Sprites that Live Inside a Melody

By Ezra Sandzer-Bell

O’ the wonderful convenience of dictionaries! We can learn so much, intuitively, from studying a word and its etymological origins.

Dictionaries commonly define the word “melody” as the “Air of a composition”. Etymologically, the word is derived from Melos (song, noun) and Oide (sing, verb), so it follows that the human act of singing a song is inextricably tied to the meaning of this word.

The physicality of our definition opens up a new world of understanding, for air is precisely the element that is required in order to sing a melody, and it is quite rare that a person can produce more than one tone at a time with their throats. This leads us to a fuller understanding of why the melodic element in a piece of music is singular, in contrast to its polytonal background (harmony).

If we take this understanding one step further, it is clear that the composer’s egoic experience of the world is reconciled through the act of composition. The melody would represent their internal relationship to their environment, the harmonic backdrop representing their subjective experience of the external world in which they live.

This brings us face to face with the Spirit of music, which might be more appropriately dubbed in the plural form, sprites of music, considering the vast number of abstract intelligences communicated through melodies. If a melody represents the personal experience of the composer as he moves through an environment, we must assume that certain sensory data contributed to the genesis of that melodic idea. So, despite the possibility that there is an actual, single Spiritual Essence shared by every conscious entity, we must honor the fact that each of these entities has their own unique experience within the environment generated by that One Spirit.

Tone Color Alchemy, ideally, would be made up of a collective of musicians sharing insights into specific musical spirits (melodies). This process is a departure from the mathematical and harmonic-analytic method of musical perception, while on the other hand, a return to the Gnostic approach of connecting with Mystery.