Gurdjieff, String Theory, Music - Tapa blanda

As the third in a musicological trilogy that seeks objective answers to physical and metaphysical questions by way of musical ratios and proportions, this book may start with the acoustical properties of vibrating strings, but it certainly does not stop there. Rather, it goes on to attack some of the thorniest issues facing quantum physics today, including why string theory, as it is presently conceived, doesn't work; what is missing in the physicists' understanding of 'missing information"; and how the real cause underlying the perceived inflation of the universe is, in fact, due to the power laws inherent in vibrating strings. The surprising answers are neither wholly mathematical nor totally philosophical, but result from the reconciling perspective of music theory, the 'real" M-theory. Moving beyond the sterile and secular world-view of the physicists, the author introduces into the equation the sacred metaphysical soul principle, now viewed as the holographic 'membrane" whose sole function is to gather and store information and thus serve as the anti-entropic force within the universe. The properties of the soul, being movement and expansion, have long been associated with the figure called the lambdoma, and with the ancient diatonic scale that naturally forms within it, known as 'The Scale of the Soul of the World and Nature." With uncanny insight, the author shows how there is not one, but three musical scales-diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic-which form of their own accord within the expanding lambdoma. These 'informing" musical scales become the obvious links to the three 'branes" of the quantum physicists, at the same time providing substantive evidence for why a 'three brain system" is absolutely essential for the completion of the soul of man-an idea that students of the Gurdjieff Work will find very familiar, and perhaps very intriguing.

Mitzi DeWhitt is a music theorist, piano teacher, composer, and the author of the landmark books, Aristoxenus's Ghost and Nearly All and Almost Everything. She resides in the Philadelphia area.