Why God Loves The Blues

1. About music in general

 1.1 Science

There are two competing theories about what music is: one says that music is an unnecessary development of speech, another says that music is an alternative mode of communication.

The recent research (‘Universality of Music’, Scientific American), conducted across 55 different cultures and languages, showed the existence of a common pattern.

The tempo of speech is faster than the tempo of song lyrics, and the pitch of speech is less stable than the pitch of song lyrics.

The general consensus among scientists today is that music is an alternative way of communication, evolutionarily developed in order to unite people (social-bonding hypothesis).

The idea that music is a combination of numbers was put forward by Pythagoras around 500 BC.

Until then, science did not provide explanations concerning the mechanism of the influence of music.

1.2 Religion

Music’s ability to convey extra semantic information and profound emotions was recognized a long time ago.

We find information about songs in the Bible (Torah):

The song of Miriam and Jewish women after the crossing of the Red Sea.

The giving of the Torah in the desert at Sinai began with the sounding of the Shofar (made of the ram’s horn)

The Torah itself is called The Song – “So Moses wrote down this song that day and taught it to Israelis (Deuteronomy 31:22).

There were also ‘The Song of Deborah’ and ‘The Song of Songs’, written by King Solomon etc.

King David played the lyre and wrote Psalms. Every Psalm has a distinctive corresponding melody.

In the First Temple, the Levites were divided into two equal groups – gatekeepers and singers. The minimum number of singers was 12.

The requirements for the orchestra were as follows: a minimum of two lyres, a minimum of two flutes, a minimum of two trumpets, a minimum of nine harps, and one cymbal.

In the 9th century, Jewish scribes- the Masoretes completed the writing of the Torah with cantillations (te’amim). The cantillations determined the pitch and rhythm of the chanting. The chanting became an inseparable part of Jewish prayer. Characteristic of the Jewish chanting is melisma and collective response.

Today we know three modes of Jewish chanting: 

1. Ahava raba – based on D dominant 7th chord with sharp 5th and diminished 9th
2. Magen Avot – D minor
3. Adonai Malach – D dominant 7th chord
4. A combination of the previous three.

According to tradition, the above-mentioned modes stem from the music of the Temple.

1.3 Christian music:

In Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox traditions, the prayers’ chants have much in common between them

and all three have a lot in common with the Jewish prayer chants, which is not surprising, given that Jesus, the Apostles and the first Christians were Jewish.

But there were certain differences. Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant movement, introduced important modifications to the liturgy.

A skilled musician himself, Luther allowed the use of the local languages in the prayer's chants, introduced the AAB bar system and encouraged collective response chanting.

2. To which faith do African Americans belong?

According to history books, the first arrival of black slaves from Angola to North America took place in 1619.

Their number was 20. Soon after, the numbers significantly increased. The slaves were converted to Christianity, in the Protestant Church.

According to statistics nowadays, two out of every three Afro-American people are Protestants. The story goes that the masters did not allow their slaves to pray together with white people, so the slaves organized their own congregations. It’s obvious that Black slaves learned the Biblical narrative and became familiar with the  chanting practice and tunes of the prayers.

It’s important to point out that the slaves logically drew analogies between their hard life and the life of Jewish slaves in Egypt. We can see it from the titles and content of their songs: ‘Go Down Moses’, ‘Swing Low, Swing Chariot’ and many others. Those songs were called spirituals, and they were the forerunners of the blues…

3. Intermediate conclusions:

There were black slaves, who brought with them their natural musicality, melodies and rhythms from Africa.

They were converted to Protestantism and became familiar with the chanting techniques and tunes of the prayers.

Their life was full of hardships, and they drew their hopes and inspirations from the Biblical narrative, which they expressed by singing spirituals and then... His Majesty Blues appeared. That was the beginning of the Music Revolution.

Now we should ask the question – what is the blues?

 4. The Blues

4.1 It’s not easy to give an exhaustive definition, but there are certain features which define the blues:

• Blues, as a rule, has AAB structure
• The tune is based on a number of ‘tonics’ – pentatonic, hexatonic etc
• Blues tunes have ‘blue notes’ which are sung microtonally (blue notes symbolise sorrow and depression)
• Singing techniques – ‘melisma’ is often used
• In classical blues, the emotive pattern is of ascending and descending order similar to prayer

The main question, in my view, is why did the blues become the foundation of jazz, rock and almost all modern music?

Why is the blues still popular today?

In order to answer this, let’s analyze the structure of the blues melody.

4.2 One of the most popular blues ’tonics’ is:

C E flat F F sharp G B flat C

F sharp divides the scale into two equal parts.

The distance between C and E flat is 1.5 tone, between C and F 2.5 tone.

The distance between G and B flat is 1.5 tone, between G and C 2.5 tone.

We have two symmetrical sequences: C E flat F and G B flat C and the dividing note, F sharp.

What is so special about the numbers 1.5 and 2.5?

In order to explain, I refer the reader to mathematics.

4.3 Golden ratio

The definition of the ‘golden ratio’ or ‘divine proportion’, (it was so-called by Luca Pacioli – a medieval mathematician-monk from Milano) is simple:

If we take the line AC and the point B in between, the ‘golden ratio’ is defined by the equation AC/AB=AB/BC.

In mathematics, ‘golden ratio’ is represented by the Greek letter phi, and is equal to 1.61….. the irrational number. The point B divides the line AC approximately 62%/38%.

It is often called the number of G-d, the number of beauty, the magic number. Here is why. Miraculously, we find ‘phi’ in paintings, sculptures, tunes, in the structure of galaxies, in quantum physics and in many more areas of life.

Why is that? These questions puzzled the best minds of humankind for centuries.

It’s interesting to note that, intuitively, we’d expect to find the harmony in the middle, 50/50, but we find it at the 62/38 point; the harmony is asymmetrical.

In my view, that confirms the idea that in order to create something beautiful one must break the symmetry of one’s soul and leave the state of equilibrium.

Now it’s time to go back to the blues.

4.4 The ‘magic number’ of the blues

If we take the line with the length 4 (the sum of 2.5 and 1.5), then 2.5 and 1.5 constituted the division 62.5%/ 37.5% – the ‘golden ratio’

On the scale it corresponds to the distance between C and F - 2.5 and C and E flat - 1.5, G and C - 2.5 and G and B flat - 1.5 – the ‘golden ratio’ of the blues.

It looks like the conclusion of the story – blues is based on the ‘golden ratio’, and that is why it’s so beautiful and fundamental. However, there is still no explanation of the specialness of the ‘golden ratio’.

In order to answer this question, I invite the reader to enter the realm of Kabbalah of Information.

5. Kabbalah of Information, the structure of Creation, Soul and Blues

Kabbalah is the Jewish mystical teaching, the hidden meaning of the Bible. In its essence, Kabbalah is the Theory of Creation, of the relationships between G-d and Man, Soul and Body, Life and Death, Good and Evil and many more.

The Kabbalah of Information is based on traditional Kabbalah and the Information Theory developed by Claud Shannon in 1942. Besides, the Kabbalah of Information incorporates scientific knowledge, accumulated by humankind. The subject is very broad, but I’ll try to be concise.

Below, there are some tenets of Kabbalah of Information:

• Everything is made of information.
• Creation is an information space, made of concepts of certain complexity and dimensionality, which are ordered and structured.
• The structure of the Soul is similar to the information structure of Creation.
• The distance between the structures in information space is determined by their likeness, expressed by numbers and symbols.

Now, back to the blues.

In the Torah (Exodus) we read:

“G-d spoke to Moses, saying: ‘They shall make an Ark of acacia wood, two cubits and a half shall be its length, a cubit and a half its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height… You should place in the Ark the Testimony that I shall give you... You should make two Cherubim (and put them on top of the Ark)...

It is there that I will set My meetings with you, and I shall speak with you…’”

We see the same numbers, 2.5 and 1.5 as in the blues hexatonic scale – the ‘golden ratio’.

The Ark was in the Holy of Holies of the Temple, and inside the Ark were two tablets with the inscriptions of the Ten Commandments. It was the place where Moses received the Prophecies.

In terms of Kabbalah of Information, it was the ’shortest distance’ to G-d, since the ‘golden ratio’ is embedded in the structure of the information space of Creation and in the structure of the Soul.

So the blues also brings us to the shortest distance to G-d, since the blues is determined by the same numbers as the Ark of Covenant.

Written by Eduard Shyfrin

 The materials for this article were taken from Wikipedia, Chabad.org, Pew Research Centre.

Kabbalah of Information Theory was developed by the author.

The detailed explanations can be found in my book ‘From Infinity to Man’, available on Amazon and on my personal page on the website https://www.jpost.com/kabbala (Jerusalem Post newspaper).