News:

If you have difficulty registering for an account on the forum please email antespam@gmail.com. In the question regarding the composer use just the surname, not including forenames Charles-Marie.

Main Menu

Wrong tuning ideas caused musicians to be burned at the stake

Started by David Pinnegar, September 14, 2010, 06:35:43 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

David Pinnegar

Hi!

I recommend very much to readers the work of the Dutch historian Van Loon and in particular his book "The Liberation of Mankind", and upon reading this, no doubt his book on the Life and Times of Johannes Sebastien Bach may well be illuminating to organists.

"The Liberation of Mankind" is subtitled "The story of man's struggle for the right to think". It details how the Roman Empire adopted Christianity - and I suspect brought elements of the Christ story and teachings into line with all the disparate religions of the Roman empire, bringing a unity in faith throughout an empire materially falling apart at the seams. As an aside and not documented by Van Loon, requiring 60 ships of wood per day to keep them fuelled, the Roman Baths were unsustainable and it is obvious that when the wood ran out increasingly throughout Europe, the trade relationships that kept the empire together disintegrated. Accordingly, Christianity was seen as capable of keeping the bureaucratic networks together.

For instance the story of the virgin birth brought forward the followers of the old worship of Mithras into Christianity and the roman soldiers converted their allegience wholesale.

Whilst vested interest authors in the net deny that the Council of Nicea and years leading to it in 325-321AD did not meddle with the bilblical texts handed down to us, Van Loon points out that the supervisoin of the written word became a routine duty of the clergy and that some books were absolutely forbidden.

It is pretty obvious that there were processes of significant vested interests which coincided to make Christianity a common demoninator throughout an Empire riven by corruption and visibly falling apart. The adoption of Christianity was seen as the solution to keep the show on the road. It's no coincidence that Christendom centered upon Rome and it's no coincidence either that those who through near two millennia have pointed out the ways in which perhaps post Nicean Christianity might not have accorded entirely with what really happened between Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem in the first three decades Anno Domini have been seen as a threat and been progressively discriminated against and put to death.

The French protestants, the Huguenots were discriminated against after the Edict of Nantes promising them freedom in 1598 but merely resulted in a fleedom, thus circuitously bringing the family of Benjamin Henry Latrobe to England and America. Their family motto "Qui La Cerca La Troba" - "he who searches finds" would have been poignantly relevant to them as protestants having searched beneath the surface of what Roman Catholic doctrine had enforced upon them. Of course, of the ancestors of these generations, many dissenters had come back from Crusades having experienced greater mercy at the hands of their Muslim "enemies" than they would have shown as "Christians" to their enemies, and in this way been impressed at how more Christian spirited the followers of Islam were than they as Christians themselves under the Roman Christian banner and doctrines. The Crusaders returning from entering Toledo in 1180 had discovered that the Arab muslim libraries had preserved the Greek myths and that these, although polytheistic, accorded with the story of Genesis. This had been the catalyst of the Renaissance and the translation of Genesis 6 and Job 1 and, of course, the wandering minstrels who sang playing Citern and Tambour, akin to the Citar and Tabla, were the Troubadours - the people who had Trouba - Troba - Trova - found.

Finding what others don't want you to find is  :D troubling! So whilst heretics of the Catholic church were put to death and burned at the stake, especially for instance at Albi, where later the Cathedral was to house one of the greatest organs of our time, such activities were considered quite normal by the Calvinists and Anabaptists too - so for instance, one could not visit Geneva uttering unthinkable things to Calvin without being put to death. If you were Servetus, one did not not want to receive a letter from Geneva from Calvin inviting you to visit. Meanwhile as a free thinker such as Giordano Bruno you could not expect to be invited by Giovanni Mocenigo to Venice without subsequently an unwelcome visit to Rome to be burned.

So it was that were you to travel through Germany where some towns were catholic, some protestant, were you to express the wrong opinion in the wrong place, your travels would be cut short.

In researching temperament I came across
http://sites.google.com/site/bachtuning/theology
where it is apparent that in defence of Meantone tuning the perfect thirds were considered to be symbolic of the Trinity and any other tuning was heretical. To tune to anything but Meantone would send you to the stake.

For once I quite agree that Equal Temperament must be the work of the Devil  ;) and that therefore all proponents of Equal Temperament should be burned at the stake.  ;D

However, if Christianity is to survive, it is upon the teachings of Christ and not the edifices of religion that have been built around it. The arguments over "the trinity", virgin birth, death and resurrection and a few other things have hardly led to the creation of Heaven on Earth intended by the doctrines of Love thy God with all your heart and your neighbour as yourself, love your enemy and turn the other cheek to be slapped again should your enemy slap you.

All the arguable tenets of doctrine are only there as meditational focii or as carrots to induce unthinking people to follow in the promise of better things ahead.

"Love thy God" - what is God? Not in hard fact the Trinity - that is only a meditational focus - but The Immortal, The All Powerful, The Invisible, The All Knowing - in fact the all around us, all connected by the invisible strands of spiders' web in the dimensions beyond the here and now and the seen.

Many Christians of the indoctrinated sort have really forgotten their foundations. When asked "what is God?" they will answer "The Trinity", forgetting the real definition of God in terms of the "All around us". Telling them that God is more than "The Trinity" undermines the comfort of their doctrine on which they have built the edifice of faith in a God made in their image, and they will glare daggers no different to the fire with which Calvin had Servetus burned or as he wished Godspeed upon Sozzini upon his way to Zurich.

There are many that think that what is invisible does not exist.  For the past 100 years such people have not been supported by the findings of modern physics which relies upon dimensions beyond the three and time, and indeed it was by plugging in a fourth and fifth demension into Einstein's equations of General Relativity that Theodor Kaluza found Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism emerged spontaneously, so demonstrating the physical existence of the invisible dimensions of which users of computers on WiFi connexions rely all the time.

So users of WiFi cannot deny the existence of God - the Omipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient and Invisible. Not even Stephen Hawking could deny that. Perhaps it's God that he has been studying all his life even without realising it. The Omipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient and Invisible all result from the physical laws from the moment of inception of the Big Bang, from which by cause and effect and within which all have to work and comply. There are no escapes from these laws. In the beginning was the law . . .

Can we not see how "law" and "word" to a disconnexion of physicists, theologians and the man in the street? By the mistranslation and loss of meaning, and especially with the resulting disconnexion with the physical universe, argument has been brought into the world.

This loss of meaning in translation and transmutation through similar words is the curse of the Tower of Babel. From my studies of the Parthenon Frieze, according with the concepts of Job 1, this is the work of Hermes (Mercury) himself, the figure representing communication - rather miscommunication, lying, deceipt and thieving. He is one of the number of cynics, Hephaestus, Artemis, Aphrodite and Ares, who try to persuade the Chairman of the Homeric assembly of Gods, that humankind is not worthy of support.

In contrast to arguing over words, "law", "word", the intimate relationship with the physical world, focussing on the fundamental meaning of God as the physical universe can bring universal understanding.

Best wishes

David P


Postscript - Equal Temperament is 11th comma meantone, but the point of Baroque meantone was the 8 pure thirds. Even today I'm aware of an organ voicer who bemoans his boss not building an organ tuned with 8 perfect thirds and accepting an impure compromise


revtonynewnham

Hi

Some interesting thoughts.  Thanks.

The Trinity is no more than an attempt by human beings to try and undertand some aspects of God - something that in fact is beyond human comprehension!  A friend of mine was being interviewed for the Methodist Ministry, and was asked "Do you understand the doctrine of the Trinity?".  Not wishing to appear ignorant, he answered yes - and was greeted with the reply "Can you explain it to the rest of us!".  The three-in-one explains some aspects of the ways in which God works - but that's all.

I agree that the church needs to get back to Biblical teaching - and not the various accretions and traditions that have neem added over the years (and no denomination is exempt).  Maybe we should get back to what was probably the earliest Christian creed - "Jesus is Lord".  Simple, yet profound.

Every Blessing

Tony

David Pinnegar

[quote link=topic=189.msg561#msg561 date=1284502816]
Maybe we should get back to what was probably the earliest Christian creed - "Jesus is Lord".  Simple, yet profound.[/quote]

Hi!

I hope that you might forgive me in taking a modified view: I'm wondering if I might best explain the point by saying that Jesus taught us how to find God, not to find him.

Of course, finding God is easier if we find our teacher, but if we worship our teacher rather than his subject then sometimes perhaps we are in danger of missing the wood for the trees. In education today, if a teacher allows his pupils to worship or love him, then that teacher is in danger of losing his job.

Because of concentration of love for the teacher rather than the subject, in the classroom of God, many have become atheists having sacked the teacher.

The Council of Nicea has a lot to answer for.

Best wishes

David P

revtonynewnham

Hi

Jesus claimed to be God.  That, plus the presence of the Holy Spirit and the voice of God the Father at Jesus' Baptism is one of the reasons for the Trinity.  Hence in this case, in one sense, worship of Jesus is OK (Hence the "Jesus is Lord" creed, which derives from His teaching and a mention in Acts).  However, strictly, Jesus points the way to the Father.  Once again, human comprehension fails to fully understand the mysteries of the Divine.

Every Blessing

Tony

David Pinnegar

Dear Tony

Thanks for this clarification. It's so important for people to understand the logic behind assertions which otherwise lead people astray.

Best wishes

David P

David Pinnegar

Hi!

If anyone is uncertain about the way in which the Council of Nicea meddled with the texts that we have had passed down to us
http://thepharmacy.wordpress.com/image-therapy/the-lost-gospels-peter-owen-jones-bbc/
is excellent, shown on BBC4 this evening.

The way in which the forces of desire to promote a Christianity that meant all things to all men of the Roman Empire to ensure the survival and promotion both of that story as a religion and concurrently promoting the continuance of Roman supremacy is very clear.

Perhaps one should postulate that one should view all texts handed down to us through the lens of an unfiltering process and on each statement asking the question: "Does this lead us further closer to God or merely hero worship of this teacher for the furtherance of the man-organisation which depended on its survival and supremacy".

http://www.gnosis.org/library/marygosp.htm is helpful as is
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html
When Jesus says:
QuoteJesus said, "Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war.

For there will be five in a house: there'll be three against two and two against three, father against son and son against father, and they will stand alone.
he's actually urging people to think and exercise their intellect.

http://www.thenazareneway.com/index_essene_gospels_of_peace.htm is an extraordinary collection of texts of great poetry, wisdom and beauty. The sections
http://www.thenazareneway.com/essene_gospel_of_peace_Book3.htm
Laments and Prophecies written for a time when the thought
QuoteWoe unto them that join house to house,
that lay field to field,
Till there be no place that a man may be alone
In the midst of the earth!
should be relevant. These texts include what we know of as the Book of Revelation but it is apparent that the verses referring to the speeches of the Angels of Earthly Mother have been substituted for something else that is a close repetition of another section.

One normally finds that editing consists of contraction rather than addition. The following passage, part of which is so well known to all, is of interest:
Quote"And pray every day to your Heavenly Father and Earthly mother, that your soul become as perfect as your Heavenly Father's holy spirit is perfect, and that your body become as perfect as the body of your Earthly Mother is perfect. For if you understand, feel, and do the commandments, then all for which you pray to your Heavenly Father and your Earthly Mother will be given you. For the wisdom, the love, and the power of God are above all.

"After this manner, therefore, pray to your Heavenly Father: Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

"And after this manner pray to your Earthly Mother: Our Mother which art upon earth, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, and thy will be done in us, as it is in thee. As thou sendest every day thy angels, send them to us also. Forgive us our sins, as we atone all our sins against thee. And lead us not into sickness, but deliver us from all evil, for thine is the earth, the body, and the health. Amen.

And they all prayed together with Jesus to the Heavenly Father and to the Earthly Mother.

Best wishes

David P