Kirchhoff Sound & Transformation

Classical music as a path to developing consciouness
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-3-6957-8613-8
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 286 Seiten

Music as a medium for the expansion of consciousness and for meditation - today many people regard this as self-evident. Yet what is usually meant is a kind of sound-consumption fed by non-European, predominantly Asian- or African-sounding New-Age music. In Sound and Transformation, Jochen Kirchhoff turns our attention instead to the rich spiritual potential of so-called classical Western music. Through a form of attentive inner listening, he reveals the music of the great composers - from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven, through Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Robert Schumann, to Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss - as a tool that works deep within the psyche and serves personal development. The foundation of the book stretches from a critique of modern musical consciousness, through the exploration of the archetypal foundations of sound, to practical guidance for the meditative engagement with masterpieces of Classical and Romantic music. Inspired by the experiences of revelation reported by great musicians themselves, Kirchhoff simultaneously sketches the outlines of a philosophy of music rooted in spirituality. First published in 1989 and long out of print, Sound and Transformation conveys a message that is more urgent today than ever. The book stands firmly against the widespread loss of empathy in our society and advocates a transformative culture of sound and listening as the foundation for peace with ourselves and with the Earth. When the outstanding musician and distinguished humanist Yehudi Menuhin received the first edition, he wrote enthusiastically: "'Sound & Transformation' is a fascinating subject that has occupied me again and again. At last Jochen Kirchhoff demonstrates the unique contribution that classical music can make to individual and cultural transformation. This impassioned book belongs in the hands of every lover of music. I wish it the widest possible readership."

Jochen Kirchhoff, born in 1944, lives and works in Berlin. From the 1990s to the early 2000s he delivered around 150 lectures on natural-philosophical themes, a number of which appear in this volume in revised form. Many of these talks are now available as podcasts and transcripts. Since 1980 he has given more than 400 public lectures on natural philosophy and topics of urgent social relevance. His teaching has been complemented by numerous seminars on geomantic subjects and on the holistic reception of classical music. His published work comprises a tetralogy of natural philosophy, books on the philosophy of music, monographs, essays in journals, and writings dedicated to the preservation, reappraisal, and creative continuation of the philosophical legacy of Helmut Friedrich Krause. Jochen Kirchhoff is recognised as one of the foremost authorities on the thought of Giordano Bruno, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Novalis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Helmut Friedrich Krause, among many others. Through essays, interviews, and his YouTube channel he regularly contributes to contemporary discourse, offering philosophical perspectives on current phenomena and on the fundamental questions involved in overcoming the crisis of human consciousness.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kirchhoff, Jochen

Leseproben

1 The missing culture of sound

(“Spring and Autumn of Lü Buwei”) 5

THE BIRDFREE EARS
AND THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE TRIVIAL

(Arthur Schopenhauer) 6

The modern world generates incessant noise, spreading an almost omnipresent blanket of sound from which escape is possible only in a few, ever rarer niches. A deafening, paralysing bell of noise from countless sources has been lowered over us. Hardly any machine runs as quietly as it technically could; in most cases silence is not even desired. A machine’s effectiveness is imagined to be tied to a certain level of noise. Alongside technical noise comes the constant bombardment of noise-like or banal music. It has become almost impossible to gather one’s thoughts – and that is precisely the intention. Contemplation requires silence, and silence is being relentlessly banished. Contemplation is also bound up with full sensuality – with undistorted hearing, undistorted seeing, with a non-neurotic perception of the environment. The noise of the megamachine, the industrial system that now dominates the planet, intensifies the already neurotic disposition of modern humanity, flattens perception, and renders it dull and one-dimensional. In his book (), Rüdiger Liedtke has examined this phenomenon comprehensively and with nuance. Among other things he writes: Why do we have to torture ourselves day after day, night after night, with acoustic rubbish dumps – most of it inferior music, streamlined arrangements, canned music that lulls us, makes us insensitive and docile, music that pursues us into every corner of daily life? […] Most people can no longer live properly without music; they can no longer breathe normally. Without background noise they feel uneasy and can no longer bear silence. Music has become a kind of popular drug, for the freedom to switch off background noise at the touch of a button is a false freedom. We can scarcely live without sound any longer; music, noise, and din have become part of our existence. […] Our capacity to experience music is degenerating; the acoustic bell is dulling and deafening us at every level of social life, and music is often turning into an addiction, a drug, a disease. 7 What surrounds us is the terror of noise, the dictatorship of the trivial. Anyone who rebels – by asking, for example, that the music in a restaurant be turned down – not only makes themselves unpopular but often simply ridiculous.

The human ear is by far the most sensitive and receptive of our sensory organs, an anatomical and physiological marvel. Acoustic perception is extraordinarily subtle and precise; it reveals nuances that remain hidden to the eye. At the same time it sets the deepest layers of the soul vibrating. Often the tiniest acoustic stimulus is enough to trigger intense emotion. The ear thus appears to have more direct access to the soul than the other senses, which explains the far-reaching magical and manipulative possibilities that have always been associated with music and exploited in every culture. It is music that lends rituals their true power. And today every advertising psychologist knows the manipulative effect of a certain kind of music that corresponds to widespread trivial consciousness.

The ubiquitous soundscape of banality, shallowness, and sentimentality is the inevitable accompaniment to the background roar of technology. Each conditions the other. Both cloud perception and fragment the wholeness of hearing. Modern man needs noise just as he needs the sonic mush of so-called background music; even music intended to be listened to – smoothed, fragmented, and trivialised – frequently degenerates into mere background. Silence would force confrontation with the self, with inner discord and disharmony, with personal chaos. How deeply the challenging quality of silence is feared! Yet only from silence – inner and outer – can healing sound arise, the counterforce to our neuroticism and numbness.

In the narrower sense, noise is simply unwanted sound, and experience shows that subjective factors play a large role. Nevertheless, there exists objective noise that causes long-term psychosomatic harm even when those affected are initially unaware of it or – as with loud music – do not find it disturbing at all. For the fanatical motorcyclist, the roar of his engine may not be noise but an almost erotically charged, soothing sound. Yet that roar – like the scream of a jet or the launch of a rocket – resonates with the brutality and murderous imperialism of the megamachine, with the objectively hostile character of the modern world. We must recognise these connections if we are to find a way out, a viable perspective for the future. Noise and explosions are everywhere because we create conditions everywhere that mirror corresponding traits of our own psyche. The explosive aspects of our artificial world and of our image of the natural, cosmic world have grown out of our psychological sediment and projections. Unconsciously we want things as they are – including the threat of nuclear annihilation.

It is no coincidence that the most popular scientific myth of our age is the fiction of the “Big Bang”. As critical scientists and philosophers have convincingly shown for decades, the monstrous Big Bang hypothesis stands on extremely shaky ground and is anything but a verified or well-established theory. 8 Modern man needs an exploding, expanding universe as a reflection of his own soul. “The explosion proves to be a fundamental figure of the modern worldview, indeed the very signature of this age” (Max Himmelheber) 9. Archetypal impressions and projections of unconscious psychic content shape every scientific theory and conjecture. The (Rudolf Bahro) also encompasses world-picture that correspond to a fragmented, neurotic psyche – including certain forms of music: the lulling banality on the one hand, the cerebral constructivism of atonality on the other. Only radical solutions – solutions that go to the root – will break this vicious circle and halt the deathspiral of Western culture. There is also an ecology of hearing, an ecology of sound. That too concerns me here, and its conscious cultivation.

Silence is the creative ground of sound. Noise is hostile to life because it destroys or renders impossible meditation, because it stifles music, because it brutalises and, in the long term, simply stupefies. The closer we come to the abyss, the more murderous the general noise level becomes. The noise to which we are constantly exposed – within and without – is preparing the “Big Bang” of atomic holocaust. Once again Liedtke: “We must learn silence again. We must try to shatter the acoustic bell. 10 The choice of silence, the choice of genuine music, and the rejection of disturbing noise are part of the fundamental human right to free development. The permanent acoustic bell that robs us of our senses violates that right. It does more than violate a right; it drowns out the ticking of the ecological and nuclear time-bomb – probably its deepest and truly diabolical function. At the same time it drowns out the sound of silence itself.

Modern man scarcely knows any longer what holistic seeing, holistic hearing, and holistic feeling might be. The demonic omnipresence of the megamachine has clouded our eyes and deafened our ears. Yet even within a system that stands in such stark opposition to the foundations of life and is so plainly heading for self-destruction, certain basic human needs remain inextinguishable. Music is essential to human existence; no culture without music has ever existed or could exist while human beings retain even a shred of self-awareness. The primal need for music lives on even in those who regard themselves as unmusical or appear to have no relation to it whatever. Language itself is essentially a sound-form, the sounding and echoing of being. Music is intensified sound-form; singing is intensified speech. The prevailing musical consciousness corresponds to prevailing consciousness in general – or rather, it is one of its modes of expression.

We have already examined the paralysing effect of constant background noise (music one simply tunes out). Let us now turn to music that is meant to be listened to – music that demands to be heard as such – even though the boundary between the two is fluid. Incidentally, what we today regard as a supreme form of listening music – a string quartet by Joseph Haydn, for example – was, for many in the eighteenth century, pure entertainment music that had to be constantly renewed.

The decidedly non-holistic, non-ecological, and non-cosmic consciousness of modern man is naturally reflected in his musical perception. As early as 1938, and again in 1948 in his...