Are we willing to be objective – to look, to listen and to think?

While getting my degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC) here in Boston, I became very interested in Medieval (500 – 1400AD) and Renaissance (1400 – 1600 AD) music – a very niche area to be sure!  

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Those epochs produced composers of great depth whose music was rich and often profoundly spiritual – and for me, music that reached the very pinnacles of Western classical music.

At any rate, a grad student at Harvard and I had discovered something taking place that was less than ethical – you might say very un-kosher.

What was it?

Music historians (musicologists), who are the folks entrusted to research and present an unbiased and truthful view of earlier periods of music, had systematically skewed the historical record to promote their view that one particular composer was superior to all of the others.

Certainly, small potatoes in the scheme of everything that goes on.  But isn’t it symptomatic of larger falsehoods that can and do permeate society?

Now, here’s something that I found quite interesting.  When I presented the evidence to a graduate class in music history at NEC – evidence that was irrefutable – everyone, including the professor, became quite irate and refused to accept it.  There was a real emotional reaction.  In fact, it was pretty irrational.

I naively thought that a group whose focus was supposed to be uncovering the truth about those periods would have been receptive to – well, er – the truth.  Funny how that works!

But as the semester went on, and as I continued to present evidence and asked them to just listen to the music for themselves, half of the class – the non-musicology students – completely switched their positions.  To her credit, the professor did also.  But not one of the future music historians budged.  Not one!

They had an agenda – an agenda that was wrapped-up in their chances for employment with the musicology establishment that controlled all of the future university-level teaching positions.  It was just that simple.

Why did the others change?  Because they listened.  They opened their thought to a different possibility and they subsequently experienced it for themselves.

I learned a lesson that year.

Do we just accept what others are saying – what authorities are expounding – or are we willing to think things through for ourselves?   Are we willing to experience them for ourselves?

As I wrote in an earlier blog “Who do you trust?” I was initially skeptical of some of the ideas in Christian Science.  But as I thought about them more and reasoned them through, I began to experience physical healings as a result of using those ideas. 

And here I am 21 years later, still experiencing the benefits of having done so.

How many of us are willing to open our thought to question conventional wisdom and find perhaps that there is something more meaningful, more direct, and more fulfilling for us, our loved ones, and the world? 

How many of you out there are willing to at least look into Christian Science?

It’s worth the peek!

And, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Renaissance music, here’s a video performance of one of the crowning achievements of the Renaissance: “Spem in Alium” by Thomas Tallis (c. 1501-1585) – performed by The King’s Singers.