Are there ‘chosen’ musicians? And what are they Chosen to do?

Though I play music for a living it has a much deeper significance to me than that of my ‘trade’. There is something deeper beneath it that is the true function of art. Though I feel capable of playing music in various capacities, I am often plagued by doubt that I am not a true musician/composer. I know it’s pointless to waste time doubting and wondering about such things, I’m never giving up music, I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. But the further I go down the road of art, I realize it’s a never ending quest for perfection/enlightenment. It’s a beautiful thing, really, a “you’ll never be bored again” card, with no expiration date, if you will!

Right now I’m reading a very heavy book by Joscelyn Godwin named, Harmonies Of Heaven And Earth-Mysticism In Music-from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde. A passage of it hit me really hard today. What do all you other musicians think about the idea of ‘anointed’ or ‘chosen’ musicians? And the idea of the larger goal of music as bridging the gap between earth and the spheres?

Here’s the passage:

It is no doubt a wonderful thing to have heard the Secret Harmonies, the Music of the Spheres, or the Song of the Angels, but what we want, those of us who are still chained by the ears to earth, is to hear those musics ourselves, as best we can, and for this purpose we need not mystics or theorists but composers and performers.

The role of the composer and performer is obvious after what has been said in the preceding chapters: they are the alchemists who help to transmute the Earth by making its substance and souls resonate with echoes of the heavenly music. In so doing these earthly echoes also become audible in Heaven, an the gulf between the two thereby closes by another hairsbreadth. This is the accomplishment of the Great Work of musical alchemy, which, like alchemy proper, aims towards the redemption of all Nature as well as to the reunion of Man with his Overself.

In order to undertake this work, the true composer, like the alchemist, does not choose his profession: he is summoned to it by a call that cannot be ignored. One of the signs of such a call is that he will possess the double endowment of skill and memory. Not without reason was Mnemosyne, Goddess of memory, called the mother of the Nine Muses.

The memory of which Mnemosyne is patroness is not the everyday memory that recalls things from the past, but the power of recapturing our other modes of being: of remembering whence we came, who we really are, and where we are going. Some believe that it is a memory restocked every night when, in deep sleep, our souls revisit the higher worlds. But memory alone is not sufficient to make an artist. Mnemosyne is the Muses’ mother, but their leader is Apollo, god of order and beauty, supreme wielder of the bow and lyre. It is sad to think of the well meaning artists in every genre who have tried to reproduce their memories without his blessing. Their experience may have been intense, even genuinely mystical, but how tedious is there is their ecstatic verse, their cosmic art, their musical improvisation. For them it is the very embodiment of unforgettable raptures yet to others it seems inflated, pretentious or inept. Such people can never understand why the world will not listen to them.

On the other hand, there are those endowed by Apollo but wanting in Memory. Everything comes easily to them: they can paint anything, make words or notes do their will. But their deep sleep is spent in vain: they return from it with their vision still bounded by Earth’s horizons. They can enchant the mind, captivate the feelings, and arouse the chthonic daemons, but never stir the immortal spirit. Fame comes readily to such artists; unlike cosmic amateurs they enjoy a harmony of ends and means, and within their chosen limits achieve a kind of perfection akin to that of the master craftsman who works with earthly substances.

….Paint may last a few centuries, marble and words a few millennia. But musical entities are more reluctant: no sooner are they born, with the indispensable help of the performer as midwife (or to continue the alchemical analogy, as soror mystica), than they vanish. Again and again, they have to be conjured back to earth on the alter of stage, studio, or living room. No art so closely parallels those religious rites, such as the Mass, which demand constant re-enactment. (Godwin, 1987)

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