Three Perspectives on the Spiritual Qualities of Music

Abstract

Without containing any verbal or visual concepts, pure music has a deep and immediate power to penetrate into the mind and body. Is it also possible that it provides humans with an awareness of the depths of their nature and of the universe? Can it activate the feeling to be completely free and infinite? In sum, can we attribute to music the power of giving humans spiritual qualities; or to use a better expression, is it possible for humans to discover their spiritual side via musical experience? If the answer is positive, how can it accomplish this mission? In this paper, music’s quality as a means for acquiring spiritual qualities will be discussed. The ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Sogyal Rinpoche will guide the discussion. These three people are from different branches; respectively philosophy, cinema and Tibetan Buddhism; which is thought to provide a discussion on the new perspectives about the spiritual qualities of music. Finally, the music type discussed in the paper is pure music, which addresses the music without words, a subject or a visual representation. In order to constitute a base for the discussion, the books of the three scholars were compiled and their thoughts about music were analysed with the document analysis method, which is used in qualitative research. The films of Tarkovsky were additionally analysed with the same method due to his being a visual artist.