Sacred Harmony: Foundations and Challenges

The concept of sacred harmony implies a set of relations between human beings and the natural order that include a divine or transcendental aspect. These types of correspondences as they relate to music are found among many of the ancient civilizations. In the West, the principles of sacred harmony emerged in ancient Greece with Pythagoras and Plato, such that the implicit connections between philosophical thought and musical experience laid the groundwork for ideas of sacred harmony and the practices of tonal music that have shaped the development of Western music for centuries. In ancient India, the unity between human beings and the universe was understood through the concept of Brahman, the highest metaphysical truth that encompassed all reality. The spirituality of Indian classical music was based upon the tonal centricity of the sacred syllable of OM, the concept of Nāda-Brahman, Yoga philosophy, and divine aesthetic principles (rasa) embedded in the musical notes and scales handed down by generations of musicians and Gurus. This essay first outlines the basic foundational elements of sacred harmony with examples from ancient Greece and India, followed by particular challenges in the twentieth century imposed by Neo-Marxist thought, Gnosticism, and theosophy, and finally by a return to sacred harmony in the 1960s as reflected in popular music as well as in the proliferation of chant and music from India, each of which has attracted admirers seeking spiritual transformation via a musically ordered universe.