Bach as Dance

The sustained note from the last chapter has not finished ringing. Let it carry. What that resonance has been telling us — across instruments, across centuries — is the working hypothesis of this one.

Music was a huge part of the last renaissance, and it is a huge part of this one. Music is the closest cultural consequence of changes in human thought and awareness — the first organ to register what the species is about to know.

Throughout the twentieth century, music kept handing us cultural proof of deep-seated changes in world civilization, and those changes have led directly into the profound civilizational collapse we now live inside. Civilizational collapse is so built into our history that we ought to be accustomed to it by now. The psychological, social, and geopolitical fallout suggests we have not adapted to such events well at all.

It was the collapse of the Middle Ages that brought about the European renaissance. It is the worldwide collapse of our own moment that has sparked this one.

Human life — and the universe of which we are a part, and our psychological and civilizational complexity along with it — tends toward harmony and balance and away from disorder. Toward equilibrium, away from entropy. Because of this tendency, repeated collapse leads to devastating change, and devastating change, eventually, to reflexive restoration. A renaissance is not a triumph of will. It is the natural, reflexive response of a complex system attempting to balance entropic forces and regain equilibrium.

One of the realms where this reflexive mechanism is most visible is music.

After the American Civil War — in truth a globalist civil war that happened to express itself most violently in the United States — the entire civilized world began to collapse into entropic disorder. By the early twentieth century the entropy was apparent in all the arts, but it was loudest in music, which became increasingly frantic and disharmonious as the world tipped toward complete collapse.

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century we have tipped dangerously toward complete socioeconomic collapse, with only a limited amount of harmony being restored — interestingly, in the United States and in a few other more Jeffersonian sovereign nations. And once again, we see the forces of harmony returning to music as a reflexive, equal and opposite reaction to the forces of entropy and disharmony. Hence the strong surge of classical music in our own time.

We have travelled, in only a few generations, from the disharmonious and entropic energy of the early twentieth century through the earthquakes of rock, jazz, folk, country, punk and rap, as the music reached desperately for answers — punctuated, occasionally, by more poetic forms from Led Zeppelin to Bob Dylan.

And now, following entropic disturbances in our science, in our geopolitics, in our socioeconomic, philosophical, and spiritual arenas, music and science together demonstrate an almost mathematically coherent return toward order and harmony.

Renaissance Two rises into being out of entropic disharmony, comparable to the entropic forcing house which made Renaissance One inevitable.

Only now, in the twenty-first century, do we have the perspectives of science, mathematics and music together to begin to find the language with which to explain these cataclysmic events to ourselves.

That language is what the rest of this book is for. From Biological Learning Machines through this volume, Gravity’s Mathematical Angels, this is the brief evolution of how these ideas became clear to one author — alongside a great deal of confluence with parallel work by others trying, in their own idioms, to regain sanity and common sense.

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The chapters that follow take the confluence as a wager, not a verdict. The golden mean, the harmonic series, the Fibonacci geometry of an f-hole, the phase cancellation that lets a quantum circuit behave like a soundboard — the case is that these are the same restorative mathematics expressing itself in different substrates, the universe rebalancing itself in whichever medium happens to be available. The chapters are the audition. The reader is the judge.

If the previous chapters let the note ring, this one asks where the note is going. The mathematical angels, when they arrive, will turn out to be the structures that were already singing in the string.