Interview:

By means of formidably impressive logical arguments one of my heroes, Alfred North Whitehead, in his “Process and Reality” (1929, Revised 1979, Free Press) and other works, tells us that while the secular and the religious are distinguishable they are not separable. For we must remember that God is an “actual entity”. If so, can we ever be sure where the ontical (the secular) ends and the ontological (the religious) begins? In relation to the other arts, music’s claim to having a special role in relation to this is undoubtedly the result of its mysteriously abstract nature. Designative meaning is strong in literature, film, and dance, and a designative meaning may weaken our fundamentally mystical experiencing of process. For instance, reference to everyday objects and experiences might form a distraction from the numinous. In contrast, the peculiarly abstract engagement or participation in process that is found in music, at least in music that doesn’t include words, recalls what Susanne Langer once said in “Problems of Art” (1957, Charles Scribner’s Sons). She makes a distinction between musical time and clock time, with musical time possessing a “complexity” and “variability” which is more similar to body time, with its passage of vital functions and the tensions of “lived events”. Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre reminded us of something similar to this in relation to place. In “The Psychology of Imagination” (1940, Citadel Press), he argues that music neither dates nor locates. He wrote, “I am listening to the Seventh Symphony. For me that “Seventh Symphony” does not exist in time”. Thus if the ontical categories of time and place, and all the habits of everyday existence are not designated, then, to revert to quasi-poetic Heideggerian terminology, we may be open to Being.

“Music’s claim to having a special role… is undoubtedly the result of its mysteriously abstract nature.”
– Dr. Richard Elfyn Jones, author of “Music And The Numinous”