Raise the Dead With Songs?
- Jay EuDaly
- Mar 24
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 17
In a previous post, Practice Time is Sacred Time, I talked about practicing the guitar as a conduit for therapy, personal growth and spiritual fulfillment. I talked about how this mind-set can enable you to maintain a disciplined, daily practice routine because you are making the act of practicing an end in-and-of itself, regardless of whether or not you feel like you are making progress towards a future goal on the instrument.
I said,
"Practicing the guitar is meditation. It has a ritual quality. It's grounding. It's centering. It's prayer. It's aligning bio-electromagnetic frequencies. It's therapeutic. It's spiritual......This makes it an end in itself, regardless of perceived progress on the instrument; how good – or not - I think I sound at any given moment..."
I called it, "Sacramental."
Of course, the ultimate goal of practicing is to be able to play real music!
Real Music can also have the qualities I mentioned; grounding, centering, prayer, aligning bio-electromagnetic frequencies, therapeutic, ritualistic - both for the player as well as the listener.
I have several blogs on what I've called, “Musical Transcendence.”
In Into the Mystic I gave an extensive quote from from the book, Wonderland: How Play Shaped the Modern World by Steven Johnson, that illustrates my contention that music issues forth from some kind of fundamental &/or transcendent aspect of our nature.
Johnson emphasizes the extreme unlikeliness of our ancestors in the Upper Paleolithic period crafting bone flutes that play intervals of perfect 4ths and 5ths:
“…what sounds like music is much closer to the abstracted symmetries of math than any experience a hunter-gatherer would have had a hundred thousand years ago...And yet, for some bizarre reason they went to great lengths to build tools that could conjure these mathematical patterns out of the simple act of exhaling.”
In Shakti: My India Connection I talked about how discovering John McLaughlin and Zakir Hussain’s music in the band Shakti caused me to begin to view practicing and playing music as a meditative, prayerful activity.
“Inspired by Shakti, I consciously nurtured the practice of maintaining an intense focus while practicing and performing. I made practicing and playing meditative. I pushed the boundary of my concentration span…”
In See the Sound I shared how drawing from the hallucinogenic experiences of my past has influenced my approach to practicing and playing music.
“A certain stimuli would trigger a different sense than normal. I would hear colors, see sounds and feel music with my hands. The most common one was seeing sound. Years later, after I had ceased all drug use, I had a waking vision; I saw notes coming out of my guitar as glowing, yellow-orangish spheres that went into people (through the solar plexus) who were listening.”
In Staying Sane in the Music Business (Part 3) I write about the ability of music to transcend whatever it's being used for, whether it be drink sales, gambling, a wedding, promoting a car dealership, a funeral, prostitution, a church service, or politics.
I referenced the philosopher Mircea Eliade and his book, Patterns in Comparative Religion, in which he posits that modern, western man has dichotomized what Eliade calls "Sacred Time" and "Profane Time."
I applied the Sacred/Profane Time concept to playing music; music can redeem Profane Time and make it Sacred, regardless of the context or environment in which it is created and performed.
“When I play a gig in a sleazy bar, casino, car dealership or some other distasteful environment and someone is touched, encouraged, inspired or simply just blown away by the music, what has happened is Sacred Time. The music has caused a redemption or conversion of Profane Time and has infused meaning, significance, joy and wonder into the normal, material world and the dichotomy between Sacred and Profane has been transcended.”
"Music has the power of producing a certain effect on the moral character of the soul..." - Aristotle, Politics,
“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.” - Confucius, Book of Rites.
I’ve curated all the above to show that the "transcendence of music" is an area in which I have a deep interest; after all, I’m a professional musician!
Also, I’ve referenced the above to counter-balance a lot of my blogs which tend to demystify the process of learning to play the guitar and performing. I’ve said things like,
“It’s all mechanical; do the work, the result will happen - guaranteed!”
I’ve argued that “playing with feeling” is not done by “playing with feeling;” it’s the result of using inflective devices. Things like dynamics, slurs, bends, vibratos and so on. These things fall under the category of technique, and as such are mechanical and achievable thru practice and repetition; anyone can do it. “Playing with feeling” is simply a performer emotionally manipulating his listeners using certain techniques.
None of this “mechanical” stuff negates the idea of the transcendence of music.
What’s my point?
Well, it just so happens that Ted Gioia (look him up) has published a book via his Substack channel that says all this and more - and says it way better than me.
The book is titled,
MUSIC TO RAISE THE DEAD
The Secret Origins of Musicology
Here’s part of the prologue:
“There is a musicology you can’t learn at Juilliard or other music conservatories. The professors there don’t know it, or even suspect it exists, although it unlocks the mysteries of the oldest and most enduring musical practices in human history.
In comparison with this kind of musicology, conventional harmony and its rules are small things indeed. This deeper science of music survives in the margins of our culture, disguised and degraded. But it’s the most powerful body of knowledge on songs that human society has ever known.
In this tradition, a path of radical self-transformation can be pursued through extreme experiences—rites of passage in which music plays the key role. This pathway involves techniques that have retained their efficacy and a surprising amount of consistency over the course of more than 2,500 years.
Perhaps most surprising of all, musicians who participate in this alternative musicology take on the mantle of heroes.
No, I’m not joking—I am deadly serious about this.
Musicians trained in this hidden musicology can serve as reliable guides on our most momentous journeys, and conductors at key junctures in human life. The performers who master these techniques not only reveal but, to some extent, create the defining stages and milestone moments in our personal evolution as individuals. They have even made progress in charting the dark territory outside and beyond our everyday experiences.
Do you doubt that music lessons can do all that?
Well, here’s something even stranger. In every significant field of human understanding—religion, medicine, law, history, philosophy, psychology, even science and mathematics—the musicians associated with this tradition originally laid the groundwork.
That’s a story the history books won’t tell you. And though their significance is mostly forgotten nowadays, the signs of their innovations are everywhere for those perceptive enough to see them.
In fact, the power of this heroic tradition persists in the current moment, even if unrecognized. By reclaiming its history we also empower our own music-making and shared culture. Instead of viewing songs as mere diversion and entertainment, we can draw on their deeper capacities, and in turn develop our own.”
If you have any interest in what I've shared here, I'd highly recommend you read Gioia's book. It's fascinating.
There's way too much to it for me to provide an adequate synopsis; there are 11 chapters and several chapters are divided into 2 parts. The whole thing can be accessed on Ted Gioia's Substack, The Honest Broker. You can start at the beginning via the link below:
How About 5 Lessons?
The 5-Lesson Foundational Series teaches the Circle of Keys as an organizational mechanism by which you ensure that whatever you learn is drilled in every key in all possible positions. It also gives you a method to find any note, anywhere, without memorizing note names on every string. That is a beautiful thing!
Almost every lesson I teach presupposes these 5 lessons.
You can download the 5-Lesson Foundational Series right here with no further obligation or commitment:
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