Pianos and violins and songs, oh, my...

In The Supper of the Lamb, Francis Farrar Capon tells of a musician who gave up playing the piano because so many of the notes he wanted to play lay "between" the piano keys, and therefore weren't accessible to him.  So he gave up the piano and took up the violin, which has no such restrictions, and then he was able to play all the notes he heard in his head, and was happy.

I think we tend to hear God's songs over us as though he were tuned to a piano, when in reality he is more like a violin, only ever-so-much-more-so.

Western European music theory breaks an octave into 12 tones, with equal spaces (intervals) between each tone. A "key" is defined by 7 of those notes creating a scale with a particular pattern of intervals. Musical traditions - folk and academic - around the world break the octave into more or fewer divisions, but not by any great margin. Over the years some musicians have developed experimental scales that include some of those "in-between" notes, like this example:

F, F-plus, F-plus-plus, F-sharp-minus-minus, F-sharp-minus, F-sharp.

This adds four named tones between the smallest traditional division in Western theory. But even these tiny divisions leave out a potentially infinite number of variations, most of which would be too small for human hearing to differentiate.

When God sings to us, we apply whatever system of theory we are familiar with to try and make out the harmonies. And most of the time, I think God sings to us in our own musical languages, so that we can, in fact, catch the musicality. But sometimes he just sings out a passage in full heavenly harmony, using combinations of divisions and variations that we have never heard, including many we can't hear at all - and to us it just sounds like noise. We can't figure out the chord structure. We can't discern the scale. Heck, we can't even hear the differences between many of the notes. And that doesn't even consider the pitches lying completely outside the range of human hearing.

But, we insist upon making our best attempt to fit God's symphony into our 12-note theory. In order to do so, we pick out the intervals that we can recognize as chords, and give them familiar names. The other tones we analyze as "added notes" or "incidental noises" or even "poorly-tuned instruments" and "mistakes."

Oh, yes, the complexity of God's little, whistled tunes blasts the inner workings of our analytical tools to smithereens. Unfortunately, we don't always know it.

Of course, I'm not talking about literal, audible music.  I'm really talking about how we see, hear, and experience God's revelation of himself in all the many ways he uses to do so.  We dismiss as distractions and mistakes anything that doesn't fit into the scheme of analytical theory we apply.  But those very tones may be the most critical to the beauty of God's harmony.  We need to work harder at learning more about his theory of music, than we labor at fitting his compositions into our societal, educational, denominational, human-derived systems of analysis.