to

Re-Vision Radio's

Musekal PhiloSophy

"Music and health are intimately related in human history, from shamanic healing to 'witch doctors,' from the Hebrews to current-day programs of music therapy. King David played the harp to relieve the stress of King Saul . . . and the ancient Greeks used harp music to ease the outbursts of people with mental illness. Music therapy was also employed by such geographically disparate cultures as the ancient Egyptians, Indians, and Native Americans. Health benefits have been described whether patients sit and listen to music, improvise tunes, write songs, discuss lyrics, perform compositions, or actively participate in the production of music. Music is claimed to be beneficial for patients of any age, ethnic or religious background, or stage of illness." --Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs

" . . . music listening and music therapy have been shown to help people overcome a broad range of psychological and physical problems." --Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain On Music

[ Added September 22, 2008 ]

"a schizoid polycentricity, a style of consciousness that thrives in plural meanings, in cryptic double-talk, in escaping definitions."

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack mixes PhiloSophy & Music--a harmonious interplay of dialectics/argument and song, prose composition and metrical composition; a concourse of prose discourse and lyrical outpouring that issues in a soulful Radio-text of ideas & love. Thus, since the The Gypsy Scholar brings his subject matter to play through song, Everybody Knows that the ability to put complex (philosophical) ideas into lyrics (of song) is the gift of Orpheus. And Everybody Knows what takes pages of text to explain a song can express in a few powerfully meaningful verses. The relationship of Argument to Song in the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is that the song is a way of saying everything the prose says, but all at once! Thus the Gypsy Scholar, in reading the essay, also let's the song do the talking, which, conversely, reveals the spoken-word essay as having itself a verbal music.  This means that the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, with its quality of a "recital," has a performative character, which makes scholarship a performance art. 

"Behind the lyric and the song is the governing, central idea, and you have to keep both of them going, so neither gets bogged down. The trick is to keep them going together.”
(Stephen Sondheim)

Thus Everybody Knows that the "governing, central idea" of the Tower of Song program is Musekal Philosophy. In other words, the program is not just "about" the words or the music, but what's behind them; the theory that under-stands them and thus eclectically puts them together. The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, then, allows the Gypsy Scholar to develop a central idea or over-arching theme sounded in the music to create a receptive mood. This midnight radio mood--engendered by sublime segues from words to eclectic sets of sounds (and everybody knows that radio-magic starts in the transitions)--is the psychic atmosphere from which listeners can soar in imaginative musical flights--into the Tower of Song.

The Tower of Song program's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, or the Essay in Argument & Song, makes for a program format that's not strictly a "music" program, but a musical and philosophical program that breaks down the strict boundaries between radio genres--music and information programing.  This means that the Gypsy Scholar doesn't just play songs, like deejays do, but showcases songs. This is possible because the essay puts song in con-text; contextualizes it. Hence the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack. There are those who are on the innovative edge of art; those who experiment with remix and "how information becomes music." Because the Gypsy Scholar remixes the ideas from his favorite writers with the music from his favorite singer-songwriters, it's all about the art of translating information into music. Thus the Tower of Song program presents something new, something novel, on radio. (The Gypsy Scholar, in blurring the boundaries between the formats of informational and music programming, believes when it comes to people "getting" information it's a matter of how it is presented, and, conversely, in listening to music, it's the context in which it is heard.)  The Gypsy Scholar would inform (educate) and entertain (play), hence the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack.

Essay: “a short piece of written work assigned to a student; paper, composition, thesis, treatise, dissertation; an artistic or journalistic work resembling a written essay but in another medium."

Thus, Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is "an an artistic work resembling a written essay but in another medium"--the medium of radio. This makes the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack a special genre of writing--a "radio-text." (The Gypsy Scholar is at pains to point out that the Essay in Argument & Song is one composition. (The reason that the song complements the text is that a song can express things in a way that the mere discursive essay cannot. It might take dozens of pages to say what one song can express.) In other words, the intermittent song is not merely a break in the discourse, which is then resumed again after the song, as in the usual practice. No, the argument and song, not to mention the background music behind the reading, are of one, continuous piece, and when seamlessly mixed should result in the listener not knowing exactly where the spoken part of the essay leaves off and the sung part begins, and vice versa.) Thus, Everybody Knows, because the song (and background music) of the essay transforms the text into (musical) texture, that the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is a "radio-text."

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack (a species of the Romantic Essay), in remixing high academic culture with low pop-culture, broadcasts big ideas through popular song, which issues in a Musekal Philosophy--a sonorous philosophy.

"Here was a man, who inside of a pop-song . . .you know, puts big ideas, big dreams.  It reminded me of Keats or Shelley or, you know, they were poets I was reading as a kid.  I said this is our . . . Shelley, this is our . . . Byron.  You know, there was an otherness to the language.  It was just a sensory overload of the language that first got to me."  (Bono on Leonard Cohen)

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A special note to interested listeners: this page particularly, along with the "Re-Vision Radio" page (#5), exists to promote that theory of Musekal Philosophy in order for listeners to fully appreciate what they hear on the program. For a more in-depth look at the Gypsy Scholar's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, see green-bordered sections below: "Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack," "Musekal Philosophy: Playing Philosophy, Playing Music," "Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack Goes to the Movies," "Musekal Philosophy: Philosophy In A New Key," "Musekal Philosophy: An Orphic Synthesis," and "Musekal Philosophy: Scholarship As Performance Art."

Re-Vision Radio's Broadcast Experiments Between Speech & Song

         The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy. --William Blake, Vala

"What I'm hoping for," wrote Yeats the month before his death," is a small book dealing with the relations between speech and song." Rekindled by his BBC broadcast experiments and by the revival of Broadsides between 1937 and 1937, Yeats's last hope was the final expression of one of his oldest, most frustrated desires. The recipient of the letter, Victor Clinton-Baddeley, who had worked closely with Yeats on the broadcasts, partially honored his request with Words for Music (1941), which contains a final chapter on Yeats's later theory of speaking verse. But Clinton-Baddeley was largely unaware that his subject's preoccupation with words for music at the end of his life had also been a passion of earlier days, and that the broadcast-broadside experiments in the late 1930s were but the last in a lifelong effort to revive the lost bardic arts of chanting and musical speech.

--The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Lost Bardic Arts (2008)

I think it's part of our tradition, which is quite different from the American literary tradition, that prose should have music. . . .  What you're doing as the writer is you're giving the reader sheet music and the reader is going to play the song. You know, so I try in write in a way that has a three-dimensionality that invites the reader to walk in . . . .

                  --Joseph O'Connor (Novelist and brother of Sinead O'Connor radio interview 3/10/11)

The Gypsy Scholar invites fellow readers to walk into this musical "three-dimensionality" he calls the Tower of  Song

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack

"It has been said that the Troubadours [of the Twelfth-century Renaissance] are responsible for modern poetry. It is, however, mostly to their songs . . . that the troubadours owe their survival into the twentieth century. They envisioned love as inspiration to song."

"Let us bring to bear the persuasive powers of sweet-tongued Rhetoric and . . . let us have as well Music, the maid-servant of my house, to sing us melodies of varying mood."
(Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy)

"How charming is divine Philosophy
not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose
But musical as is Apollo's lute."
(Coleridge)

Going back—"way, way back"—Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack (or the Essay in Argument & Song) would pick up the fallen standard of the nineteenth-century Romantic Essay, which sought to transcend the boundaries of prose and non-prose and conjoin philosophy with poetry. (This is in keeping with the Romantic’s penchant for mixing genres.) The Romantic Essay has been described (based upon its development by Wordsworth and Coleridge) as a "conjunction of Reason and Passion that did not draw particularly sharp lines of differentiation between ‘poetry’ and the ‘impassioned, eloquent, and powerful prose.’" Thus, for Coleridge: “The love of truth conjoined with a keen delight in a strict, skillful, yet impassioned argumentation, is my master-passion.” Following in this Romantic genre, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is conceived of as "the perfect union of words and music," and, thus, like the Romantic Essay, begins with an "impassioned, eloquent, and powerful prose, following from a fairly strict following of traditional ‘public’ discourse to modes of prose requiring the virtual abandonment or annihilation of such discourse and often quite literally disappearing into poetry or into the silence of contemplation and vision." The Romantics maintained that "the end of philosophy is poetry." Thus--since music was separated from poetry relatively recently in the history of Western culture--the Gypsy Scholar would re-phrase it as "the end of philosophy is song"--as demonstrated by his Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack.

Therefore, since "Eros redefines reason in its own terms," Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, mixing PhiloSophy & Song, or dialectics and music, replaces the "murders to dissect" (Wordsworth) mode of academic (Protestant) scholarship with service to Eros--insight, synthesis, celebration; "Reason in her most exalted mood." (Wordsworth) Thus, in the Tower of Song, the moments of Intellectual Coherence/Clarity reached through the Essay-with-Soundtrack are, at the same time, conveyed in music. "All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling." (Blaise Pascal)

“Words make you think and music makes you feel. And song makes it possible to feel a thought. Quite an interesting way of putting it.”  (Pete Seeger, quoting the words of the great popular song lyricist E. Y. Harburg ["Over the Rainbow"].)

And Everybody Knows that the Gypsy Scholar loves to find "an interesting way of putting it"*--i.e., the relationship between the prose and the song-lyric in the  Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack. And, thus, your Re-Vision Radio host, the Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist--in the role of the scholar-as-artist (of Eros) and longing to connect with that soulful dark blue-fire rhythm of things--romantically "burns the candle at both ends" (V.M.): logos & mythos, ideas and love, reason & imagination, fact & fantasy, realism & idealism, dialectical & mystical, mind & heart--the end of the Argument & Song on your radio dial, tuned to the Romantic Tower of Song.

And in the Tower of Song, those "funny voices" from "way, way back" can he heard: "Love that discourses in my mind" (Pugatorio, Canto II). Practicing its own form of the twelfth-century Troubadour "Dialectic of Love," the Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist would use his Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack to discourse on love and philosophy, love and ideas--the philosophy of love and the love of philosophy ("wisdom"). Indeed, in the Tower of Song (listening to Socrates and Plato) these two are so intertwined that one can't tell if the philosophers are singing about the virtues of love or, conversely, if the lovers are decanting on the pleasures of philosophy. Ergo, in the Tower of Song one can find following equation etched in the wall: PhiloSophy = Music = Love ("Oh, Socrates and Plato / They praised it [love] to the sky." --Van Morrison.) Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack--with its "flowers of discourse"--plays both aspects of the psyche: both reason and imagination; both critical/scholarly intellect and intuitive/poetic heart, academic research and mystical insearch, secular hermeneutics and sacred hermetic/kabbalistic interpretation, scholarly rigor and poetic reverie, painstaking precise phrasing and euphoric poetic diction, Apollonian clarity and Dionysian obscurity, philosophical questioning and romantic questing, philosophical aptitude and the musical amplitude of heightened discourse. This issues in the paradoxical reuniting of the Western head and heart—a Romantic commingling of a "sensuous reason" and a "feeling intellect," thereby synthesizing the left and right brain: "If my heart could do my thinking / And my head begin to feel / I would look upon the world anew / And know what's truly real." (Van Morrison) It’s the great Platonic synthesis of logos and mythos; between the earlier mytho-mystical, as it was transmitted through the Greek Mystery Religions, and the newer rationalist development in Philosophy that had broken away from it: "Intellectual rigor [logos] and Olympian inspiration [mythos] no longer stood opposed.” Thus, Everybody Knows that the thinker becomes a melodious thinker and, conversely, the singer becomes a philosophical singer. Running the popular song through the engine of dialectic not only re-visions the song philosophically, but returns the dialectic to its original Orphic/Pythagorean/Platonic music--making philosophy musical. In other words, Platonic dialectic becomes oracular poetry/song “after it has risen, with an incredible impulse, through the mania [madness] of Eros to the heights of philosophy." And the "heights of philosophy" are expressed on Re-Vision Radio as the "flowers of discourse."

Love or music--which power can uplift man to the sublimest heights? It is a large question; yet it seems to me that one should answer it in this way: Love cannot give an idea of music; music can give an idea of love. But why separate them? They are two wings of the soul. (Hector Berlioz)

As a Philosophical program, it's about Ideas. As a Musical program, it's about Music as Idea (and, conversely, the Idea of Music). Because Everybody Knows that on radio Information alone doesn't do it--to feel soulful--Music, too, is needed. Thus the Tower of Song program is finally about a Musekal Philosophy--or, "Philosophy in a New Key." With musical echoes reverberating throughout the text, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is thoroughly song-haunted-- memorable song lyrics fading in and fading out between the written lines, generating a steady stream of correspondences between ideas & song. In reading between the lines of dialectic and song, moving back and forth between the prose and musical text--with margins of nuanced associations--a Soul-text of Musekal Philosophy. Thus the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, which shows music's role as a kind of verbal melody and, conversely, dialectic's role as a kind of melodious phrasing, is realized as a hyper-text of musical dialectic--a soul-inflected montage of the spoken word and music. Thus Everybody Knows that the Gypsy Scholar's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is designed to make the words sing.

“Tennyson’s style, the most flawless in English poetry after Milton’s and Pope’s, is itself a sensibility, a means of apprehending both the internal and the external world. Intuitively, Tennyson understood what poetry was, argument that could not be separated from song, gesture, dance, and the rhythms of a unique but representative individual’s breath-soul.” (Trilling and Bloom, eds., The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Victorian Prose and Poetry.)


The (dialectical) relationship of Argument & Song in Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack can be understood in a variety of ways (many of which I have already delineated*), as the performance of the essay entails the strategic shifting from (the juxtaposition of ) argument to song, from song back to argument.  Looking at the essay from the prism of the Song, yields a multifaceted range of meaning the essay speaks.  Therefore, one of the interesting ways of understanding the content of the essay is to become aware how each song slightly alters the perception of what is being said in the essay—i.e., another shade of meaning registers on the attentive listener's consciousness. It's as if (looked at from the point of view of the musicality of the essay) each successive song is a window (or frame of reference) through which the essay's argument is then recognized and now re-visioned.

By approaching the familiar from a different angle, we see the shape of the subject change dramatically.
--W. I. Thompson

Again, it's as if the Gypsy Scholar is entreating his listeners: "You've heard the argument through this song, now try seeing what I mean through the emphasis of this song." In this sense, the position of the song in the essay is not simply one-dimensional; commenting upon what has been expressed in prose, or amplifying the meaning of the argument thus far.  The relationship between Argument & Song in the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is much more complex (because dialectical).  It could even be said that each song sings the essay in its own lyrical ambiance and, conversely, the argument contextualizes each song in its own rhetorical logic.  This is why Gypsy Scholar's "Re-Vision Radio Manifesto & Visionary Recital” states:  “Thus, Everybody Knows, there’s a song hermetically hidden in an essay and, conversely, an essay waiting to be revealed in a song.”

From his imaginal window in the Tower of Song the Gypsy Scholar looks back to the "freeform" midnight radio born in the 1960s. And because PhiloSophy is (as admitted by Plato) a form of “play”--an artistic endeavor--, it makes the scholar of philosophy a scholar-artist-musician, who is distinguished by his or her ability to synthesize and play with knowledge--to create a collage of ideas or intellectual mind-jazz.

"Today, in the 21st century, the problem is synthesis--collage--how to put it all together, or put it in juxtaposition so it makes some sense." (Jennifer Stone, 7/17/7)

"Freeform radio is an art form. The airwaves are the empty canvas, the producer is the artist, and the sound is the paint." (Julius Lester, 1974)

". . . but it was a staple of the underground format. There was a sense of accomplishing something mighty creative. Not just disc jockey work, but weaving songs together in progression to make a statement or a theme." (Ed Shane, 1997)

Therefore, tied by those "twenty-seven angels" to the writing table in the Tower of Song, the Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist (the Magus of Ceremonies) re-visions PhiloSophy leading, finally, not to ponderous academic desiccation (Wordsworth's "murders to dissect"), but (because it has transcended "Protestant scholarship" in its service to eros) to ecstatic Dionysian celebration--a sort of mind-jazz ensemble.

Brother Cornel West has lately embodied the Gypsy Scholar's ideal of the "Inspired Scholar" or the "Orphic Scholar," who combines in his soul both philosophy and music and gives utterance to ideas through song. Prof. West has now recorded a CD mixing the inspired lecture with the rhythms of hip-hop. And in this Emersonian tradition of the "Orphic Scholar," this Black Orpheus seems to have taken a page out of the Gypsy Scholar's website, where he dialectically mixes the metaphors of scholarship and music to describe his ideal:

"I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind and a jazzman in the world of ideas."

Tell it like it is Brother West! *

_____________________________________

* For more "interesting way(s) of putting it"--the dialectical relationship between the prose and the lyric; (Argument & Song) in the Essay-with-Soundtrack--, see the Gypsy Scholar's Re-VisionRadio Manifesto & Visionary Recital on page #4, "Program Guide" (short version), or page #5, "Re-Vision Radio" (long version).

"Program Guide"  

"Re-Vision Radio"  

* For the illustration of the scholar-as-musician--the "Orphic Scholar"--go to the end of this page to see where the Gypsy Scholar is going with all this.

The experimental format of RE-VISION RADIO is a seamless mixing of argument & song, dialectics & music, or logos & mythos; in other words, philosophical essays are put to music, producing the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack. Thus Everybody Knows, since there’s a song hermetically hidden in an essay and, conversely, an essay waiting to be revealed in a song, that RE-VISION RADIO puts its philosophy best in song—as the lyric goes: “That’s why I’m telling you in song.” In mixing the noetic texts of Philosophy with the poetic texts of Song, RE-VISION RADIO offers its listeners an Orphic soundscape; an eclectic medley of the esoteric and the popular, high academic culture and low pop-culture—high argument & deep song—not from the Ivory Tower, but from “that tower down the track”: the TOWER OF SONG.  (Re-Vision Radio Manifesto & Visionary Recital)

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack:

Con-fusing Argument & Song

The Tower of Song is the radio program that attempts to mix (or con-fuse) spoken-word/ argument (dialectic) with song so perfectly that it might confuse its listeners as to what kind (category) of programming it really is--a talk or music program? Con-fusing in the sense that--as opposed to music programs--listeners won't know for certain whether the song merely serves as a brief respite or interlude between the talk segments (the song exists for the sake of the discourse), or--as opposed to talk programs--the spoken-word part is just an excuse to showcase a song (discourse exists for the sake of the song). Or, to put this last option in another way, that the spoken- word part becomes (what they call on radio) a "lead-in" to the song--an extended lead-in (the The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack as liner-notes of philosophical proportions). There is yet another way that The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is con-fusing. Because the ideas and song are so harmonious, it makes you think that the Gypsy Scholar didn't write the essay and then look for songs to go with it (as would be the normal way to go about it), but rather he wrote the essay exclusively with the song in mind. (And the GS must confess here that once in a while a song strikes him as so wonderful that he will write an entire essay around the song; just so he can lead up to it as a grand finale. Again, the The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, mixes Argument & Song so adroitly that it creates the illusion that the song was tailor-made just for the essay.

". . . don’t we know that all of this is a prelude to the song itself, . . . the song itself that dialectic performs?" –Socrates (Plato, Republic)

“The music isn’t really an interlude, but serves as an extension of the dialogue.”
–Delroy Lindo (on new theatrical play 4/4/7)

"Behind the lyric and the song is the governing, central idea, and you have to keep both of them going, so neither gets bogged down. The trick is to keep them going together.” –Stephen Sondheim

"The point of writing about a figure like Orpheus is not to expose him to our intellectual curiosity and self-serving need to dissect–a caricature of true Orphic fragmentation–but rather to evoke him and his song." –Thomas Moore

Thus Everybody Knows that the "governing, central idea" of the Tower of Song program is Musekal Philosophy. In other words, the program is not just "about" the words or the music, but what's behind them; the theory that under-stands them and thus puts them together. The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, then, allows the Gypsy Scholar to develop a central idea or over-arching theme sounded in the music to create a receptive mood. This midnight radio mood--engendered by sublime segues from words to eclectic sets of sounds (and everybody knows that radio-magic starts in the transitions)--is the psychic atmosphere from which listeners can soar in imaginative musical flights--into the Tower of Song.

And Everybody Knows, because Orpheus played his best music for an underworld audience, that Re-Vision Radio is Underground Radio. (This means that the Gypsy Scholar re-visions radio back--"way, way back"--to 1960's free-form "underground radio.")

 
The Tower of Song program was created out of the Gypsy Scholar's love for radio—especially 60's "underground radio." The fact that he couldn't get enough of it when it died out means that it was his "Impossible Love" affair with underground (free-form) radio. This is why the Gypsy Scholar created a place—a late-night sanctuary—where one could go to find an alternative to most of what is called "non-commercial" radio. This is why Re-VisionRadio is a "Soul-making" program. This is why the the Tower of Song  is from the "invisible landscape"—"Somewhere Else" radio.

There is no cure for impossible love when it revolutionizes our lives. When it leads to the future as well as into the past, when it cannot be comprehended on a purely personal level, then it is not an illness, but an initiation. Initiation into depths, but also into longing, and this will not, should not, ever cease. This longing keeps us in proximity to our souls. It reminds us, as we conscientiously go through the obligations and activities of every day, that there is a place, a "somewhere else" where we also belong and need to go to from time to time. We are reminded of this place by a sentence we read in a newspaper, a picture on a subway wall, a memory brought to life by a smell, [a piece of dialogue from a movie that speaks to us, a beautiful face that haunts our dreams, a passage from a book taken randomly off the shelf,] or by a song we hear on the radio . . . –Impossible Love

The Gypsy Scholar  & Bohemian Essayist,  mixing and remixing argument & song—dialectics & music—in a musical and philosophical program,  presents his    Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack,    which "Orphic" Scholarship reveals itself to be a kind of performance-art.

What are the Treasures of Heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves, are they any other than Mental Studies & Performances? --William Blake
  
The Gypsy Scholar's program,   because breaks down the strict boundaries between conventional radio genres/formats of "music" and "informational" programming,   also breaks down the strict boundaries between high, academic culture and low pop-culture —between "high argument" and "deep song"—, and therefore  ...  is broadcast not  from the "Ivory Tower" but from "that tower down the track / the Tower of Song." 

And because PhiloSophy (as admitted by Plato) is a form of “play” —an artistic endeavor—, it makes the student of philosophy (via radio) a scholar-artist, who is distinguished by his or her ability to synthesize and play with knowledge —"to create a collage or montage of ideas or intellectual mind-jazz." And given that the radio program in Argument & Song is inspired by Orpheus —bard, prophet, master rhetorician and divine musician and "singer of love-songs” — the Gypsy Scholar, exiled from the Ivory Tower, offers the following insights into what he is trying to do with another, higher office (of scholarship) in that "tower down the track, the Tower of  Song":


Ah ye old ghosts! ye builders of dungeons in the air! [ivory towers] why do I ever allow you to encroach on me a moment; a moment to win me to your hapless company? In every week there is some hour when I read my commission in every cipher of nature, and I know that I was made for another office, a professor of the Joyous Science, a detector & delineator of occult harmonies & unpublished beauties, a herald of civility, nobility, learning, & wisdom; an affirmer of the One Law, yet as one who should affirm it in music or dancing, a priest of the Soul yet one who would better love to celebrate it through the beauty of health & [the] harmonious power [of music].

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise and to guide men by showing them facts amid appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation.

I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson, Professor of the Joyous Science, Troubadour of Knowledge, and Orphic Scholar]

Yes, upon graduating, the Gypsy Scholar could have gone into teaching in the Ivory Tower, but he was destined for "another office":

Professor of Musekal Philosophy; Troubadour of Knowledge & Lecturer in the Joyous Science.

A MUSEKAL PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

The recording artists that are featured in the Tower of Song—“where the poetic champions compose”—are more than just a great singers. These Romantic “ringers in the tower” create songs of overwhelming psychological impact, songs that speak to the heart of the things that draw people to art and music in the first place—its soul-making aspect. Some of their songs are not just about love and love lost, but songs that combine the personal and the political—the erotic song and the protest song. Their songs also produce an added force from the delicate power and intricately shaded feelings their voices convey. Their songs, while seeming to speak of the usual maters of the heart, convey a sense of the deeper dimensions of life and its lessons. Taken together, singer and song achieve a universality of experience. Thus, these "poetic champions" of popular song--like Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison--can be understood to be (as Yeats would have put it) "the singing masters of my soul."

In the Tower of Song all such grand and common subjects of life truly are addressed in rock ‘n’ roll songs. Since the culture-war attacks on our popular music have been unrelenting since its inception in the 1950s, this is a singularly important achievement. Not since the poet Dante had dared to put his poetic message not in the high-brow idiom but in the vulgar tongue has anything caused such a stir. Here, it is significant that one rock critic has ironically identified the rise of rock as “the triumph of vulgarity.” Indeed, it’s plain to see that over the past half century, it has been the songs of our popular music—the folk-rock and rock songs, the R&B and soul songs—that have been, perhaps above any other art, the readiest access point to open and honest discussion of such topics in our society. I would venture to guess that as young people what drew us to the music in the first place was not only a musical style, a specific beat or melody or guitar lick, but the way in which those songs filled the needs of our heart and emotions, addressing passions and perils we didn’t know had anything to do with us. And now, as older people, this music’s continuing appeal is this ability to touch what most needs touching—the soul—that keeps us coming back and providing us with a kind of philosophy of life.

What the Gypsy Scholar’s notion of Musekal Philosophy seeks to do is to bring to consciousness what has been implicit about some of the most important songs in the Tower of Song—the philosophical "lustres" [Emerson] embedded in the music. It’s a way of knowing more about the song, and more about its inner spirit. Additionally, the noetic text of the Gypsy Scholar’s Essay-with-Soundtrack provides a way of contextualizing the poetic songs in order to recognize the larger dimension of their meaning. It is an Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack because of its synergy between the prose and the lyric--the noetic and the poetic text--, since the Tower of Song's Orpheus was both a master rhetorician and a magical singer. It is a return to the lyric-consciousness of the 1960's song (revived today by Hip-Hop's Black Orpheus). In the Tower of Song, it is not just about about the beat, but about the lyrics. Thus, the Essay-with-Soundtrack is inspired by the recognition that people (since the 1960s) already use such songs to sustain and guide them through the ups and downs of life, and presented in the hope that listeners who love these familiar songs will hear them again (and again) anew; discover a new, more complete understanding of them as wisdom-guides to life—a Musekal Philosophy—that follows the song-lines of the planet.


Felicia Pride: I think that's the interesting thing about music is that different people take different things from a particular song, especially depending on their experience with that song or during that time.

Interviewer: I thought it was cool--the idea behind this book--, because oftentimes people will talk about other genres of music and other lyricists.  Bob Dylan is a name that comes up a lot, or Bob Marley--you know: "these songs speak to me!"  But it's kinda overlooked that Hip-Hop music has life-lessons contained in it--sometimes there's several life-lessons in one song!  Now do people really listen the the lyrics? Because, oftentimes, people will say, "I'm just in it for the beat."

Felicia Pride: No, I think that for music in general people interact with it differently. I don't think everybody listens to Hip-Hop lyrics.... There's a large audience who just want a nice beat. But then there's also a large audience, in my opinion, who listen to the lyrics, especially with Hip-Hop, and dissect them, remember them, and rewind them. So I definitely think it goes both ways.

(From a Sept. 2008 radio interview with Felicia Pride, author of The Message: 100 Life Lessons from Hip-Hop's Greatest Songs.)

_____________________________________________________

For a detailed explanation and description of the Essay-with-Soundtrack, see the Gypsy Scholar's Re-VisionRadio Manifesto & Visionary Recital on page #5, "Re-Vision Radio."

The Gypsy Scholar neither a theist or atheist,  doesn't communicate with "G-d," but nonetheless believes there is some external (Orphic) cosmic force that communicates with him through ...  the lyrics of song. This is because "you hear these funny voices in the Tower of Song."  (Leonard Cohen)

RE-VISION RADIO'S
Romantic Quest in Archaic Revival of
Musekal Philosophy

Parmenides: shaman-poet voyager to star realms

RE-VISION RADIO Takes You Back
--"Way, Way Back"--in Archaic Revival

to the origins of Western Philosophy with the Pre-Socratic Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles, when "philosophy" was poetry--was a visionary/mystic discipline, with ascent journeys to the stars and descent journeys to the underworld. In other words, "way, way back" to the shamanic origins of Western "philosophy." From there, it moves forward to Socrates and Plato (introducing the daimonic "soul," or "psyche") when, after carving a separate role for "philosophy" (dialectic), a synthesis of philosophy's new logos with old poetry's mythos was attempted--especially with music. From here, it was up the the Romantics to complete the synthesis. Thus, it is from the Romantics that the Gypsy Scholar plays (through his Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack) with the double meaning of the traditional "dialectics of music"--is it musical philosophy, or philosophical music? Here, music-as-idea is also idea-as-music, where the "hermeneutics of music" becomes the music of Hermes (who is said to have been the inventor of the lyre and the teacher of Orpheus).

But most of all, Re-Vision Radio takes you back--"way, way back"--to great Orpheus, who represents the original and perfect union of Philosophy & Music. Once more, Orpheus has been identified as a "shamanic figure." Thus, Everybody Knows that the "archaic revival" of Orpheus means that Re-Vision Radio discovers its new "religion" in the re-vived Orphic Mysteries (since Orpheus is the "melding of old and new"); that novel spiritual path for all true music lovers (who now can worship in the Tower of Song as Orphicoi, "Orphic folk")--Oima, "Song As Way."

"Let us bring to bear the persuasive powers of sweet-tongued Rhetoric and . . . let us have as well Music, the maid-servant of my house, to sing us melodies of varying mood." (Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy)

"This introduction is the key which shall open to you the flowers of the discourse that is to follow, namely, the investigation of the arts, of wisdom, of reason and understanding, the efficacious methods and revelations which throw light upon the secret words. (From the alchemical text, ‘The Visions of Zosimos’)"

"The way to speak and write what shall not go out of fashion is to speak and write sincerely. He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public which you have come at attempting to satisfy your own curiosity." (Emerson, Spiritual Laws)

"This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist / Without Imagination, which, in truth, / Is but another name for absolute power / And clearest insight, amplitude of mind / And Reason in her most exalted mood." (Wordsworth, The Prelude)

Re-Vision Radio would go back to the "light of Ancient Greece /Towards the One" (V.M.), it broadcasts its "Archaic Revival" of great Orpheus--divine rhetorician and magical "singer of love songs." Yes, "way, way back" to the shamanic origins of Western culture, when "religion" (e.g., "the Orphic Mysteries") was understood as a tradition of shamanic ecstasy. Thus, looking back to the cult of the Muses and Plato, who incorporated the Orphic Mystery cult into the new dialectical tradition, Re-Vision Radio reunites Philosophy & Music, and, thus, puts its Philosophy best in song.

... Oh my dear, oh my dear sweet love it's a long, long journey
Long, long journey, journey back home
Back home to you, feel you by my side
Long journey, journey, journey

Yeah in the midnight, in the midnight, I burn the candle
Burn the candle at both ends, burn the candle at both ends
Burn the candle at both ends, burn the candle at both ends
And I keep on, `cause I can't sleep at night
Until the daylight comes through
And I just, and I just, have to sing ...

(Van Morrison)

RE-VISION RADIO Presents

MUSEKAL PHILOSOPHY

Musekal Philosophy: Playing Philosophy, Playing Music

Re-Vision Radio's quest has taken it back--“way, way back” to "the light of ancient Greece / Towards the One" (the Neoplatonic’s “the One”). Sitting at that ancient banquet table in the Tower of Song, I learned from Socrates and Plato to reunite Philosophy & Music into a single discipline, an ecstatic discipline--originally, "of the Muses"--in service to Eros. Thus, because for Plato Philosophy was a dialectical art form--a form of play--, on Re-Vision Radio playing music is actually playing with Philosophy. (The Muses have the "gift of speculative knowledge" and "unregretable play," "measured and reasonable play." Mousikos: "of the Muses, devotion to the Muses, musical; musician; lyric poet; scholar, man of letters." Mousie, ta mousike: "art of the Muses; music, song, poetry, dancing, arts, letters, accomplishments"). "We have sought truth, and sometimes found it. But have we had any fun?" –Benjamin Jowlett, translator of Platonic dialogues). Therefore, the Western "ancient quarrel" (agon) between mythos and logos will be resolved when poetry/music and philosophy are recognized as two aspects of one art form. And because, as Hesiod tells us, the Muses are "of one mind," poetry/music and philosophy are not out of tune with each other. This single-mindedness unites the different nine Muses into "one harmonious chorus." (The name of the Muses and of music are derived from their making "philosophical inquiries." Furthermore, these Muses have, writes Plato, "the gift of speculative knowledge" and are "of one mind," desiring to "express themselves in song." Plato also suggests that "the Muses and music in general are named, apparently, from mosthai, "searching," and "philosophy"--"to strive after," "to long for," or "to desire eagerly"--, and partakes of similar meanings as does philosophia; "loving," "searching," "striving," and "inquiry.") My own definition of musicology's "speculative music" succinctly designates the grand union of philosophical inquiry and musicality. In broadcasting what I call Musekal Philosophy, via my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, I strive to give listeners what in the history of Rock ‘n’ Roll is described as "lyrics that make one think." This is the great legacy of the Sixties folk-rock musicians, our modern Troubadours. "I understand my music as chords of inquiry" (Joni Mitchell). My novel notion that Philosophy & Music are one-and-the-same "art" is found in Socrates’ original con-fusion, brought about by his dream that admonished him to "Make and cultivate music!" Hence, Socrates reflects that "the study of Philosophy, which has always been the pursuit of my life, is the noblest and best [highest] form of music." I only compound Socrates’ con-fusion, in regarding, conversely, Music as the highest form of Philosophy. In my Musekal PhiloSophy, then, the philosopher and the poet are in complete harmony, since Socrates’ daimon/muse, Diotima, demanded of Socrates a "music art."

On Re-Vision Radio, this reunion and fusion of Philosophy & Music--dialectics/argument and song; logos and mythos--makes for a philosophy that is musical and, conversely, a music that is philosophical. Thus, Everybody Knows the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack's musekal philosophy is also the (Romantic) "philosophy of music." (The Romantic's belief that music is the highest art; the pure expression of feeling and thus supra-rational, and the end of philosophy is music.) In addition, musekal philosophy makes the ideal philosopher (according to Socrates and Plato) a "fervent musician," or a "musical man.” Moreover, because PhiloSophy is a form of “play”--an artistic endeavor--, it makes the scholar of philosophy a scholar-artist-musician, who is distinguished by his or her ability to play with knowledge and create a collage of ideas or intellectual mind-jazz.

".... Here's to the was you been, to the is you in, to what's deep in deep and what's down and down / to the lost and the blind, and the almost found. / Here's to somebody within the sound of your voice this morning. / Here's to somebody who can't be within the sound of your voice tonight. / Here's to a light buzz in your head, and a soundtrack in your mind / going on and on, and on and on and on--like a good time…."

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack goes to the Movies

The experimental format of RE-VISION RADIO is a seamless mixing of argument & song, dialectics & music, or logos & mythos; in other words, philosophical essays are put to music, producing the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack. Thus Everybody Knows, since there’s a song hermetically hidden in an essay and, conversely, an essay waiting to be revealed in a song, that RE-VISION RADIO puts its philosophy best in song—as the lyric goes: “That’s why I’m telling you in song.” ("Re-Vision Radio Manifesto & Visionary Recital")

The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is designed on the analogy with film soundtrack; the dialogue is interrupted at key moments to heighten the emotional ambiance, to drive home the idea the director desires to get across, and works best when the synergy of words, images, and music come together (when the music isn't simply an interlude, but an amplification of the theme). In fact, the Gypsy Scholar's novel notion of the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack seems all the more relevant as film and music (soundtrack) become more and more meaningfully integrated. In other words, the Gypsy Scholar's passion to hear a song as essay and an essay as song seems to be shared, on the level of film, with some avant garde filmmakers. For example, here's a film critic (Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune) reviewing (on Ebert and Roeper) the Bob Dylan based film, I'm Not There (12/09/07):

". . . But if films are songs, this is one Troubadour that travels its own stretch of Highway 61 in its own way."

Here, all the Gypsy Scholar's passions (and main themes) come together: Troubadours, Sixties popular song, philosophy, and film.

"My life was saved by Rock 'n' Roll. Because it was this kind of music that, for the very first time in my life, gave me a feeling of identity, the feeling that I had a right to enjoy, to imagine, and to do something. Had it not been for Rock 'n' Roll, I might be a lawyer now." --Wim Wenders (Filmmaker) “It’s [a film] a lot like music and it’s a little bit like painting, but it’s based on this mood the idea gives you.” –David Lynch (Filmmaker) “Some of the images that are very important in Eraserhead aren’t simply the ones that you’re seeing on the screen but the ones that you’re producing yourself, because of the very suggestive soundtrack.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum (Film Critic) --From documentary, Midnight Movies

MUSEKAL PHILOSOPHY: PhiloSophy In A New Key

Going back--"way, way back"--Re-Vision Radio’s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack would pick up the fallen standard of the nineteenth-century Romantic Essay, which sought to transcend the boundaries of prose and non-prose and conjoin philosophy and poetry. The Romantic Essay has been described (based upon its development by Wordsworth and Coleridge) as a "conjunction of Reason and Passion that did not draw particularly sharp lines of differentiation between ‘poetry’ and the ‘impassioned, eloquent, and powerful’ prose." Following in this Dionysian genre, I conceived of the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack as "the perfect union of words and music." Thus, my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, like the Romantic Essay, begins with an "impassioned, eloquent, and powerful prose, following from a fairly strict following of traditional ‘public’ discourse to modes of prose requiring the virtual abandonment or annihilation of such discourse and often quite literally disappearing into poetry or into the silence of contemplation and vision."

Re-Vision Radio, in programming a mix of rigorous intellectual argument and a profound musical sensuousness, strives to unite intellect and feeling, head and heart. It has been said that Romantic Mind is "the union of deep feeling and profound thought." Re-Vision Radio’s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack assays back and forth between the dialectical and musical, between logos and mythos; between, in other words, the mind & heart. So Everybody Knows "If my heart could do my thinking / And my mind begin to feel / I’d would see the world anew / And know what’s truly real." (Van Morrison) In practicing its own type of the Romantic “Arts & Sciences of the Imagination” (Blake), Re-Vision Radio Radio delights in remixing what Wordsworth has poetically combined--"high Argument" of "the Mind, / My haunt, and the main region of my song." Re-Vision Radio, in bridging high academic culture with low pop-culture, takes its cue from the great Romantic composer, Beethoven, who, it is said, "took great delight in juxtaposing the exalted and the commonplace," making his music "a union of sensuous and rational." It also looks to the inspired American scholar Emerson who dared to proclaim: "I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low." Re-Vision Radio’s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, assaying back and forth between high academic culture and low pop-culture (song), finds itself validated in literary theory: (argument) and "Soliloquy bridges the gap between high art and popular song." Thus, the Musekal Philosophy of my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack broadcasts its meaning in two modes: Wordsworth’s "high argument" and Lorca’s "deep song." ". . . they have climbed, / on high with song that is more sweet, more deep." (Dante, Divine Comedy) "Music that can deepest reach." (Emerson, The Essays)

And because Re-Vision Radio participates in the great Romantic project of the "re-enchantment of the world," the Gypsy Scholar would invite guests/listeners to enter the center of enchantment (en-song-ment) by following, "in the middle of the night" of extravagant delight, the song on the (Dionysian) path of wild abandon, the path of awe and wonder--to the Tower of Song.

Re-Vision Radio's quest is to seamlessly fuse together a prose argument with a lyrical song. The medium for this ideal accomplishment on radio is the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, which is, simply, prose argument put to music. And this seamlessness of going back and forth between the prose argument and the poetic song could be described in the following way: "So the words dissolve into the music, and the music dissolves into the words, and a refreshment is produced, kind of oxygen." (Alan Watts) My Essay-with-Soundtrack’s mixing of PhiloSophy & Song is truly an Orphic medley of dialectics & mythopoetics, logos & mythos--Argument & Song (Blake). And, thus, Everybody Knows Musekal PhiloSophy heard on Re-Vision Radio means that a Song is as good as an Argument/Essay. In fact, through the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, they are in dialectical relationship; that is, there's a song hermetically hidden in the prose of an essay and, conversely, there's an essay waiting to be revealed in a song lyric. And the goal of Re-Vision Radio, through its Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, is to not only cause the listener to "hear" the familiar song empowered by philosophical meaning and "see" the essay's meaning amplified by song--thus experiencing a "new" song--, but to so seamlessly weave together essay and song that it feels like the song was actually tailor-made for the essay.

Through the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, the song is amplified in its depth of meaning by the nexus of interconnected literary associations (impersonal and personal) to which it resonates. Thus the literal academic text is translated to another dimension whose meanings are musically apprehended in a text above the basic text; the hypertext that is the Soul-text.

"When ... writing ... all the natural instincts are at work the way some people play a musical instrument without a lesson." (Lillian Hellman)

In fact, it wouldn't be too much to say that virtually everything my novel hybrid radio-text meant--the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, and the Musekal Philosophy it evoked--was later found intellectually worked out in a classic philosophical tome (one whose title even provided a rich metaphor for my conception):

"... we find the belief very widely disseminated that music is an emotional catharsis, that its essence is self-expression." "The content has been symbolized for us, and what it invites is not [just] emotional response, but insight." "... conveying a musical message." "... music articulates forms which language cannot set forth." "'There are feelings ... which are so constantly suppressed by the tumult of our passions, that they can reveal themselves but timidly, and are practically unknown to us.... Note, however, what response a certain kind of music evokes in our hearts: we are attentive, it is charming; it does not aim to arouse either sorrow or joy, pity or anger, and yet we are moved by it. We are so imperceptibly, so gently moved, that we do nor know we are affected, or rather, that we can give no name to the effect.... Indeed, it is quite impossible to name everything fascinating in music, and bring it under definite headings. Therefore music has fulfilled its mission whenever our hearts are satisfied.'" "These two excellent thinkers saw in music what most aestheticians failed to see--its intellectual value, its close relation to concepts, not by reason of its difficult academic 'laws,' but in virtue of its revelations. If it reveals the rationale of feelings, the rhythm and pattern of their rise and decline and intertwining, to our minds, then it is a force in our mental life, our awareness and understanding, and not only our affective experience." "But this explanation of music as a high abstraction, and musical experience as a purely logical revelation, does not di justice to the unmistakably sensuous value of tone, the vital nature of its effect, the sense of personal import which we meet in great composition every time it is repeated to us. Its message is not an immutable abstraction, a bare, unambiguous, fixed concept, as a lesson in the higher mathematics of feeling should be. It is always new, no matter how well or how long we have known it, or it loses its meaning; it is not transparent but iridescent. Its values crowd each other, its symbols are inexhaustible." "... the true nature of music, which is unconventionalized, unverbalized freedom of thought." "The real power of music lies in the fact that it can be 'true' to the life of feeling in a way that language cannot; for its significant forms have that ambivalence of content which words cannot have." "The assignment of meanings is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling. Because no assignment of meaning is conventional, none is permanent beyond the sound that passes; yet the brief association was a flash of understanding. The lasting effect is ... to make things conceivable rather than to store up propositions. Not communication but insight is the gift of music.... Its entire record is emotional satisfaction, intellectual confidence, and musical understanding." "Music is the myth of the inner life ...." (S. Langer, Philosophy In A New Key)

Music giving "insight," "a flash of understanding," music's connection with the inner life of the mind and soul--"intellectual value," "the force of mental life,"concepts," "revelations"--, the personally "associative" quality of music, the "musical message," the illuminated mind plus the "satisfied heart"--all these attest to and highlight my preoccupation with "philosophy" and popular music, and the reflection on these that eventually lead to my intuitions and independently conceived ideas, which evolved into a radio program--Re-Vision Radio's Tower of Song.

If my heart could do my thinking
And my mind begin to feel
I’d would see the world anew
And know what’s truly real.
(Van Morrison)

Therefore, Re-Vision Radio’s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack and its Musekal PhiloSophy turns out to be--metaphorically and literally-- PhiloSophy In A New Key

"Songs slip into your consciousness at a significant moment of development." (Patrick McCabe)

"When the thoughts unroll in the mind with the effortlessness of music and the precision of geometry." (Paul Bowls)

“To me, songs are a living thing. It’s not hunting to capture. I just want a glimpse of it, so I can record it.” (Neil Young)

"Like so many of my generation, I can landmark my life with songs." (Sting)

"In a funny way, that's right. It's unexplainable what a song means to you. Because remember, songs--its not like a movie you see once or twice. A song-- it ... it gets under your skin! And that's why we abandon ourselves to it. It has a sense of ... of ... a sense of ... of a kind of ... uplift ... of getting airborne! ... Everything feels possible ... and maybe more things are possible than we think!" (Bono, U2)

"We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it. " (Jerry Garcia)

"The best music... is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with. " (Bruce Springsteen)

"Music helps you find the truths you must bring into the rest of your life. " (Alanis Morissette)

“There are three things I was born with in this world, and there are three things I will have until the day I die: hope, determination, and song.” (Miriam Makeba)

"My life was saved by Rock'n'Roll. Because it was this kind of music that, for the very first time in my life, gave me a feeling of identity, the feeling that I had a right to enjoy, to imagine, and to do something. Had it not been for Rock'n'Roll, I might be a lawyer now." (Wim Wenders)

"It came out perfect. It came out gold. I was conscious I was writing . . . you have to speak in metaphors . . . that there was gold dripping out of the pen." (Robert Hunter, Grateful Dead singer-songwriter)

"I loved this music, and it is a matter of always looking for someone to share your passion with." (Ellie Greenwich, Tin Pan Alley songwriting partner of Jeff Barry)

Compare Langer's profound observations on music and philosophy with a sixties singer-songwriter:

"It is always new, no matter how well or how long we have known it, or it loses its meaning; it is not transparent but iridescent." (Langer)

"It was about the way a you want to hear certain words. The way certain things in music were appealing to the ear. For me, as a songwriter, it was about hitting that target every time .... And it has to do with reaching a certain vulnerable spot within each listener. You have to hit it there--I like to call it the 'sweet spot'--, and the minute you hit them with that little taste of sweetness . . . well, ya know, they can't bear it; they can't have just one hit, they have to go out and buy it so they can play it all the time."

And, finally, compare all this with Bono of U2 being interviewed by Sixty Minutes:

SM: You say when people are screaming at a concert its not about you; it's about them.
B: In a funny way, that's right. It's unexplainable what a song means to you.  Because remember, songs--its not like a movie you see once or twice.  A song--it's ... its ... it gets under your skin!  And that's why we abandon ourselves to it.  It has a sense of ... of ... a sense of , of a kind of ... uplift-- of getting airborne!  [Pause]  Everything feels possible ... and maybe more things are possible than we think!

Now compare all these with ancient and nineteenth/twentieth-century writers:

"Now when a man abandons himself to music, to play upon him and pour into his soul as it were through the funnel of his ears those sweet, soft, and direlike airs of which we were just now speaking, and gives his entire time to the warblings and blandishments of song, the first result is that the principle of high spirit, if he had it, is softened like iron and is made useful instead of useless and brittle." (Socrates, The Republic)

"Music as it exists in the old tunes or melodies . . . is Inspiration and cannot be surpassed. Nature has no tune, but Imagination has." (William Blake)

“Without music life would be a mistake.”
“Sing me a new song, the world is transfigured and all the skies rejoice.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

"The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. I do not wonder at the miracles which poetry attributes to the music of Orpheus, when I remember what I have experienced from the varied notes of the human voice. They are an incalculable energy which countervails all other forces in nature, because they are the channel of supernatural powers." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"Which brings up another topic--songwriting. I've always felt that ideas for songs are falling on us everywhere, like rain. If we are open to those ideas, feelings, etc... then we will catch them like buckets and at some point, whether in the middle of the night, or in the middle of our lives, the song (art in any form, visual, verbal, etc.) will come to life." (Jorge Luis Borges)

Musekal Philosophy: The Orphic Synthesis

The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack--a kind of “Visionary Recital”--mixing the noetic texts of Philosophy with the poetic texts of Song, broadcasts a sonorous literary texture and a “speculative” musical texture--a radio-text--that is an Orphic medley of the esoteric and the popular; the high and the low--the sub-textuality of a Soul-text. Remembering that “Philosophy” for Plato is a “care for soul” and begins in “wonder,” Re-Vision Radio, in mixing dialectics and song, puts the logos of scholarship in service to the god Eros. The Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack’s “soul-music” spans both logos and mythos; both the critical analysis and the enraptured intuition, both the down-to-earth investigation and the flight of poetic inspiration; the fusion of scholarly acumen with poetic reverie; philosophical aptitude with musical amplitude.

Thus Everybody Knows, since there’s a song hermetically hidden in an essay and, conversely, an essay waiting to be revealed in a song, that RE-VISION RADIO puts its philosophy best in song—as the lyric goes: “That’s why I’m telling you in song.”  [From "ReVisionRadio Manifesto & Visionary Recital."]

"When I read about this [historical figure] ... I knew there was a song in there somewhere." --Interview with member of The Battlefield Band, 11/1/08

With the Romantics, "the business of philosophy was no longer to argue and clarify but to expand and alter our vision." Therefore, the Musekal PhiloSophy of Re-Vision Radio’s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack (argument/song) finally leads not to ponderous academic desiccation but to ecstatic Dionysian celebration—to the "Joyous Science” (of Emerson and Nietzsche). This means it offers a mood of trance, enchantment, and ecstasy. However, it is not the brain-dead, new-age elation, but rather, because Mueskal PhiloSophy is both logos and mythos, what the Romantic poet, Wordsworth, said was "Reason in her most exalted mood," which issues in "music that can deepest reach.” (Emerson) Re-Vision Radio, then, carries on the great Platonic synthesis (between the earlier mytho-mystical, as it was transmitted through the Greek Mystery Religions, and the newer rationalist development in Philosophy that had broken away from it: "Intellectual rigor [read: "the logical"] and Olympian inspiration [read: "the mytho-poetic"] no longer stood opposed.”) of logos and mythos. Because Plato’s dialectic became--“after it has risen, with an incredible impulse, through the mania [madness] of Eros to the heights of philosophy”--mantic (poetic-prophetic) vision, Re-Vision Radio’s Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack would energetically channel philosophy back through the medium of radio, where it rises to the heights of enraptured song. This Musekal Philosophy, then, is what one sixties songwriter said the music of that time promised: "A deep ecstasy that can be had." If the Romantic Movement’s project of reuniting philosophy with poetry (reason and imagination, head and heart) meant that “the end of Philosophy is poetry,” then Re-Vision Radio would make music the end of philosophy.

Musekal Philosophy & the Troubadour's "Joyous Science": Scholarship as Performance Art

The Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist's ideal of the Orphic Scholar and Musekal Philosophy is Beat writer Jack Kerouac telling Beat poet Allen Ginsberg about the importance of spontaneous prose; of speaking from your heart and bellowing it out as if you were a crazed jazz man.

To reiterate: in the Tower of Song, the Orphic Scholar's address becomes more and more inspired and rhapsodic ("Reason in her most exalted mood"), until the Dionysian energy can no longer be controlled and breaks out into ecstatic song:

"... one, two, three, four ... But all joy wants eternity,—wants deep, deep, deep eternity!" (Nietzsche)