"I feel more than ever before that music is a connection to the Divine."

Bruno Walter

"Architecture is frozen music"

Friedrich van Schilling

On the conductor Christian Zacharias:

"His gestures are reminiscent of a painter applying oils

and of a sculptor molding materials. He acts as though the music

were a physical substance to be molded in air."

Fred Childs - National Public Radio

On the New Music

Offered to The Mother and Sri Aurobindo

I have an intimation that the new music may be visual as well as aural, its strains unknown to man before the descent of the Supramental, tone clusters of an infinite love filling the vortices of space, descending in a supreme harmony, a music of the highest spheres enriched by the aspiration of the earth. On the wings of these choral prayers there rides a voice of such haunting beauty that no heart will remain unmoved, no soul fail to leap up at the call of its pristine melody, no mind left uninspired; even the body will vibrate to these chords of the divine Musician.

In the new music one will experience the mantric force that calls into manifestation the supernal bliss, the grace ever present in our lives that rarely we feel and seldom acknowledge. The music of the future has begun and one can catch its subtle notes in the subtle realms, but its plenitude awaits our receptivity to the Divine's behest. It is a music of force and majesty scored with divine humility. The Mother brought down its first tremendous notes into the rhythmic pulse of earth's awakening and gave to Sunilda the opening movements of its massive themes. Those shall come who will complete the full orchestration of the music of the New Creation, singers of the ultimate songs of praise, musicians of a higher order, composers of canticles of light and peace, ennobling men, enriching life, enhancing joy.

I have heard a strain of the music to be waiting behind the iron wall of self. Its moment is near and the rapture it brings shall transport the soul and renew the spirit's ageless quest. I have sensed its rhythms in the quickening pulse of earth, caught faint echoes in the counterpoint of our days and once, in a moment of unparalleled grace chanced upon its cadences in the music of the spheres. I have heard the inner melodies in my youth and when I met Mother for the first time She talked to me at length about music and musicians. She told me many things, among them that the music heard most often on the inner planes was that of Chopin though She said She didn't know why it was so. During our talk She asked me: "Is it [the music] with you now?", and I replied, "Yes, Mother, it is always with me." And She replied: "Not always." Then passed a phase in which the sounds that filled my soul were heard no more, for it was a time of emptying. And then, for a brief moment in the old unfinished halls of Bharat Nivas, in the early days of Auroville, a few gathered together to aspire to bring down the New Music. And that which descended was a chorale of voices each alone in its prayerful expression yet united with the others in collective aspiration in a sound-field of calm and joy.

Here in the silence of the soul I listen now for the new sounds - a single note supported by symphonies of light, a swelling diapason of orchestral might, a lone and perfect voice singing of a golden age, a life divine, in immortal strophes, the voice of the eternal Bard, the singer supreme, the Lord and Master of our lives.

A Greater Music           March 23, 2001

A far and haunting melody

Like something caught at the edge of dream,

A song of human destiny

Came flowing in a golden stream.

Before it all our music pales,

Our harmonies seem a monotone,

Our complex erudition fails

And art an imitation grown

And weak attempt to catch the strain

Of music from our higher spheres

That falls to earth as subtle rain,

Fades and suddenly reappears.

A tremolo on a silver string

Draws the soul from its secrecy,

A chant the astral choirs sing,

A conch that blows on Triton's sea,

Call the heart to deeper ways

Its chords vibrating in sympathy,

And last a flute the Blue One plays

Attunes us to His ecstasy.

For man shall overleap his day

A greater music will compose

On the score of life must overlay

The song of truth that in us grows.

Narad, (Richard Eggenberger)

May 2001