the first. But when the wolf tries to blow down the third little pig’s brick house, he can’t, and so he jumps down the chimney into the fire. The pattern is broken, and the story finds an interesting, happy resolution (for the pigs, at least). Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother tries to get rid of them on two occasions, and then once she is successful and they are abandoned, they find themselves trapped in a gingerbread house where they are abused day after day by a wicked witch. Were this cruelty to go on indefinitely, the story would trail off senselessly. Too much sameness. But the pattern is broken when Gretel shoves the witch in the oven and releases Hansel from his cage, and the two children happily return home to their beloved and overjoyed father. Symmetry or patterned predictability is much of the story, but the breaking of symmetry is the heart of the story. It is also the heart of life.

Music also involves broken symmetry, the fracturing of ongoing sameness. In a very basic sense, it too is a compound of opposites, a tango of silence and sound.[14] The sound component is particularly hard to talk about. At what point does sound become music rather than mere aural stimulus? Pitch, timbre, rhythm, and texture are often said to play into music, along with melody and harmony, but how these and other elements constitute music is a matter of ongoing debate among music scholars, particularly in light of cultural differences. What counts as dissonance, say, in one culture will be heard as consonance in another. Further, as with other art forms, musical definitions and boundaries are always in flux, and so within a single culture music may evolve beyond earlier recognition. Baby boomers may struggle to appreciate grunge and rap, having grown up on rock and soul.

For these reasons, I acknowledge the inherent risk and, in my judgment, wrongheadedness of suggesting that one kind of music exclusively reenacts God’s action in the world. What follows is my attempt to account for the power of music within the framework of the Western classical tradition. Although I talk a little about other kinds of music, the scholars I cite principally develop their arguments from their understanding of that tradition. This does not imply that other forms of music, Western and non-Western, do not also communicate God’s love. In fact, if readers wish to regard the following as a “likely story”[15] (Plato’s expression for an approximation or analogy one or more steps removed from divine truth), and just one likely story among many, that is fine by me. That is how I regard it.

Also, let me add that I do not believe that all music is good or expressive of God’s love. Some is dark or counterfeit—another instance of opposition in all things.[16] Here, however, I embrace the favorable view of music assumed by the people I cite. Or, more correctly, the favorable view of what I call “musical time,” which is just one aspect of classical music’s appeal, but one that spills over into many other kinds of music. There are, of course, other aspects (pitch, harmony, etc.), but in the context of broken dreams, musical time is particularly propitious because it enacts the gospel promise that broken dreams can be mended. The heartbreaking past can be redeemed in the present moment.

Like many other art forms, classical music balances itself between predictable order and surprising novelty, or what Martin Gardner characterizes as mechanical repetition of tones and seemingly random variation of tones.[17] A pattern is established and then surprisingly broken. The surprise may entail dissonance, at least for the moment—a bit of noise in an otherwise pleasing melody line. But then the narrative moves on, gathering up the noise and transforming it redemptively. By letting the noise stream into its ongoing story, the composition retroactively charges noise with new meaning and thereby “buys it back.” This, it seems to me (a lover of music with scarcely any musical talent), happens in many kinds of music, but most obviously so in jazz. The melody drifts away into strange and discordant (“noisy”) possibilities, then returns at a higher, or lower, turn of the spiral, enriched by the erstwhile noise.[18] The same is true of life, which is why broken dreams are integral parts of the life experience. They are senseless noise when they occur, but if we can assimilate them melodiously, we are much better off because we then move upward or at least onward.

Music and Time

To fully grasp the import of broken symmetry in music we note that music, unlike artistic creations that we may experience in a single glance, unfolds in time. And yet it falsifies the truism that the past, present, and future never intermingle. As a matter of lived experience or human psychology, they almost always intermingle. “The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner. “It’s not even past.”[19] We embody our past and anticipate our future. But what people principally mean when they characterize past, present, and future as separate categories is that we cannot change the past from our vantage point in the present. Past events are cemented in. I will argue that music teaches us otherwise. It is, as Oliver Sacks insisted, “a rope let down from heaven.”[20] A rope, I propose, which embodies the hope that we may change the past through repentance.[21]

Because music unfolds in time, it embodies and expresses time’s enduring mystery. Augustine of Hippo famously remarked that he understood time as long as he didn’t think about it. He could read a sundial and keep an appointment. But the minute someone asked him to define time, he grew confused.[22] Time seems like passage from one moment to the next, but this definition isn’t helpful because it uses time—moments of time—to define time. Besides, if time passes, how quickly does it pass? Sometimes we say it passes quickly and other times slowly, depending on our level of interest. When we’re bored, it drags; when we’re having fun or are wrapped up in a project, it flies. So we are back to human psychology, and if we turn the question over to physical science, we run into the same problem. Aiming for a quantitative (rather than qualitative or subjective) measure of time’s flow, all we can say is that it passes at one second per second, one minute per minute, and so on. If time is not the biggest unsolved riddle in all of philosophy, science, and life, it is one of the biggest.[23] Which no doubt is why some very smart people, Albert Einstein included, have concluded that it doesn’t really exist.[24]

My favorite definition of time is Henry David Thoreau’s: “Time is the stream I go a-fishing in.”[25] I have no idea what it means, but it resonates nicely with time’s inscrutability. Besides, I grew up fishing a little canyon stream not far from my childhood home in Idaho. I also grew up thinking occasionally about time, and when my deacon’s quorum advisor—Merrill Lewis, who, you may recall, taught me that there is more to life than fun—stated that God could do anything that didn’t violate the laws of nature, I asked him if God could stop time for ten minutes. Merrill wisely disregarded my question and went on with his lesson.

After decades of thinking about time, I believe that the gospel is our best lens for appreciating it. Time has something—maybe everything—to do with our mortal circumstance and our chance to learn, grow, and repent before we leave mortality. William Blake said that “eternity is in love with the productions of time.”[26] Given that love, we temporal beings are not fully subject to the ravages of time. Reality, as Lehi taught, is a compound in one, a giant lost and found. We lose much, whether through broken dreams or steady decline, but when we seek in faith we find more than we lost. Recall Edmund Spenser’s line from The Faerie Queen:

Whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto another brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.[27]

Time is on our side if we live the gospel.

Whence Music?

While teaching a priesthood quorum some years ago, I commented that while Latter-day Saints pray often, they generally do not pray for long periods of time. Our public prayers last no more than two or three minutes, and our private prayers no more than thirty minutes. There are exceptions, of course, but usually our prayers do not go on for hours. After I made this comment, the stake president, who was also a Tongan, a good friend, and, in my opinion, a great man, remarked that we should keep our prayers brief because God is too busy to listen to us praying all the time. Surprised by this response, I made a mental note of the difference between his conception of God relating to time and my own. For years I had entertained the idea that God transcends time, at least on occasion or in ways unfathomed by humans. Here, however, was a very down-to-earth outlook that assumed that God, like us, has only so much time to complete his tasks.

As counterpoint to the stake president’s remark, I could have referenced Alma 40:8 (“time only is measured unto men”) and Doctrine and Covenants 38:2 (“all things are present before mine [God’s] eyes”). But for every scriptural passage indicating that God transcends time, there is another passage suggesting that he, like us, is “wrapped up” in time. This is not surprising, given that “all things” exist as a “compound in one,” or in virtue of complementary opposition, according to the Book of Mormon (2 Nephi 2:11). In some sense past mortal imagining, God is eternal and otherworldly, but he is also fully intimate with the sufferings of this world, all of which unfold in time. And for us, time is similarly a compound of opposites. Explaining Dante’s cosmology, two scholars note the compound nature of time—it is a river that brings us into imperfect being while washing away our “sinful dirt.”[28] The streaming waters move us through mortality while also cleansing us of “the load of errors of life as it is lived.”[29]

How does music figure into this scenario? For one thing, it blunts the moving edge of time, or movement toward dissolution and death. For another, it dissolves the binary opposition between spirit and body, as that opposition or duality has been constructed in the West.[30]

Perhaps because it is so nonrepresentational of nature, music has often been portrayed as nonphysical and disembodied. “You will never come on anything in nature that sounds like a symphony,” remarks Martin Gardner, the point being that unlike many paintings and sculptures, musical compositions are not simply plucked or transcribed from the sights and sounds of nature.[31] And yet, as everyday engagement with music shows, it is deeply physical and supremely affective: it can move us to tears, transfigure our mood, alter our body chemistry, and gather past events into an ongoing storyline, which is one of the functions of musical scores in plays and movies. And in the end, music’s physical impact can be memorable, decisive, and life-clarifying. “My fanhood is shamelessly unintellectual,” writes Bernard Chazelle of his love affair with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. “I love Bach,” he continues, “because his music is the most formidable elation machine ever engineered. To be sure, there is a wide spiritual canvas on which to draw our analyses, but analysis is optional. The thrill is not. So forget the cerebral razzle-dazzle. The music is corporeal, sensuous, and intoxicating. Bach, the most human of all composers, gets to your soul through your body.”[32]

Even so, in music we hear something that “does not fit into the general context of the physical world,” according to Victor Zuckerkandl.[33] There is no obvious link between music and the physical world. “Music . . . is preeminently non-representative,” writes Susanne Langer. “It exhibits pure form [without content] not as an embellishment, but as its very essence . . . no scene, no object, no fact.”[34] Tones, unlike words, do not explicitly point to anything in nature. Nature, it seems, is musically impoverished if not altogether bereft of music. When listening to music we are caught up in tones that seem to have no basis in the sensory offerings of the present world.

With this incongruity in mind—music’s emotional and physical impact but its absence from physical nature—Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that “music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable.”[35] We know what it is because it vibrates in sympathy with some deep part of us, but it is not obvious whence it comes. Lévi-Strauss further argued that among the arts music is singular in this regard. “There is no true equality . . . between painting and music.” Even abstract art employs colors, which are already present in nature, but “there are no musical sounds in nature, except in a purely accidental and unstable way; there are only noises.”[36]

Possible exceptions to this rule of noise might be birdsong, whale song, and other music-like utterances by nonhuman species. Whether humans picked up on these utterances to produce something comparable is controversial, however. In any event, music has come to occupy a place in our lives that far outstrips the meager offerings of nature, which makes music anomalous. The thrust of modern secular thought, of course, is to explain the world in terms of itself, as if it were a self-contained whole; modern cosmology, posits the Big Bang as the moment the universe popped into existence about 13.7 billion years ago. What preceded this momentous event, no one knows for sure, and often people say that nothing preceded it. Space, time, matter, energy, the fundamental forces of nature, and a causal network of relations—everything we need to explain the evolution of the cosmos (after its sudden origination)—was embryonically contained in that first moment. This makes little sense insofar as the Big Bang is often presented as an uncaused event.[37] Because time and space are said to have begun with the Big Bang, there can be no backstory or pre-narrative. By contrast, the restored gospel, while similarly positing a Big Bang event, offers a backstory, and implicit in the backstory is an explanation of music’s origin.

Speaking of our premortal participation in what Joseph Smith called the Grand Council of Heaven,[38] Hugh Nibley wrote: “When the Plan [of salvation] was announced to the assembled hosts, and the full scope and magnanimity of it dawned upon them, they burst into spontaneous shouts of joy and joined in a hymn of praise and thanksgiving, the Morning-song of Creation, which remains to this day the archetype of all hymns, the great acclamatio, the primordial nucleus of all liturgy.”[39]

Nibley proposes that music originates with the premortal shout of joy that occasioned God’s announcement of the plan of salvation wherein Christ became “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). At least three Biblical passages allude to this overflowing burst of joy: (1) “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . . When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4, 7); (2) “And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:12–14); and (3) “And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood . . . and the number of them [that sang] was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands” (Revelation 5:9, 11).

The song of joyful praise that occasioned the earthly annunciation of the Savior’s birth no doubt echoed (or unveiled) the spontaneous burst of joy that occurred in the Council in Heaven. And our own mortal birth also merits jubilation: without a mortal body, we would have no claim on the atoning blood of Christ. “From henceforth let no man trouble me,” wrote the Apostle Paul, “for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” (Galatians 6:17; my emphasis). The marks are the stigmata, the wounds, hurts, and exhaustions that Jesus suffered on our behalf, and which we come to know in part as mortal beings. Christ was tried and tempted in every human way, and this allows him to succor us, but reciprocally Paul added, this coincidence of suffering allows us to win fellowship with him. By folding our own hurts into the master narrative of his anguish and death, we avail ourselves of the sanctifying power of his Resurrection (see Philippians 3:7–11).

Said more explicitly according to the Judeo-Christian imagery of the New Testament, Christ’s body is the veil of the temple rent on our behalf to afford us passage into God’s presence. Describing the crucifixion, Matthew wrote, “Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom” (Matthew 27:50–51; see Mark 15:37–38; Luke 23:45). The author of Hebrews developed the same point: “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest [of holies] by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh” (Hebrews 10:19–20). Christ’s body, pierced, torn, and bleeding, is memorialized not just in the ordinance of the sacrament but also in the parting of the veil of the temple. This is how we progress beyond our own mortal embodiment.

Moreover, the joy that occasioned the premortal annunciation of Christ’s atoning sacrifice lives on in the joy we experience while passing through the veil, or whenever we follow the gospel and share its glad message. “There are several reasons for bearing testimony,” stated Elder Jeffrey R. Holland while addressing the subject of missionary work: “One is that when you declare the truth, it will bring an echo, a memory, even if it is an unconscious memory to the investigator, that they have heard this truth before—and of course they have. A missionary’s testimony invokes a great legacy of testimony dating back to the councils in heaven before this world was. There, in an earlier place, these same people heard this same plan outlined and heard there the role that Jesus Christ would play in their salvation.”[40] The premortal announcement of Christ’s magnanimous sacrifice and the jubilation it touched off still echoes, however faintly, in our hearts.

Nibley called the jubilation the “Morning-song of Creation,” a designation that alludes to Christ’s role in the creation of the world.[41] Paul stated that by Christ “all things consist” (Colossians 1:17), and John testified that “in the beginning . . . the Word was with God,” and by the Word the world was created: “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1, 3).[42] In the original Greek, “Word” is logos, a term denoting reason, intelligence, and harmony, all suggestive of elemental cosmic truth. It may also mean discussion or counsel,[43] perhaps referring to a premortal, in-the-beginning discussion wherein God, counseling with others, formulated and introduced the plan of salvation: the plan of happiness whose announcement elicited a great, ongoing refrain of happiness, a still-echoing “Hallelujah” chorus. Such, Nibley suggested, is the origin of music in this world.

Clock Time and Musical Time

Following Nibley, I suggest that music exploded on the scene as God declared the plan of salvation.[44] It is therefore mindful of our passage from premortal spirit to mortal embodiment and our return to God following mortality. It is the “new song” sung in praise of God as he outlined a plan to baptize us in physical experience so that our capacity for happiness might expand without limit.[45] Originating from above and bespeaking another world, it transcends the sight-and-sound offerings of this world.

True to its methodology, science gives us a very different picture of things, one which offers no intimation of God. In 1927 the British astronomer A. S. Eddington coined the phrase “time’s arrow” to denote time’s unrelenting movement from past to future.[46] Unlike space, time’s companion in modern physics, time is asymmetric and, more than that, the asymmetry is displayed through disorganization. Left to themselves, things break down and fall apart, and Eddington insisted that this drift toward disorganization lets us know that time is passing. Bedrooms get messy, living things lose their youthful vitality, stars burn out, and so on. Time is a one-way trip into increasing disorder. Of course, we can, through the application of intelligent work, reverse this tendency, but only temporarily. We can clean our bedroom or get a facelift; eventually, though, disorganization prevails.

Eddington, of course, was hardly the first to remark on this facet of our experience. The apostle Paul spoke of our “bondage to decay” and testified that Jesus Christ would one day free us from that bondage (Romans 8:21 NIV). For him, time was a round trip, with the second leg of the journey occurring at a higher turn of the spiral than the first leg. First, descent into disorganization, and then if we are faithful, ascent toward renewal and redemption. Without the one, we cannot know or appreciate the other.

For some, Paul’s outlook is wishful fantasy. I disagree. There is something different about music, something that suggests that time’s passage entails more than descent into disorganization. Music, in brief, gives us a more promising picture of time.

We begin with a question: Why is music so repetitive? “We are so accustomed to repetition in music,” writes Victor Zuckerkandl, “that we accept it as self-evident; that we never become aware of what an extraordinary phenomenon it is.”[47] Unlike prose or visual art where repetition quickly becomes monotonous, music builds on repetition—think of how many times a melodic line may be repeated, often with little if any variation. As an example, Zuckerkandl offers the first movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony: He describes it as a “brief tonal formula, comprising a mere five tones, in three variations—as if I should say: ‘I gave him apples, apples gave him I, I apples gave him’—repeated thirty-six times in all, followed by eight more repetitions of half the formula. . . . And hardly have we got through it before it begins again, and the whole thing is repeated tone for tone!”[48]

Zuckerkandl responds to the question of “Why so much repetition?” by insisting that each repetition is in fact a new event; that is, a new event in musical time.[49] What he has in mind is the way a musical composition gathers its past into the present moment. Music has a metric wave, or a wave cycle produced by the metrical rhythm of the composition. As we all know, the rhythm or beat often (but not always) drives the composition, but not in a flat, linear, purely repetitive way. Rather, as the composition unfolds, each wave gathers up earlier waves so that “something grows, accumulates.”[50] In brief, musical time is not like clock time, or time as idealized by classical physics.[51] Clock time is wholly repetitive, a mere succession of isolated moments. Musical time is inclusive of many moments.

Zuckerkandl relates the growing, swelling nature of music to the waves that successively roll into each other with growing force. He calls this intensification, and while it is not something we can measure or quantify, we all know it subjectively. A clock may be ticking in the background, each tick the perfect copy of every other and each cut off from the others by an equal interval. But this is very different from music, even though timing is a critical element of musical experience. Tones may be aligned with ticks, but unlike ticks they are relationally alive to one another. A single unvarying tone, cut off from other tones, goes nowhere; it is little more than a tick.[52] But when it is followed by a second tone, music, or the prospect of music, arises. No tone is self contained or cut off from the others, and as the composition unfolds, we are carried along by the musical waves that keep rolling into one another. With music we feel something we never feel when listening to a clock or metronome. Clocks never sing to us.

Even future tones are gathered into musical time. We know this, again, from everyday experience: while listening to music we feel stretched out toward a satisfying resolution, a return to home key perhaps. And as musical tones integrate past and future to produce musical wholes, they trigger within the listener an expansive and heightened sense of the present moment.

The experience of listening to music, I submit, gestures toward the eternal present that scripture associates with God. Granted, music unfolds in time, but it is enjoyed in the here and now; as listeners we are not inclined to recall how beautiful a melody was two or three measures ago, nor do we become distracted with the musical future, even though we feel pulled toward it.[53] The past and the future live in the ever-flowing present, and that life flow is lost, says Zuckerkandl, when we lose the burning fuse of the present moment.[54] Because deliberate recall and anticipation assume the unreality of past and future (which, therefore, must be summoned forth as if they were non-present entities), they are at odds with music’s capacity to give us the past and future in the now of the lived musical moment. We therefore break the spell of music when we try to enjoy it through the conceptual lens of a timeline that breaks our experience of time into past, present, and future.

In essence, the moving edge of music, unlike the moving edge or arrow of time that Eddington spoke of, folds past and future into the immediacy of the present moment. There thus seems to be a realm in which the three divisions or tenses of time—past, present, and future—remain primordially intact, a realm not yet broken by conceptual representation. Zuckerkandl states that “every melody declares to us that the past is there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown.”[55] We do not call up the past and future as if they were independent of the present—they are there already, integral to what Kathleen Marie Higgins calls music’s “surprising present”: “We enjoy the fullness of the present musical moment, even if it is dissonant, not for its efficiency in moving us toward the evident musical goal, but for its own surprising present.”[56]

Oliver Sacks touched on the radical nature of this surprising present while rehearsing the experience of Clive Wearing, a well-known English musician who became profoundly amnesiac after encephalitis crippled his brain’s memory function. Wearing’s wife wrote that while “his ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired . . . he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was entirely forgotten.”[57] Eventually Wearing learned to function socially in a limited way by stocking his mind with facts about his past life, even though he had no recollection of them. He also learned to talk about certain subjects in a scripted fashion, albeit without realizing that these comments and conversations were repetitious. Providentially, there was one respite from this sequence of self-contained moments that never fused together, and that was music; it was, said Oliver Sacks, Wearing’s friend and neurologist, “a rope let down from heaven.”[58] Although Wearing might claim beforehand that he did not know a musical piece, when he sat at the piano he could play it with feeling and intelligence. The same passion and intelligence kicked in when he sang a song or conducted a score.[59]

Sacks suggested that Wearing, “incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, [was] able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering it at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is entirely in the present.”[60] To hear a musical tone is to be picked up and carried along by the entire composition: “A piece of music is not a mere sequence of notes. Every bar, every phrase, arises organically from what preceded and points to what will follow.”[61] Milič Čapek makes the same point while also noting that each note or tone, though infused with the meaning of the entire composition, does not completely lose its individuality: “The quality of a new tone, in spite of its irreducible individuality, is tinged by the whole antecedent musical context which, in turn, is retroactively changed by the emergence of a new musical quality. The individual tones are not externally related units of which the melody is additively built; neither is their individuality absorbed or dissolved in the undifferentiated unity of the musical whole.”[62]

Following Zuckerkandl, Higgins, Sacks, and Čapek, I propose that music touches us because it profoundly instances this synergistic interplay, or harmony between part and whole. Each tone ultimately taps into a primordial harmony, which I like to believe is the aforementioned hymn of praise that occasioned our shouting for joy when Christ offered himself as “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” So, thanks to musical time, we realize, though generally not consciously, that there is more to the here and now than the here and now, conventionally understood. Thus, musical time allows us to recapture some expansive life quality that leaks away during our normal routine, and in doing this it gives us promise of another world. A world not subject to clock time’s remorseless descent into disorganization.

Before Clock Time

Musical time, I suggest, is a throwback to the grace or innocence of childhood—before we learned to break time into three parts and thereby emptied the present moment of its innate fullness. Scholars have linked music with language learning, noting that “linguistic prosody, which is analogous to the melodic and rhythmic contours of music, is extremely salient to young language learners.”[63] Infants appear to have absolute pitch, an endowment that is generally lost during language acquisition owing to their need to parse sounds into syllables and ordered sequences so that they may enter the world of adult meanings, which does not depend on absolute pitch. “Infants limited to grouping melodies by absolute pitches,” write Jenny Saffran and Gregory Greigentrog, “would never discover that the songs they hear are the same when sung in different keys or that words spoken at different fundamental frequencies are the same.”[64] Information, that is, would be exclusively tied to pitch, and that would lead speakers (singers?) into a linguistic world we can scarcely imagine, for even tonal languages depend on much more than pitch for the expression of meaning.

The salient point is that what adults now deem a rare musical gift—absolute pitch—is something virtually all humans possess at birth but then lose while growing into a language keyed to other criteria. Further, the ability to parse experience according to these other criteria gives us a reality not exclusively musical, a reality in which music is just one of the world’s many facets, albeit one that has struck some thinkers as elemental and universal. It is a familiar observation that music, unlike the visual arts, lacks specific content. As Arthur Schopenhauer stated:

Music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives for them. Nevertheless, we understand them perfectly in this extracted quintessence.[65]

Because music triggers passions and moods without referencing uniquely particular events or moments of experience, it seems to point back to a reality far less particularized and differentiated than the one we normally engage. Keying off of Gustav Mahler and Paul Hindemith, Martha Nussbaum calls this a dream-like reality, or one in which musical emotions

follow one another in rapid and sometimes surprising succession; they seem to lack rootedness in specific events and in the usual sequencing of events in space and time; they grow and fade with a bewildering rapidity. In all this they are like dreams, or certain sorts of memories; they have the characteristics of compression, multiple reference, illogical order, displacement, and rapidity that we associate with our experience of dreaming.[66]

Nussbaum proposes that music, like dreams, offers release from hard-edged, logically ordered, and fully differentiated waking reality, and this assertion comports with Zuckerkandl’s proposition that music short circuits our sense of clock time by folding past and future into the flowing edge of the musical present. Along with others, I am suggesting there is something fundamental about music, something embryonic of particularized possibilities that, once realized, tends to mask music’s wavelike, integrative structure. If we grow out of absolute pitch while giving ourselves over to languages keyed to particular objects, events, and experiences, it is likely that something elemental—something prior to space-time sequencing—gets left behind in the growing-up process.

Marcel Proust proposed that music might be “the unique example of what might have been—if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened—the means of communication between souls.”[67] What he had in mind is that while there is continuity between speech and song, there is also discontinuity. Abstract speech, or what Storr calls “language designed to convey information and communicate ideas rather than to share feelings,”[68] instantiates clock time: past, present, and future are cleanly parceled out. Storr then quotes Zuckerkandl to the effect that “words divide, tones unite. The unity of existence that the word constantly breaks up, dividing thing from thing, subject from object, is constantly restored in the tone.”[69] Words lift objects and events from their environs, thereby dismembering the world. Music, by contrast, reunifies, re-members the world, gives us back what was there in the beginning. Without music, Zuckerkandl suggests, human experience would be ever more taken over by clock time’s reductive, disintegrating rule.

Pondering his childhood, Dylan Thomas described the shadow that fell over his life as his understanding of time changed.

I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.[70]

Clock time is a “childless land” in that it valorizes past, present, and future as absolutely distinct times. Part of the magic of music is that it undoes the valorization and disabuses us of the assumption that every event can be pinned down to a single, distinct moment and a single precise place. In music (that is, musical time) we find tones, though briefly sung or played, expansively existing beyond their assigned locations in the spacetime regime. The moving edge of music, the musical tone we hear right now, is freshly informed by antecedent and future tones, and that is one reason music can touch us so deeply.

Musical Time and the Octave

From a gospel perspective there is a great deal about musical time that bespeaks grace, forgiveness, repentance, and redemption. Can we change the past? Most of the time we say no, but most of the time our thinking is ruled by clock time with its steady iteration of distinct instants, each one marking a clean break with the past. Musical time is much more promising, and much more faithful to life itself. “The past is beautiful,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”[71] Past experiences have a way of welling up in the present, of flooding into our lives at unexpected moments. An autobiographical case in point: I taught at BYU–Hawaii for eight years and then transferred to BYU’s main campus in Provo, Utah. After transferring I knew intellectually that my time at BYU–Hawaii had been a great blessing to my family and me, but I waited in vain, it seemed, for my past BYU–Hawaii experience to expansively complete itself in the present. Then one day while walking across campus I bumped into a colleague from Hawaii and chatted briefly. Right then my BYU–Hawaii experience flooded back into my life, taking on new meaning and breaking the clock-time frame of the present moment. During this sudden upwelling of emotion, the past was musically gathered into the present.

Such moments anticipate larger moments of change and redemption. Speaking of the resurrection of our bodies, Paul wrote that “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye . . . the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:52). While in mortality, we may be changed as past events redemptively well up and wash over us in the twinkling of an eye.

“One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been,” wrote Sophocles.[72] We must get past the past to fully assimilate it, and that assimilation experience may go on for a long time, expanding and reconfiguring itself in new ways. Hence if we are spiritually pliant, the lamentable past need not remain lamentable. Rather it can be musically—that is, redemptively—gathered into the present. In his novel The Near and the Far, L. H. Myers describes desert Bedouin whose daily toil is redeemed by the sight of the setting sun. As the twelve-year-old Prince Jali watches the sun sink in the west every evening, the travail of the day (the Near) is suffused with an unsuspected vastness of meaning (the Far). Hence for Jali there are “two deserts”: one that makes him feel like “an insect” crawling across the sand, and another, brought on by “the red glitter of sunset” that turns “his whole body into a living arrow” ready to “flash into” the faraway vista.[73] The faraway vista—the sense of being rescued from the daily grind—unlocks the meaning of musical time.

Another illustration of musical time and its connotation of redemption: it is said that in jazz there are no wrong notes. A good jazz musician can retroactively charge a “wrong note” with right meaning through on-the-spot improvisation. The same thing can happen in our lives through repentance. One’s life can, after setbacks, missteps, and broken dreams, find a melody, a rhyme. Not a happy ending distinct from the misery and misfortune that preceded it, but a storyline retroactively charged with meaning, wonder, and joy. “And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you,” states the Lord in the book of Joel. “And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, that hath death wondrously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed” (Joel 2:25–26). If we avail ourselves of God’s wondrous mercy, the dissonance and senseless noise of our past will be restored to us as a song of divine praise.

This is part of what it means for God to remember our sins no more. He does not erase our past but redeems it. He gives us a new beginning, a new life, by retroactively charging past events with transcendent meaning. In a general conference address entitled “The Brilliant Morning of Forgiveness,” Elder Boyd K. Packer spoke of fifteen-year-old John Breen, one of the survivors of the Donner Party, the group of California-bound pioneers who spent the winter of 1846–47 trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.[74] After months of brutal suffering, John and others made their way to safety in late April after much of the snow had melted. They descended into the Sacramento Valley and found refuge at William Johnson’s ranch. Of the experience John would later write: “It was long after dark when we got to Johnson’s Ranch, so the first time I saw it was early in the morning. The weather was fine, the ground was covered with green grass, the birds were singing from the tops of the trees, and the journey was over. I could scarcely believe that I was alive. The scene that I saw that morning seems to be photographed on my mind. Most of the incidents are gone from memory, but I can always see the camp near Johnson’s Ranch.”[75]

Elder Packer stated that he was initially puzzled by John Breen’s statement that “most of the incidents are gone from memory.” “How could long months of incredible suffering and sorrow ever be gone from his mind?” he asked. “How could that brutal dark winter be replaced with one brilliant morning?” Then he recalled the scripture: “Behold, he who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more” (Doctrine and Covenants 58:42). If God does not remember our sins and hardships, it is not because they still exist in clock time and he simply chooses to overlook them. Rather, he redeems them in musical time.

Some people argue that all the evil on the earth, along with the suffering that accompanies it, counts decisively against belief in God. This argument presupposes clock time, or the impossibility of altering the past. If in fact there were no hope of redeeming the past, of turning the seemingly senseless noise of our lives into music, we would be, as Paul said, “most miserable” (1 Corinthians 15:19). But while we are caught up in musical time it is as if we catch God in the act of blessing us. It is firsthand evidence of redemption, for music heals, completes, and transforms the past so graciously that the erstwhile dissonance of our lives—the broken dreams and other seemingly senseless sufferings—ceases to register. Indeed, that dissonance becomes music.

Elder Dale G. Renlund spoke to this theme of backward transformation: for good or for ill, the individual events of our lives are caught up into a rhyme or melody, the effect of which is to decide not just what is happening now but also what happened in the past.[76] To make his point, Elder Renlund quoted C. S. Lewis:

[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me but have this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why at the end of all things . . . the Blessed will say, “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.[77]

In brief, God’s way is to let our present acts define our past acts, ideally to our good. Music works the same way: each tone gathers earlier tones into itself, propelling the entire composition toward a destination that feels right, that feels like home.

The octave, a musical interval—perhaps the only one—that spans all cultures, may be said to illustrate this principle of homecoming. Zuckerkandl writes: “The strange fact of the octave—some authors have rightly spoken of ‘the miracle of the octave’—is responsible for the paradoxical situation that movement along the [musical] scale brings into the open. It is a unique situation, one which has no parallel anywhere.”[78] Under what other circumstance do we move away from a starting point only to return to it with a sense of arrival, completion, and fulfillment? Where the journey takes us back to the same place but now with a brighter or deeper appreciation, as evidenced by the varied frequency of the ending tone.

Contra Zuckerkandl, however, I suggest that “the miracle of the octave” has many parallels. It is sometimes likened to the DNA spiral and to the so-called golden-ratio manifestations of nature and art.[79] It can, moreover, be seen as gospel allegory: we return to where we began, but with newly acquired sensibilities born of our away-from-home adventures. Additionally, only the restored gospel, with its teaching of premortality and the necessity of mortal embodiment, gives us an understanding consistent with music’s affirmation of return. The “miracle of the octave” does not occur if we journey only partway through the octave, nor do we feel the satisfaction that homecoming brings when we hear only the latter half of a composition. For our joy to be complete, we must end where we began, albeit at a higher turn of the spiral, and then perhaps at yet another turn, and so on upward.[80]

A Superhuman Task

The Pythagoreans are often credited with the discovery of the octave and several other musical intervals or consonances. Thinking widely and believing that the cosmos was a beautiful harmony, they supposed that the planets moving in their orbits sounded tones comparable to those produced on lyres. Underlying this conviction was the Pythagorean finding that musical intervals are governed by mathematical ratios. 2:1 defined the octave, 3:2, the fifth, and so on. If “everything is number”—a common summation of Pythagorean doctrine—then in some sense everything is music as well. As Socrates states in Plato’s Republic: “It’s likely that, as the eyes fasten on astronomical motions, so the ears fasten on harmonic ones, and that the sciences of astronomy and harmonics are closely akin. This is what the Pythagoreans say, Glaucon, and we agree, don’t we.”[81]

Glaucon agrees and Socrates continues his argument, faulting the Pythagoreans for paying attention to only the consonances while ignoring the dissonances: “They seek out the numbers [ratios] that are to be found in these audible consonances, but they do not make the ascent to problems. They don’t investigate, for example, which numbers are consonant and which aren’t or what the explanation is of each.” To which Glaucon replies, “But that would be a superhuman task.”[82]

It would be a superhuman task to explain all the consonance and dissonance in the world, but Lehi’s teaching that opposites exist in complementary interface, each opposite giving shape and meaning to its contrary, helps immensely. A single state can’t compute, can’t deliver the goods of salvation—life, happiness, meaning, intelligence. We therefore need a compound-in-one state in which we are situated amid alternative possibilities. This is life but also the atonement, or the at-one-ment, the term implying a return to unity after scattered brokenness. Without the scattering and brokenness there would be no divine mending and reconciliation. No return to unity, no return home, and consequently no homecoming joy. Just flat sameness. As Sappho observed 2,600 years ago, life involves separation and return, departure and reunion. Sunset (announced by Hesper, the evening star) gathers back what sunrise scatters abroad:

Thou, Hesper, bringest homeward all,
That radiant dawn sped far and wide,
The sheep to fold, the goat to stall,
The children to their mother’s side.[83]

By virtue of opposition in all things, the Atonement is divinely patterned into mortal experience, into our hardship and happiness and all the comings, goings, gatherings, and goodbyes of everyday life. And knowing that physical death is part of the pattern, we may say with Paul, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55).

Notes

[1] Henry David Thoreau, The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, ed. Odell Shepard (New York: Dover, 1961), 94.

[2] “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” https://www.imdb.com/.

[3] “Incredible Shrinking Man.”

[4] Willie Nelson, It’s a Long Story: My Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 327.

[5] Nelson, It’s a Long Story, 357. See also pp. 21–22.

[6] Quoted in Jolene Jones, Dwelling: A Memoir about Addiction and Recovery (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2014), 1. This statement is frequently attributed to Rumi, though I have yet to find it in a primary source.

[7] Willie Nelson, “Night Life,” https://songmeanings.com/.

[8] Frederick Weatherly, “Danny Boy,” https://en.wikisource.org/.

[9] Ai Kawakami et. al, “Sad Music Induces Pleasant Emotion,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, (13 June 2013), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00311.

[10] Kahlil Gibran, “On Love,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/.

[11] William Blake, “The Little Black Boy,” The Portable Blake, ed. Alfred Kazin (New York: Viking, 1972), 86.

[12] For a brief explanation of symmetry breaking in science, see Anthony Phillips, “Why Symmetry Gets Really Interesting When It Is Broken,”Aeon (10 April 2018), https://aeon.co/. By way of conclusion, Phillips states: “At a certain level of abstraction, in both science and art, symmetry-breaking creates the conceptual space for interesting things to happen. Patterns might be appealing but, from ancient sagas to modern technology, they are at their most interesting, useful and revealing when broken.”

[13] The thought experiment is an old one, predating Buridan and keyed to the question of whether the ass can break the deadlock through the exercise of free will. Buridan said no. “Buridan’s Ass,” https://wikipedia.org/.

[14] Musical pauses often heighten tension. More broadly and deeply, there is the “presence-of-absence” aspect of unsounded tones, whether tones not played at all or tones between the canonical semitones or half-steps—those not allowed by the scales. And then there is the backdrop or “sound” of silence against which sound emerges, a backdrop that can be soothing or disturbing. “Silence alone is worthy to be heard,” wrote Thoreau. “As I leave the village, drawing nearer to the woods, I listen from time to time to hear the hounds of Silence baying at the Moon. . . . The silence rings; it is musical and thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible, I heard the unspeakable.” Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, 105.

[15] Plato, Timaeus, 29d.

[16] Even bad music, however, is redeemable according to the rationale I will present. It is senseless noise that God can turn into rhyme or melody if we are willing to let him.

[17] Martin Gardner, “Mathematical Games: White and Brown Music, Fractal Curves and One-Over-F Fluctuations,” Scientific American 238, no. 4 (April 1978): 16–32.

[18] Western classical music is tonal, meaning that tones gravitate around a particular tone, the tonic or keynote, and tension is created and released as tones move away and back to that tone. We are culturally acclimated to feel relief when the music returns to the tonic after straying away from it. When I talk about returning to our starting place at a higher turn of the spiral, I am elaborating on this phenomenon, though in Western music the pitch line may just as readily go down as up. Thus, there is no archetypal necessity of melodic ascent, and the analogy I strike is imperfect. All the same, I use the phrase “higher turn of the spiral” because it captures the way music progresses through the octave in what strikes me as a spiral manner. It can just as easily spiral downward as upward, and so here I add “lower” turn of the spiral. In a gospel context, descent and ascent are a single oppositional package. We can’t go up without first going down, and sometimes going down, as evidenced by Christ’s condescension, is wondrous.

[19] William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (London: Chatto & Windus, 1919), 85.

[20] Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2020), 215. In his study, Anthony Storr concluded that music “is an irreplaceable, undeserved, transcendental blessing.” Music and the Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1992), 188.

[21] James Faulconer makes a similar argument in a forthcoming publication, tentatively titled “Christian Temporality and the Possibility of Repentance.”

[22] Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991), 230–31.

[23] Even experts and wordsmiths falter when defining time. The Oxford English Dictionary states that time is “the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” Wikipedia defines it as “the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future.” The words I have italicized, indefinite and apparently, strike me as tacit acknowledgements of time’s inscrutability. Moreover, ask yourself, “To what extent, if any, do the past, present, and future exist?” We are comfortable insisting that other places in space exist even when they do not coincide with our present location (for example, I know that Antarctica is just as real as Honeyville, Utah, even though I have never been to Antarctica and am presently situated in Honeyville), but we hesitate to say that other places in time exist just as vibrantly as the present moment. The past is past or passed, having slipped into some kind of faded and readily forgotten reality, and the future is still waiting to happen. Only the present moment seems real, but its crystalline reality is called into question by its elusive brevity. The very moment we undertake to capture or “freeze” it, it becomes something wholly other than what it is—it becomes past. It is the knife edge between past and future, but its magnitude is so slight as to seem nothing at all. And yet it is the moment we identify with reality itself. If an event doesn’t happen in the present, it doesn’t happen at all. Further, time flies, we say, but generally only when we stop to marvel at its mercurial passage after doing something that lets us forget it. When we do remember time—while waiting for a pot to boil or an arduous task to end, for example—it drags. There is thus something uncanny and almost unreal about time’s passage, as evidenced by the saying that “days are long but years are short.” The toddler who can’t quite outgrow his diaper is one day a high school honor graduate. From a parent’s perspective, a monotonous string of tiring days somehow, almost magically, becomes a temporally foreshortened labor of love. “Is this the little girl I carried? / Is this the little boy at play? / I don’t remember growing older / When did they?” Tevye and Golde singing “Sunrise, Sunset” in Fiddler on the Roof.

[24] Shortly before his own death, Einstein consoled the family of a dear, recently deceased friend: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.” Thomas Venning, “Time’s Arrow: Albert Einstein’s Letters to Michele Besso,” https://www.christies.com/features/einstein-letters-to-michele-besso-8422-1.aspx.

[25] The definition deserves a little context: “Time is the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count but one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973), 86.

[26] Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Portable Blake, 253.

[27] Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queen, bk. 5, canto 2, st. 39.

[28] Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Exploring the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission through Myth (Boston: David R. Godine, 1977), 197.

[29] De Santillana and Von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill, 197.

[30] Here I am thinking of Cartesian dualism, or René Descartes’s view that mind (spirit) and body consist of utterly different substances and possess utterly different attributes. This characterization has been widely embraced in the West but also has been much criticized by academicians. Joseph Smith offered a different account of the relation between spirit and body, one that situated the two substances toward different ends of the same spectrum: “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter” (Doctrine and Covenants 131:7–8). Some have proposed that spirit-body unity is part of music’s “remembering” (explained more fully below). “The fact that conceptual thought demands the separation of thinking from feeling, of object from subject, of mind from body,” writes Storr, “suggests that music may be one way of bridging this [spirit-body] division.” If analytic thought goes into musical composition, what comes out is nonanalytic or experiential, implying that the primordial intrigue of music is its dissolution of the object-subject split that normally seems so obvious. Some things we may enjoy dissecting, a lifeless frog in a lab class, for instance. But this is partly because we have no real idea of what it is like to be a living frog. Whatever we do (observation, testing, dissection, etc.), we are on the outside looking in. Music, by contrast, can be so spellbinding as to pull us inside itself and thereby prevent us from holding it at arm’s length and objectifying it. With music we get a taste of life right from the start, and afterward, once the spell is broken, we can then dissect, analyze, and objectify it if we wish. With other things, or most other things, however, we are never pulled wholly inside. Storr, Music and the Mind, 165. Later he writes that music plays a role in “restoring the links between mind and body” (183).

[31] Gardner, “Mathematical Games,” 31. To follow Storr: “Music is not usually representational: it does not sharpen our perception of the external world, nor, allowing for some notable exceptions, does it generally imitate it. Nor is music propositional: it does not put forward theories about the world or convey information in the same way as does language.” Music and Mind, 2–3.

[32] Bernard Chazelle, “My Favorite Things by Bach,” at https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/music/bach.html.

[33] Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 24.

[34] Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (New York: Mentor, 1964), 178.

[35] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (Mythologiques), trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 18.

[36] Lévi-Strauss, Raw and the Cooked, 19.

[37] In Chapter One of A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), Stephen Hawking stated that “the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe.” Rehearsing Edwin Hubble’s discovery of cosmic expansion, and by implication, cosmic birth, he added: “If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences.” Some argue, however, that the question is still unsettled. See Gabriele Veneziano, “The Myth of the Beginning of Time,” Scientific American (February 1, 2006),

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-beginning-of-time-2006-02/.

[38] Joseph Smith, Discourse, 12 May 1844, in Samuel W. Richards, Notebook, 74–76, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org.

[39] Hugh Nibley, “Treasures in the Heavens,” in Old Testament and Related Studies, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1986), 1:173.

[40] Jeffrey R. Holland, “Missionary Work and the Atonement,” Ensign, March 2001.

[41] The author of Hebrews folds Christ’s creation of the cosmos into his divine election: “God . . . hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Hebrews 1:1–3).

[42] See Lynne Wilson, “John 1: Come Follow Me Commentary,” https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/sites/default/files/archive-files/pdf/wilson/2019-01-18/cfm_-_john_1_1.pdf.

[43] Hugh W. Nibley, “Beyond Politics,” in Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless: Classic Essays of Hugh W. Nibley (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2004), 304, https://rsc.byu.edu/book/nibley-timely-timeless.

[44] Hugh W. Nibley, “Treasures in the Heavens,” in Nibley on the Timely, 55, https://rsc.byu.edu/.

[45] The reference to the new song sung in praise of God, together with a description of Christ’s worthiness to be the sacrificial Lamb of God, is found in Revelation 5. See also Job 38:4–7. Some of the following section is drawn from my Everyday Quantum Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), though the discussion is differently contextualized.

[46] Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (London: Dent, 1964), 76.

[47] Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 213. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization. Arnold Schoenberg organized much of his music around non-repetition; pioneers of “chance music” rolled dice, selected symbols from the Chinese divination text I Ching, or used other random procedures to determine musical elements, with the result often being very little repetition.

[48] Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 216.

[49] Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 218–19.

[50] Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 175–76.

[51] Isaac Newton, the chief architect of classical physics, wrote: “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without regard to anything external.” By equably he meant “with unvarying constancy,” and by without regard to anything external he meant “with perfect indifference to events in the world.” Principia Mathematica, definition VIII, scholium I, in Principia, ed. Stephen Hawking (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 2002), 6. Both of these suppositions are qualified if not sabotaged by Einsteinian relativity. The recently invented mechanical clock reshaped Newton’s (and virtually everyone else’s) conception of time. Because the clock was a “smart” machine that kept track of time with unprecedented precision, it seemed to follow that the units (“ticks”) it produced were the paradigmatic representation of time. Hence, a perfect clock would tick “equably without regard to anything external.”

[52] Here again, possible exceptions or surprising departures must be acknowledged. La Monte Young, my second cousin, is a famous but reclusive figure in the world of avant-garde music. He claims that his early experiences in Bern and Montpelier, Idaho, shaped his musical sensibilities. As a very young child he lay in bed listening to the steady buzzing of insects and the wind whistling through cracks in the walls of the small cabin where his family lived in Bern. And when he visited his grandpa’s gas station in Montpelier, the hum of the nearby power line fascinated him. These sounds later impelled him to pioneer drone music, also known as minimalism—long, principally single-tone music. He has sought, according to his biographer Jeremy Grimshaw, to reduce “music to its most elementary nature, sustained vibration.” In La Monte’s mind, before music took a turn toward tonal variation, it was (and still is) a steady resonance structuring the cosmos, and his task—really, self-assigned divine mission—is to bring back this lost truth. Grimshaw insists that La Monte sees himself as a prophet restoring eternal truths, à la Joseph Smith. His early immersion in the Latter-day Saint worldview stamped his thinking, though he has since soaked up ideas from many different quarters. See Jeremy Grimshaw, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17–21, 142–72, particularly p. 154.

[53] Expectation is a big part of the musical experience. Without it we cannot relish moments of resolution, nor can we be surprised when the melodic line takes an unexpected turn. For an exhaustive treatment of expectation, see David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006).

[54] Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 227, 235.

[55] Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 235. See also p. 227.

[56] Kathleen Marie Higgins, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 184.

[57] Cited in Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 202.

[58] Sacks, Musicophilia, 225.

[59] Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that music is something “for whose sake it is worth while to live on earth.” Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 101. He took up piano and musical composition at a young age and never lost his awe of music’s capacity to transport the soul. Even after he lost his sanity and his ability to speak coherently, his passion and memory for music remained intact. Like Wearing, Nietzsche found a home in music when other means of expression deserted him. He could still sing and play the piano. “Music was the only thing that was truly his,” writes Walter Stewart of Nietzsche’s last years in a mental asylum. Friedrich Nietzsche: My Sister and I (n.p.: Xlibris, 2011), 112.

[60] Sacks, Musicophilia, 228.

[61] Sacks, Musicophilia, 226.

[62] Milič Čapek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1964), 371.

[63] Jenny R. Saffran and Gregory J. Griepentrog, “Absolute Pitch in Infant Auditory Learning: Evidence for Developmental Reorganization,” Developmental Psychology 37, no. 1 (2001): 75. Steven Mithen proposes that human language originated with the singing of wordless meanings, which were tied to absolute pitch. Over time the singing yielded to word-borne communication, the “loss of perfect pitch” for most people, and “the diminution of musical abilities.” The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

[64] Saffran and Griepentrog, “Absolute Pitch,” 82.

[65] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 1:261; emphasis in the original. It is important to note that Schopenhauer wrote this in the early nineteenth century, when music was much less accessible and much less individualistic or personalized. Much contemporary popular music, it seems to me, does have specific content, often the story of someone’s heartbreak. But such stories, as Willie Nelson noted, readily lap over into listeners’ own lives and rescue them from the egocentric predicament.

[66] Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 266–67.

[67] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 5:292. The thesis that language originates with music lines up with Hugh Nibley’s argument that written language originated in the temple, where music was part of the revelatory ambience. He writes: “The place [of learning] was always part of the temple, and the books contain the earliest poetry, for poiema means “creation” and the business of the muses at the temple was to sing the Creation song with the morning stars; naturally the hymn was sung to music, and some scholars would derive the first writing from musical notation.” “Genesis of the Written Word,” in Nibley on the Timely, 126, https://rsc.byu.edu/.

[68] Storr, Music and the Mind, 164–65.

[69] Storr, Music and the Mind, 164–65.

[70] Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill,” https://poets.org.

[71] Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Oliver Bell, vol. 3, 1925–30 (n.p.: Hogarth, 1980), 5.

[72] Although this statement is widely attributed to Sophocles, I cannot find the source. The saying is also associated with Herodotus’s story of Solon the Wise and Croesus, the fabulously wealthy king of Lydia who deemed himself happiest of all people. To Croesus’s chagrin, Solon stated that others who died nobly were happier, since they were now beyond the reach of earthly misfortune and evil. Croesus dismissed Solon as unwise, but soon thereafter suffered the death of a son and lost his kingdom in battle against Cyrus the Persian (the ruler who defeated the Babylonians and then allowed exiled Israelites to return to their homeland). As Croesus was about to be burned at Cyrus’s behest, he recalled Solon’s words and called out his name three times. Cyrus, marveling at this unexpected response, halted the execution and asked the meaning of Croesus’s words. Then, upon hearing of Solon’s wisdom, Cyrus released Croesus and made him an advisor. The moral is that we should call no person happy until we know how her life ended. To some extent, the story aligns with the ancient Greek belief, notably expressed by Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics, that happiness is a lifelong endeavor based on virtuous behavior. Not, as we often think of it today, a transient emotion produced by temporary—and, as the Greeks might say, fickle—good fortune. Again, what matters most is how things thread together at the end, whether for good or for ill.

[73] L. H. Myers, “The Near and the Far,” The Root and the Flower (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), 1:15–16.

[74] Boyd K. Packer, “The Brilliant Morning of Forgiveness,” Ensign, November 1995.

[75] John Breen, “Pioneer Memoirs,” unpublished, as quoted on “The Americanization of Utah,” PBS television broadcast, also quoted in Packer, “Brilliant Morning.”

[76] “Elder Renlund Shares How Mistakes and Trials Can Pull Us Downward or Heavenward—It’s Our Choice,” LDS Living, August 20, 2016, https://www.ldsliving.com/. See also Dale G. Renlund, “Family History and Temple Work: Sealing and Healing,” Ensign, May 2018.

[77] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 67–68, quoted in Renlund, “Family History.”

[78] Victor Zuckerkandl, The Sense of Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 27. See also Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 102. Regarding the octave’s universality, Daniel J. Levitin writes: “It [the octave] is so important that, in spite of the large differences that exist between musical cultures—between Indian, Balinese, European, Middle Eastern, Chinese, and so on—every culture we know of has the octave as the basis for its music, even if it has little else in common with other musical traditions.” This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (n.p.: Dutton, 2016), 31. The octave is the interval between two tones where the higher tone vibrates at double the frequency of the lower tone. Thus, the two tones sound alike, evidently because they share a common foundational frequency, the lowest audible frequency that when doubled again and again defines the higher, similarly named tones. For example, A in the lower register vibrates at 220 hertz, one octave higher at 440 hertz, and then 880 hertz, and so on up. This is quite different from counting from 1 to 1,000. As we progress through the number line, we do not feel that we are rounding back to earlier numbers—we just feel that we are moving on in a linear fashion.

[79] See, for example, Jordi Solà-Soler, “Phi and Music in DNA,” Sacred Geometry, https://www.sacred-geometry.es/?q=en/content/phi-and-music-dna.

[80] The miracle of the octave may be built into life itself, eternally so. Douglas R. Hofstadter calls J. S. Bach’s Canon per Tonos, sometimes referred to as the “Neverending Canon,” the “Endlessly Rising Canon.” Beginning in the key of C minor, the piece cunningly switches key six times before returning to C minor “with all voices exactly one octave higher than they were in the beginning.” It then ends in a pleasing way. The implication, however, is that it could go on rising forever, each change in key seeming a step away from the home key, while actually being a step back toward it at the next higher octave, ad infinitum. In his award-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach, this is Hofstadter’s first illustration of a strange loop, or a system that surprisingly loops back on itself to awake itself from mere mechanical repetition and thereby bring forth a sense of self. Unlike machines, human beings can break out of their mechanical design, thanks to something about that design that is self-referential and therefore self-revelatory. In the case of Bach’s composition, it is the way the music unexpectedly returns to (and thereby references) its origin after seeming to wander so far away from it. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 10.

[81] Plato, Republic, 530d–e, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 1146.

[82] Plato, Republic, 531b–d, quoted in Cooper, Plato, 1147.

[83] Sappho, The Songs of Sappho, trans. Rennell Rodd (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper, 1966), 57.