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cirdaneth
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Post So what WAS the Music?
on: October 12, 2011 09:34
Let's talk Pre-creation ... before there was time or space or matter ... when Eru and his Ainur were the Higgs Field or Hawking's Cosmic Singularity ... but more magical and mystical ... and musical ... (in the true senses of those words.)

... but what can be music in a world without sound? What is the actual meaning of the word?

So bite your bosons, hang onto your hadrons and tell us what you think ...

tarcolan
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Post RE: So what WAS the Music?
on: October 13, 2011 11:02
Well now! In the beginning was an undifferentiated ball of energy. If it had expanded like that it would just be a homogenous universe where nothing could ever happen. No use to man nor beast. One theory is that a universe cannot exist without consciousness in it. Another theory suggests that an acoustic wave passed through it and the interference patterns produced led to the present universe. In the beginning was the Word? Celestial harmony? This must have happened after time was created, or maybe it defined space and time. Who knows? Landlord! A pint of Higg's Boson please.
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Ilandir
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Post RE: So what WAS the Music?
on: October 14, 2011 09:35
I always thought it was actual physical music (which could be heard). True, sound isn't present in the outside world but that's OUR own physics. Maybe the Void in which Eru resided could allow communicative sounds.

Another explanation though could be that this music was transmitted and evoked through thoughts ...
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tarcolan
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Post RE: So what WAS the Music?
on: October 14, 2011 12:06
It's impossible to talk about existence outside of space-time and I don't think Tolkien even considered his void to be like that. So I look at his creation story as a way of describing the indescribable. All that 'happened' in the beginning really existed all at once. Before the creation, all possibilities existed as patterns which later took form, so a pattern of harmony would become everything in space-time. Only when Eru made the music real did space-time begin. I can't quite imagine what I mean, so that's encouraging.
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cirdaneth
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Post RE: So what WAS the Music?
on: October 14, 2011 10:00
I'm with Tarcolan all the way here. The potential for absolutely everything must have existed in that pinpoint of possibility that became the universe ... except ...

... that we are limited to our concepts of 'thing' and 'must have' and 'became' ... probably because we exist within it.

As for sound ... it is dependant on a vibration travelling through air until it makes contact with a physical structure that has the capacity to interpret it. So The Music may have more to do with Eru's 'musing' than than with noise.

Oooh! I'm loving this ...
pv
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Post RE: So what WAS the Music?
on: October 15, 2011 12:02
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:

When nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
'Arise, ye more than dead!'
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And Music's power obey.

From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in Man.


~ John Dryden ~
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Huin
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Post RE: So what WAS the Music?
on: October 19, 2011 11:22
I tend to think the Music was not exactly literal music (and what I do think it was, I can hardly venture a guess); but that, once physically incarnate or at least present in a physical universe, the Ainur found music to most resemble whatever their original creative process was. To get more abstract, I envision them--irrevocably influenced by the world--remembering the Music as music, even if it were not literally music when it occurred.
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cirdaneth
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Post RE: So what WAS the Music?
on: October 20, 2011 09:23
Yessss! I definitley like that idea.
RimmoldadTheWizard
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Post Re: So what WAS the Music?
on: April 05, 2012 04:38
I think the music was just inside their heads, as in, hearing voices. Because it says in the book, The Sillmarilion, that they all sensed each other but there was nothing about actual sound.
PSK
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on: June 10, 2013 11:45
yess very hinteresing....
"Tears unnumbered ye shall shed; and the Valar will fence Valinor against you, and shut you out, so that not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains." ~ The Doom of Mandos
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