DNA and Music (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 21, 2010, 08:20 (5241 days ago) @ xeno6696

This has nothing to do with DNA, but there was a sentence in The Guardian's obituary of David Fanshawe that I found particularly striking. I remember hearing African Sanctus back in the 1970s, when it became a bestselling success, and was fascinated by it. Just in case you don't know the work, Fanshawe recorded live tribal music and interwove it with his own to create an extraordinary blend of African and western, ethnic and classical. The sentence I found so evocative reads:-"Most importantly though, David identified the core of truth behind all religions as a unifying rather than divisive factor, and saw a common tonality as an apt metaphor."-Of course the link between religion and music goes back to time immemorial, but I must confess I'd failed to grasp the philosophical implications of Fanshawe's achievement: his identification of the common ground between the art and religion of all cultures. We can blend not only the music but also the thought. And if we strip away all the sophisticated trappings particularly of the main religions, what we come down to is a basic force of Nature, an ungraspable, harmonious essence of life that lies way beyond the scope of language. You don't even need to believe in a god or gods to appreciate the wonder of it all.