Interview:

Where is the spiritual significance of music to be found? To speak of music, we must also speak of the soul, which may briefly be defined as that moral structure, that moral law within each of us that urges us to seek the good, the beautiful, and the peaceful. In short, music is about truth and perfection. We have only to consider the chaos that results when a note is poorly, carelessly, or inaccurately played; it is utter dissonance. Music is not so much an expression of emotion, which may lead us to false music; it is the elaboration of those things that the soul holds dear: universality, morality, beauty, and freedom. Therefore, music has the power to heal, for it is the very suture that binds our mortality to immortality, that is, to universality, to those things that exist outside us – to the world of ideas. This leads us to realize that music is a system of thought without words, for it has only an otic existence – one note at a time. Music is spiritual because it is the very discourse of ideas, the endless conversation of the soul. What are the contours of this discourse? Indeed, harmony, virtue, truth, perfection, wisdom, and liberty.

“Music is spiritual because it is the very discourse of ideas, the endless conversation of the soul.”
– Dr. Nirmal Dass, editor and translator of “Songs Of The Saints From The Adi Granth”