Musical Imagination I
The Literary and Musical Imagination
The technique of shaping one’s imagination through reading great works, aimed at broadening the view of “human life’s possibilities,” is well-known to anyone who’s dipped even slightly into philosophers like Olavo de Carvalho. In his essays and courses, he emphasizes that this formation includes poetry, along with the appreciation of major theatrical and cinematic works.
Olavo also addressed the apparent gap in the musical realm, recommending on the Seminário de Filosofia website a list of great pieces to listen to and memorize. Yet, simply hearing and memorizing masterpieces doesn’t suffice to craft a set of musical experiences that properly fills this void — music being a distinct phenomenon from poetry and literature, with its own language and impact on the human imagination.
Controversial as it may be, we must assert this art’s superiority over others — not in dominating the imagination’s formation, but in a higher, spiritual sense. After all, anyone, even an intellectual, can go through life without seriously contemplating music or listening to it regularly. Still, the Bible highlights its prominence: alongside sacred poetry, it’s the only art likely to endure into eternity, with no other forms presented in Scripture as active modes of worship. I see no reason for this to change after the end of times.
Setting controversies aside, one undisputed point is that music doesn’t rely on the core knowledge accumulated by Western civilization since Classical Antiquity. In other words, our literature, visual arts, and philosophy would be incomprehensible without Greco-Roman foundations — and this doesn’t hold for music.¹ The noblest daughter of Mnemosyne stands autonomous across the ages. Its history is fragmented, origins tracing back to the creation of time and space. Were it not for the genius of a few enlightened souls, we’d lack recordings of the forms brought from eternity into our world over the past three thousand four hundred years — and even then, tempered by Bach.
https://youtu.be/IDfSI294fMs
The truth is, Bach’s wondrous “cage” is divinely inescapable. Any microtonal endeavor is futile: its intelligibility creeps in subtly, its utility near nil, and its aim often to drag us from trance into madness, even if masked as ritual serenity. This very Eastern influence was deliberately woven in for social engineering — in crossover tunes, pagan rituals, and the various lysergic styles that sprouted in the West from the counterculture.
Music is a perilous muse, speaking straight to the spirit and rendering the psyche secondary in its grasp — or, not infrequently, entirely dispensable — upending the value hierarchy naturally imposed by other creative expressions. As the art that channeled the pride that felled Lucifer himself, it demands from its appreciators ironclad willpower to avoid enslavement. No wonder the Greeks called it the giver of pleasures. Socrates saw music as a mighty force capable of elevating or corrupting the soul and society.
For these and other reasons, reshaping and claiming one’s musical imagination matters as much as building a literary one; otherwise, this incompleteness, this imbalance — often lopsided — will assert itself unpredictably through life. At times, it’s better to live without music than to be its slave.
Forming the Musical Imagination
The musical imagination differs from the literary in how it’s built. While the literary has some social imposition, that element plays a minor role — the will predominates in its formation.
With the musical, the process is involuntary in nearly one hundred percent of cases. Once crystallized in the psyche, a given musical imagination is almost impossible to rebuild or reshape without fierce determination and dedication. From personal experience, I can say this rarely happens. Most people are as willing to exert such effort as an addict is to quit the habit.
This element forms over a lifetime, through the music we encounter from earliest childhood — often from the womb. We’re surrounded by music more than any individual across all prior eras combined. It’s a hallmark of our century: excess, the endless regurgitation of needless information. As kids, we heard it via devices through the decades — first the gramophone, then radio, television, the internet. In movies, cartoons, church, school, home. Initially through parents and family, who until recently shaped our musical imagination; now, not even that directly. I’d say YouTube Kids is the great musical tutor of our age, molding millions of children’s imaginations daily via the passive license parents grant the platform.
In adolescence — or earlier, depending on family permissiveness — the individual faces musical imposition from peers: friends, classmates, targeted events, fleeting trends. All this material layers onto childhood absorptions. The issue is that, unlike the literary imagination, the absorption mode stays constant. Never forget: music can be apprehended bypassing the psyche entirely. Thus, teens and young adults take in a style or form through cultural pressure, unconsciously or near so. This imposition’s force matches the earlier phase, worsened by the fact that adults won’t forget it as children do.
By this stage, crystallization is underway, but room remains for further enculturation. The process holds for everyone, with variations for those with talents suiting a musical path — not necessarily professional. In them, it shifts slightly due to study choices or career pursuit: the instrument selected, environments frequented when deepening studies, the age of decision — self-initiated or pressured by family and mentors.
Finally, in adulthood, some additions to our musical imagination may occur via personal decisions to acculturate, for varied reasons. For instance, some of Olavo de Carvalho’s students turned preferentially to classical music, others to Catholic sacred works. Regardless of motives, only in this life phase is there real chance for fully conscious shaping of one’s musical imagination — making it the process’s most crucial stage and, precisely due to these traits, the most prone to interruption. Most adults never seriously reflect on their musical tastes. In truth, they’re unwilling to shape them.
Conclusion
To fully enrich our imagination, we need a conscious decision to mold the musical one — acknowledging it’s arduous, demanding detachment from convictions hardened during our ego’s formation. I’d call it almost ascetic: renouncing the familiar’s comforts, embracing vulnerability in exploring new sounds consciously, challenging biases, and opening to a profound reconnection with music’s creative and spiritual essence.
