The role of music in society

Sacred imagery: Human body as Veena - a musical instrument

What we hold to be the highest ideals in life also dictate what we do in the humdrum of everyday life, when we are not in the least bit self-conscious. In the daily lives of most people, there are no moments for self-reflection. People barely pause and absorb what is happening around them, nor do they appropriately redirect the goals and intentions of what they want to do.  Instead, most people run their lives on autopilot, discarding the mentally onerous task of decision-making to some long forgotten moment in the past. Did they ever decide what to do? If at all such a decision was even taken, was this taken for them unconsciously, due to the force of another rote habit? This decision process is all but forgotten, but that still dictates the timetables of people for everyday. In Hinduism, that is called Karma. One cannot break the cycle of Karma until a moment of insight suddenly appears like a lightning, the flash of the Vajra in the hands of Indra, which forces open the body of daily habit. Such insights are rare gifts which are hard to come by. But there is a mechanism that invites such insights to occur with greater likelihood. That mechanism is music.

Music is the most sublime of the arts. The Greek philosopher Hypatia once spurned the advances of an unwanted suitor by asking him to play music and perceive the beauty of those melodies. She contrasted them with a rag soaked in her menstrual blood and asked him to choose which is more beautiful. That body of hers was bound to perish, she said, but the music would remain eternal. But alas,  how can we forget the needs of our bodies and live in the realm of music? It is simply not possible.  Our bodies need to eat and to excrete. This is what makes life possible. Without the basic sustenance of life, no music can be perceived.


The Guru Nanak of Sikhs was spoken of as Pavanhāri - the one who consumed air as food. His disciples were fed healthy vegetarian food, a tradition known as Langar (kitchen) that continues in Sikhism till this day, since they couldn't merely live off air like their Guru. If eating air seems like  a tough skill to achieve, how about eating music? The master Yogi and devotee Hanumān managed to become an immortal by merely being absorbed in the sound of the Rāma Nāma: the Japa (meditation) of repeating the name of Rāma endlessly. In Hinduism, the sound of Aum is supposed to be the secret sustenance of all vigor in life. This Mantra forms the fabric of the universe, each object being manifested as an oscillation of this Mantra, but barely anybody perceiving it. The highest Yogis are supposed to discard all their needs for food and be nourished by this sound alone. We mortals may not be Yogis of the calibre of Hanuman, but even we may get nourishment from music. Our minds may be far too easily distracted for meditation on a single Mantra, but they may still be tempted by the melodies and harmonies of music. This should be the purpose of music, and art in general - to awaken the mind to the unexamined possibilities. This creative potential is called the Anāhata Nāda - the unstruck sound. In the Chinese philosophical text Dao De Jing, this is called "Pu" or 樸 ("unhewn wood") which is the cradle of spontaneity in mind.

Achieving such a state of clear perception and spontaneity is not possible by a mere thought or by a mere repetition of words. If music were to be the conduit to such a state, this effect is not due to the tones or the melody, but due to the silence in between, which affords the mind an opportunity to wake up from within. In the Vedic tradition, the Dēvas are supposed to be summoned by a Mantra, but only when the Mantra is chanted in the right intonation and at the right setting. These preconditions (known collectively as "Auchitya" in Sanskrit) encode the space for the silence in between. In the modern world, this Auchitya is all but lost and nobody ever hears the Anāhata Nāda.

So how can music open the doors to the Anāhata Nāda? This should be the most important criterion in how we craft our society: our customs, our institutions and even our buildings or computer programs. We should first ask, where is the place for music in any of this. Then we should ask, how can one play and participate in this music. Finally, we should ask if one achieves the meditative calm to perceive the silence (and to hear the Anāhata Nāda), while partaking this musical experience. In the modern day, the answer to all these questions is a big no. There is no place for music in our society, in our economy or in our state institutions. In fact, our world runs by the paradigm of efficiency, where leaving spaces for music or poetry is considered a violation. What is the place for music in law? Even asking such a question is considered nonsensical (but it need not be). We look at the world as a collection of boxes, and we put music in its own box, and carefully seal the lid so that it doesn't escape outside. Even within that box of music, we barely ask the question of how we can play or participate in it. The modern world requires us all to be consumers, and so we consume music or any other art. As consumers, our choices are limited to whether to buy a piece of music or not,  how much to spend on this, and in the rarest cases, when to applaud. We have successfully transformed musical experience into another creature of rote habit. At this stage, we need not even pretend to ask the final question, on whether this experience of music opens any space for silence.


I am struck by the sheer absence of music in our architecture. In many cities, there are simply no spaces to listen to music. We live in a persistent cacaphony of motor sounds, the whirring of automobiles and the electronic beeps of notifications from smartphones. Merely a few centuries ago, we were living lives synchronized to the rhythms of sunrise and sunset, punctuated every hour by the melodies of church bells or their equivalent. Our grandest buildings were created to listen to music and they were placed in the heart of our cities. A few centuries earlier to that, we even had memories of biophony - the music of the animals, plants, wind and water. Those sounds of nature were our first steps of music, as well as our greatest musical inspirations.  Now, there is no place to perceive music with our eyes. We are all stuck in our individualized sonoric bubbles on electronic devices. Music has become Muzak - a background accompaniment to the all encompassing busy-ness of our lives. The absence of music in physical architecture is mirrored by its absence in virtual architecture  or software design. The pioneering scientists of personal computing were music afficiandos, and wanted to build software systems that replicated the joy of playing musical instruments. This is all but forgotten today. There is nothing musical about the myriad apps on our computing devices today. Instead of creativity and meditative calm, this virtual world caters to sheer consumerism and to the dumbing down of the human mind, just like its counterpart in bricks and mortar.

This violence on music is greater in the poorer countries, whose customs are broken by centuries of colonialism and whose people are uprooted from their villages to newly built ramshackle cities and shantytowns. Unlike in the western world, where there are still some concert halls and theaters, the burgeoning cities of Asia and Africa provide no such places for music. Prime real estate in the heart of a city is taken up by shopping malls or fancy apartments. What is the point of music in architecture? Why should a rich person deign to share the space for music with others, when he can get the higher quality experience in his own virtual reality - his jacked up audio system in his car, or the surround sound speakers in his home?  This is the reality of music today. We banished it from our architecture. We barely see the musicians in life and blood, and we barely participate in the musical experience.

In India, this epistemic violence on music has a direct effect on the spirituality of people. This is a country where the human body is compared to a musical instrument, with the mystical Chakras at the backbone of a person being the counterparts of the frets of a Veena. In their sacred divinations, Yogis saw the figures of gods and goddesses with musical instruments. This depiction of divinity with instruments of music is perhaps unique amongst the various religions. But the most sacred perception is not considered to be a visual figure, but the very sound - the syllable Aum. In India today, apart from those hermits who retire to forests and mountains, who has the opportunity to hear that Aum? Even by temples, there is persistent honking and noise from automobiles. Even in private homes, smartphones and television sets intrude into any moment of silence that may appear. Most people, whether inhabitants or visitors to India, are blinded into thinking that this is the normal state of affairs. But no, this is a mutilation of the values and the ideals of India.

In this sad state of affairs, shouldn't the architecture for music be considered at least as sacred as  temples? A place where silence is nurtured, where the walls and air are shaped to resonate to music - why is this not sacred? A place where multiple people come together to sing or to play musical instruments - why is this not a glimpse of the sacred Purusha that dwells in all of us? Once we see architecture with our ears, and look for music in those walls and windows, we will quickly realize that the space for music needs to also involve the natural elements - light and water, the moist earth, and of course, the wind. This can only be supported by a green cover, of trees and flowing water. Birds and animals will play their part too. In other words, we need to build gardens. Indian texts on aesthetics refer to gardens as the right setting for music. Gandharvas - the musicians of the gods, are supposed to roam and frolic in gardens. There is an urgent need to reimagine public architecture, and music has to be right at the centre of this. Not money, not politics, not fancy pride in whichever ethnic history.

As the great Shehnai player Ustad Bismillah Khan once said, "Even if the world ends, music will survive". That is the most eternal architecture we can afford to build.