Richard Lloyd Jones: Wagner believed in Mozart, Beethoven, and God. Not necessarily in that order, but in all three. Schumann called music the language that permits us to converse with the beyond. Artists carve mythology into stone and record history on canvas. Maybe it's true. Through art, all men are saved. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, Art and Transcendence. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Whenever any of my colleagues here at the International Society of Analytical Trilogy bring art and aesthetics as a classroom subject, the energy changes in the room.
The students, often stressed and tired after a long day's work, perk up and something beautiful happens. In fact, one of my good friends down here, Helena Melander from Sweden, a very gifted singer, was recently giving a lecture to a select group of human resources professionals down here Brazil about the leading-edge strategies for dealing with stress that are emerging out of Dr. Keppe's Science of Analytical Trilogy.
And as part of her lecture, she sang a couple of songs. Well, let me tell you, it had a magnificent impact. Everyone felt it. The combination of knowledge, reason, and feeling, intuition. There are certain moments that come along where your life is different afterwards, said one participant. This was one of those moments for me. Art and spirituality go hand in hand. Well, they used to, anyway, consciously.
But spirituality is always present with great art of any discipline. Keppe has always recognized this and has written that art and aesthetics is the basis of civilization. And I'm writing this as I'm preparing to head off to our sixth Festival of the Arts at our Grand Hotel Trilogia in Cambukita, Brazil, this weekend. There are some wonderful things happening there that I'll be letting you know more about as time goes on.
Our initiatives there are serving to bring the place to life, and it's been let go for many years. So what we're witnessing is a great comeback in that town now. This is in a beautiful part of Brazil, nestled among coffee plantations, the verdant Atlantic forest, and some of the best mineral waters on the planet. It's a forgotten town in a jewel of a setting, but it's receiving new lifeblood now.
As always, you can get me anytime by email if you want to learn more about this or any of our projects here, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Always happy to hear from you. Today, musician and Analytical Trilogy teacher Fabrizio Biliotti joins me to talk about the arts and transcendence. In the preparatory notes you were giving to me, Fabrizio, for our discussion today, you talked about that we have a big difference in the way art and music is seen today from the past.
And I don't want to sound like I'm an apologist for that everything in the past is better. But this aspect, I think, is better and was better in the past, that art and music should be linked to a transcendental life in some way. So maybe we should start there, talking art and music. What was it? What was it used for? What was the purpose of it?
Fabrizio Biliotti: You know, Richard, we don't know very much about the Greek music because there is no written music.
Richard: Didn't have a lot of CDs.
Fabrizio: No, not so many CDs and so on. But what we know is that, for example, music was considered by the Greek very, very important because of two factors. First of all, because music was considered as a means to link the human being to God, to the transcendental life, to a superior level of life.
And the second, because music was considered as something therapeutical, then the therapeutic value of music was well known from the ancient Greek.
Richard: So they had an idea of art for other purposes than just to fulfill the artist's needs, right? And today we seem to
Fabrizio: have moved away from that a lot, haven't we? No, we don't have any more of this. The music today doesn't have this aim anymore, we can say.
Then there is a big difference. If we consider, for example, that until the 19th century, All the musicians had this purpose to express something coming from a superior level, because they said from the transcendental life. And they tried to transfer these feelings, what they feel and what they capture. For example, like Beethoven from nature. Beethoven, he said, for example, that he captured these elements from nature, this universal element from nature, such as Johannes Brahms too.
And their aim was exactly this, to reproduce with notes what they felt about nature, music, and the world. And also to glorify God, like Johann Sebastian Bach. He wrote music for the glory of God. Then it seems that for example the musician, the artist in general they had this purpose to help human beings to reconnect themselves with this dimension of life this is the transcendental life and as we know by the science of Dr.
Keppe we know that for example aesthetics are something very important in human life because aesthetics are one of the pillars of the inner self. And not only because we are not talking about beautiful museums, beautiful paintings, or beautiful music. Or even
great furniture. Yeah, or even great furniture. Or shoes. Or beautiful palaces also. This is an expression, of course. But first of all, this beauty is something inside a human being as a balance between, for example, two important aspects of our inner self
Fabrizio: that are love and reason.
And the beauty is a harmony coming from inside the human being. Then all the actions the human beings do in their life, they must be a kind of mirror. They must reflect this aspect. This is why the main preoccupation of this musician in the past was that, to reflect this beauty coming from inside and which was linked to the transcendental world.
Richard: With always this purpose, as the Greeks talked about, of having a connection again, the human being, with something transcendental and also for healing purposes.
And so, Dr. Cláudia Pacheco has been talking a lot about this because you guys are developing a lot of courses in the arts. And she's been talking a lot about how we don't... The purpose of art is not for self-fulfillment. It's to do something for society. Art has value if it provides something for people. And so these sort of, I don't want to say ancient, but these older artists in older times, they had this concept, didn't they, of trying to do something for the good of humanity.
Trilogical
Fabrizio: science gives us a light in this sense because beauty is a pillar of our inner self, of our inner reality makes the music or art an important element to awaken this inner part that we have always. We are born with this part, with this inner structure. And then music is not only a means of entertainment, for example, but it's a means of awakening the existence and the consciousness of the existence of this part inside of ourselves.
If music is capable to awaken this consciousness of beauty, of love and of reason inside of ourselves, this helps us to get in touch with our sane part. This is why music is therapeutical. And it
Richard: also means that we have this sane part inside that if it's awakening something, it's something that we already have. And uh exactly, I think this is interesting because the old artists.
They used to talk not about being a creator, but about being a channel for something. And so talk a bit about that, how these artists, Brahms and Bach and Beethoven, Mozart, how they saw this.
Fabrizio: For example, Beethoven, he could hear the sounds of nature in his mind directly. And he was completely deaf. And he could compose so beautiful music, so fantastic music.
Then many people, they say, for example, Beethoven composed this symphony because he already knew the music, then he already know how to write the music. But you know that, for example, I am a musician and I know if I don't hear anything, it's impossible for me really to play something. And how was it possible? It was possible because he really heard these sounds in his mind first and then he could reproduce this.
And
Richard: these artists, too, are not just instinctive beings. They have
Fabrizio: consciousness of this. They have consciousness. Mozart could write music without correcting a note. Now, many people say, well, he was a genius. Well, he
Richard: was a genius. He was a genius. But
Fabrizio: that's not the reason. Many other people, they say, well, he knew music since he was five years old or less.
But this is not the reason. The important is the connection you have with reality and also with this transcendental world.
Richard: You sent me some quotes of some of these artists and I think it would be interesting to read a couple of them because they really have a power today that we don't hear artists talking about in this way anymore. Sebastian Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach, as you mentioned, said the aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
Beethoven said music's the mediator between spiritual and sensual life. So they were very conscious of this. They weren't just doing instinctively whatever they felt. They were doing something with a consciousness of the purpose of art. Today I think we see a real deterioration in that art. The artist thinks that anything the artist does is art. Yeah, anything. So you could urinate on the stage and this would be art if the artist is doing it.
This kind of idea, that's a very modern sensibility, and this is really a deterioration of what two or three hundred years ago how artists thought about their art, isn't
Fabrizio: it? And if you don't understand what the artists are doing, it's because you you don't understand their aim, you don't understand what they want to say. But sometimes I wonder, is there really something to understand?
For example, what's the difference between Michelangelo the Sistine Chapel and a canvas without anything, just a word landscape? There were many provocations in modern art, okay. But then many many artists they use this to not to develop their skills. And this lead to another important aspect, that before in the past the artist was a kind of channel to transmit this beauty coming from the transcendental level, and today the artist is the creator.
The
Richard: artist thinks of himself
Fabrizio: as thinks himself as a creator. Then for example if you don't understand arts is because you are ignorant. This is why for example many people today they say I don't go to the museums or I don't listen to classical music because they think, oh, I don't understand. Then what for? And they don't think that the understanding of something artistic comes from the feeling, from this feeling that you have when you see a beautiful painting or when you listen to a beautiful music.
Richard: I want to do some of this because you brought some pieces of music and I really would like to have this experience of playing a few and then talking a bit about what you experienced in the workshops with students. But I want to just address this one aspect, because this comes up a lot with artists, that art should be whatever the artist wants to portray.
And it can be whatever it is. And Mozart had such a great thing to say about that, this quote you sent me, that the passions, he said, whether they're violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust. Music, even in the situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear, but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.
They made a very clear distinction that music had a link, a direct link, with beauty and aesthetics, that it was something beautiful. And this is, although we can differ on, well, I like this kind of music and you like that, we still know if music is beautiful or if it's not beautiful. If a singer sings out of key, everybody knows that, whether they know anything about music or not.
So do cats and dogs and children, you know. So there is something about this that I think is really important, the link with aesthetics, harmony.
Well,
Fabrizio: even our physical structure reflects the perfection of nature. And, for example, there are, Dr. Capes, in his book, Sociopathology, he shows that what are the most important elements of music. There are melody, then rhythm and harmony.
These three elements are indispensable to have a good music, a good result, not only in music but in every kind of art of course. But for example our physical structure reflect exactly this perfection, because for example we know through the science that for example the right brain is responsible for the part of feelings. And when we think about music what is the the part of the music that really really awakens our these feelings is the melody.
But music must have a logical part too, that is rhythm. This corresponds to our left brain, which we know is responsible for the logic part, the intellectual part, the
organization. Yeah, analyzing
Fabrizio: and analyzing. Yeah, but these two parts, melody and rhythm, must be in harmony. Then the harmony is the result of these elements together. Yeah, then this is a balance, and this is according to our inner structure.
This harmony that you have outside must correspond to the harmony you have inside, and vice versa. This is why for example we can recognize without being professor or university professor and so on, we can recognize good music, music which is aggressive or... Let's play
Richard: some examples. What do you have for us first? What's the piece?
Fabrizio: Yes, this is a piece, New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak.
Dvorak, yeah,
Richard: this is marvelous.
Fabrizio: Well, I find it very marvelous and everybody knows that he wrote this music for the United States, for this new country appearing and giving a hope for something new. What is interesting, Richard... Let's play it first, though. Okay, let's play it first.
Richard: By the way, you can hear the Old West when you hear that music. It's like Gilbert Gambucci, one of our colleagues, uses this for his video blog, promiseland.info.
By the way, it's a very, very interesting blog. He's put together using clips of Dr. Keppe's TV programs about the economic crisis and other things, promiseland.info. But he uses that theme as the beginning of this, and he's a real American, because this music symbolizes that spirit of the West, of opportunity, something new, some possibility. What do you perceive when you use this music in your workshops with your students?
Fabrizio: The results are very fantastic, because all the students, all my students that participate to these workshops, they understand very well the meaning of the music. And you don't need to explain the music. They see images like beautiful landscapes, things linked to the nature and so on. But they can distinguish the beginning that is quite sad, expresses a feeling of sadness. Melancholy. Yeah, or they say death.
Then comes the hope, the hope of something new, a kind of rebirth. They can identify very clearly. And the conclusion is that, for example, if you want to understand the music and if the intention of the composer was that really that of capturing something from this transcendental level, then everybody understands what he wanted to transmit because they recognize these elements in their inner self.
Richard: Robert Schumann said to send light into the darkness of men's hearts such as the duty of the artist. I don't know that we'd have many artists today who would would think of it this way. Artists are profound, they think they think deeply. I don't want to make a to say that artists today are totally lost. But I think our art, we have lost this sense of communicating something greater.
What's the next piece of music you have for us?
Fabrizio: Yeah, this is still by Starlight. Miles Davis, a very beautiful, very beautiful music. Let's listen to it and then speak about it.
Richard: What do your students perceive when they're listening to Miles Davis?
Fabrizio: Feeling of love. A kind of melancholic love. I
don't know if my heart's
Fabrizio: been broken but calmness, tranquility, and they can really really make a beautiful uh a very a very uh agreeable atmosphere in the family,
Richard: friends.
And Miles Davis, it seems to me, had a great interior life too. This is very internal. Yeah, this jazz music that he was developing in this period, 50s I
Fabrizio: guess, right?
Richard: Yeah, exactly, 58, 58. So towards the 60s really has an interior experience. He's really exploring what's going on inside him through this music,
Fabrizio: isn't it? Exactly, and this music expresses exactly this aspect.
This is why for example I what I want to show with this uh playing this different kind of music, because the first piece was a classical music, this is this is jazz, but doesn't matter what you play. The I mean uh you can play classical music, you can play jazz, you can play pop music, but the result is the same if
you have
Richard: this desire to do something beautiful.
Yes, then the result
is
Fabrizio: the result is the same, because this
music comes from these universal values
Richard: that are universal, and then you can express. Richard Wagner said in these quotes you sent me, that he's convinced that there are universal currents of divine thought vibrating the ether everywhere, and that any who can feel these vibrations is inspired.
Fabrizio: This reminds me of Dr.
Keppe's work, The New Physics, because Dr. Keppe's work went back to the 19th century, to the beginning of the 20th century, to save this consciousness of the existence of this universal energy. And
Richard: it's also very important to mention Dr. Keppe talks directly that his science
was inspired by music. Exactly, by Beethoven, by the Ninth Symphony of
Fabrizio: Beethoven. So I
Richard: said, if you want to listen to that, and I've been listening to this symphony constantly lately, it is incredibly inspired.
Oh, it's unbelievable, this symphony. If you listen to that in your, if you're driving in your car at home and you listen to it like loud,
Fabrizio: it's really touching because it's Full of moments, and you can see that, for example, this symphony is not music, not only music. It's philosophy. It's also theology. It's a kind of revelation. You can understand the different moments and what happens in the interior of the human being and in the world.
That's really, really amazing what happens in this
Richard: music. We could play this piece of Mozart, but you had something else you wanted to sort of throw in here. Is there another type of music you wanted to play for us now?
Fabrizio: Well, yes. We are in Brazil. I'd like to play Brazilian music, Caetano Veloso Sampa. And just to show, for example, how this music describes very well the city of São Paulo.
And even if maybe the Americans, not all the Americans can understand Portuguese, but try to get deep into this atmosphere of Caetano Veloso and you will understand.
In my heart that only when I cross Ipiranga and Avenida São João is that when I got here I didn't understand the hard concrete poetry of your corners, the discreet dis-elegance of your girls. There was still for me to laugh there your most Completa tradução.
Alguma coisa acontece no meio. Que só quando cruza Ipiranga. E a Avenida São João. Quando eu te encarei frente a frente. Não vi o meu rosto. Chamei de mau gosto o que vi. De mau gosto, mau gosto. É que Narciso acha feio. O que não é espelho. E a mente apavora o que ainda. Não é mesmo velho. Nada do que não era antes.
Quando não somos mutantes. Panaméricas de Áfricas utópicas. Túmulo do samba. Mais possível novo quilombo de zumbi. E os novos baianos. Passeiam na tua garoa. E novos baianos. Te podem curtir numa lua.
Richard: That's really great music, isn't it? Samba, bossa nova
Fabrizio: but this music that originates from Brazil is really beautiful music. That's really beautiful because it's a kind of mix of different kinds of music, from jazz to classical music, and it's very complex music also from a harmonic point of view.
And it's very nice.
Richard: We could move in the last few minutes of our podcast, I think. This is very interesting, by the way. We have probably other pieces of music we could play, and we could come back and do more of that sometime. Your students have this experience, don't they? Not being intellectuals, they have the experience of feeling things, having images, perceiving things.
But I wanted to come to this last part you were talking about in our preparation for this, which is the so-called isms of the 20th century, which represent that our 20th century has been really a break with the past in all areas of human knowledge and that we've lost a lot in this process. We've cut away a lot of ancient, old knowledge and wisdom that we had in the past.
So let's go through these aspects that you laid out for me here. Particularly in physics, we sort of touched on this. Einstein's formula, E equals MC squared. How do you see this in relationship to art and music, this rupture, this break?
Fabrizio: This idea of Einstein influenced not only the physics, but I think influenced all the world. Because, for example, thinking that energy comes from the matter, then it excludes a priori the existence of what we called before ether, this universal energy that Nikola Tesla called scalar energy.
And we know that, for example, Nikola Tesla was criticizing Einstein, saying that, OK, if this is the formula, then we will destroy the world. We will soon destroy the world because we will be like vampires destroying matter to have energy.
Richard: Voraciously consuming to get energy.
Fabrizio: And there is another important consequence in this. If you exclude the existence, for example, of this ether, this energy, universal energy coming from a superior being, you automatically exclude the idea of the existence of...
God. And of metaphysics. That is a science that is not linked to the physical world, but a science that includes also the physical world, but starting from a superior level.
Richard: And so everything began to deteriorate away from the transcendental into more pop culture, possibly as a result of this movement, right? Yes, exactly. In fact, Einstein said in his life, he said, if there is an ether, my theory is wrong.
All right, that's one area, the area of psychopathology, where Freud first saw the origin of mental diseases and then created a completely inadequate reason for that. Talk
Fabrizio: about this. Freud saw very well that the origin of mental diseases comes from the psychic life. But then the solution he proposed to the world was a totally inadequate solution because, for example, he proposed the solution that if you want to have a balanced psychic life, you must have a balanced sexual life.
And this is impossible. We know, right, because there was a liberation of sex and everybody in the world today should be very, very balanced. I mean, people in the world should be very balanced. We know that from the statistics, mental diseases are increasing in the world. We have
Richard: more sex and more mental
Fabrizio: diseases. More sex and more mental diseases. Interesting. Okay, this is interesting.
And we know that the solution is not in the physical life, material life, but it is in treating the psychological life.
Richard: And Freud, being an atheist, wouldn't have considered this transcendental world at all, so he would move everything down to the sensorial life, like the sexual drive being the most important drive. These two drives, the drive for sex, for life, and the drive for death, for destruction.
He saw life in this very limited, pessimistic way. Yeah,
Fabrizio: then you can see, for example, that Einstein in physics and Freud in the psychoanalysis, in the science of the mind, they did the same error, the same mistake. Yeah.
Richard: Economics. Boy, this is great, too, if we think about it. Here we are linking art with economics. It's wonderful. The ideas of capitalism and communism.
Okay, so what's the influence here and the corruption of metaphysics and economics here?
Fabrizio: For example, the idea of Adam Smith that everybody that can earn money and can make money by himself can teach the other people how to make money was a beautiful idea if this person could be a balanced person. But what Adam Smith didn't consider was the psychopathology of human beings.
That is, that, for example, if I earn money and I'm capable to earn money and make money, then I won't teach the other how to earn money, but I will use all the methods and the structure I have at my disposal to take money from the other people.
Richard: Also, this whole idea of getting more money than I need, wanting to have more money than I need, exploiting other people, trying to make money with money, we see that our our world becomes not an ethical world and not an aesthetical world.
Because of this we have created a very anti-aesthetical world by this. Exactly,
Fabrizio: and Adam Smith suggested a very individualistic way of life such as the communism, because uh capitalism and communism as Dr Capi analyzes for example in in his work uh work in capital did the same mistake, putting uh the value of everything in the capital and not in the work, and this was a big inversion.
This is why for example the socialism was a big catastrophe, it continues to be,
Richard: it continues to be in arts and music. Then dodikaphonic music has been an enormous destruction of this aesthetic idea that came from the classical music structure particularly?
Fabrizio: I studied the technique of dodecaphonic music and then I can say that there is a big difference that Arnold Schoenberg which created this technique introduced, because if you read his book about harmony and about music, then he says exactly that for example the new horizons of music they are in the destruction of the eternal rules.
And what are the eternal rules? Harmony, melody, rhythm, and so on. These three elements we were talking before. And then he was conscious that he was destroying these universal elements of music. Then, for example, this technique of melodic-phonic music is a really inverted technique, because, for example, the composer, he starts to compose a series of 12 notes, then he can combine this series in different ways.
I don't explain now because it's very technical. But what I want to say is that he substituted the was writing, but he was
Richard: kind of intellectual, mathematical. Okay, so he's moving the notes in an intellectual way. He would take the note and say, okay, I'm going to put that note over there. Whether it has any relationship to harmony. He cut off the
feelings.
He cut out the feelings from the situation. So he's taking the note and then arbitrarily
Fabrizio: decide where that note is going to be, not based on what feels right or what is the correct thing in terms of musical laws. He substituted, he used the intellect and not more the feeling. And this is why if you go to a concert of dodecaphonic music after the first part, people want to go out because nobody understands this.
This kind of music doesn't touch because of this destruction of these elements. The artist doesn't want to be instrument, a channel anymore. He wants to be the creator. He wants to put himself in the place of the creator. This is why it doesn't work. Because he puts in this music, in these techniques, all his pathology that he doesn't perceive.
Richard: Mendelssohn said, though everything else may appear shallow and repulsive, even the smallest task in music is so absorbing and carries us so far away from town, country, earth, and all worldly things that it is truly a blessed gift of God.
Yeah,
Fabrizio: this is a beautiful, beautiful sentence because it shows very clearly one aspect that we think that reality is what the human beings do, what they create, destroying everything, all the problems that we live, the wars, violence, crimes and diseases and so on. Then we think this is reality. And Mendelssohn says, no, reality comes from God. Then the reality comes from this link that you have with the transcendental world, with this reality comes from this link you have with this aspect.
And then this is why, for example, through arts you can reach again this consciousness and this link of the true reality that exists. We have inside, it exists outside of us, and it's up to us to have consciousness of it and to live in this or destroy it.
Richard: And while I know which of those choices is more appealing to me, this subject strikes deep at something universal in us.
Art, beauty, goodness. And it's something we do have the responsibility to bring again, consciously, to our communities and families and worlds. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Talk to you next time.
