The Book of the World

Buddha Shakyamuni, late seventeenth or eighteenth century (silk embroidery, appliqué) from Tibet or Bhutan. Rubin Museum of Art.

The theme of the 2025 Aspen Music Festival takes its name from Wassily Kandinsky’s treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911). Like a surprising number of other artists and thinkers in his high-modernist historical moment, Kandinsky believed that art is a vessel for the artist’s soul and perhaps something more—a means by which spiritual forces can manifest in a world that has forgotten how to think spiritually.

Some find the term “spiritual” cloying, but there is no other common word in English for the range of experiences it denotes—feelings of transcendence, feelings of oceanic oneness, a sense of the sacred and of numinous power. And yet in the modern era, the reality of such feelings is always in doubt, and intellectuals approach them with a mixture of anxious curiosity and disavowal. Speaking for many modern thinkers, Sigmund Freud wrote “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself.” But there are always artists, like Kandinsky, who feel the breath of the spiritual nevertheless, and who seek to express it. In the 2025 Aspen Music Festival, we hear music from three composers—Richard Wagner, Gustav Holst, and Christopher Theofanidis—who each, in different ways, manifest “the spiritual in art.”

But in what does this “spiritual in art” consist? “Spirituality” is a notoriously vague concept; indeed, it points to a domain of life that is inherently resistant to ordinary language. To William James, ineffability is one of four essential characteristics of mysticism, which is the contemplative core of what we call spirituality. Music has an intimate relationship with this unspeakable domain. Musical and mystical experience alike present us with experiences so vivid, so definite, so real, that they banish all intellectual doubts and qualifications, even as they leave us empty-handed, with nothing more tangible to show for our adventures than stammering accounts of fading visions. Felix Mendelssohn wrote that “the thoughts which are expressed to me by "the God(s)" that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.”

In his little-known essay “The Mystic, the Philistine, and the Artist,” Holst comments that “all mystical experiences seem to be forms of union.” Again, a parallel to music suggests itself, and Holst suggests that the experience of playing chamber music might show us what “mystical union” might mean: “Your self is merged in the whole; true, but the whole is likewise merged in you. You have trained your instrument to obey your will. Whose will is it obeying now? Your playing is transcended . . . and yet it is yours, and in you the playing of the others is transcended.” In everyday life, my self meets another person, an Other, as an objective presence set apart from me; in chamber playing, I discover that my self is the Other, and vice versa, in some way I can never explain. And why stop there? The instrument in my hands, the roof over my head, the sky over the roof … in musical and mystical experience, all the myriad things cohere in a oneness that bursts with a meaning that is overwhelmingly definite and convincing, even if it will never convince a skeptic. The skeptic calls the mystic “a blind man looking in a dark cellar for a needle that is not there,” writes Holst, who gives the mystic’s reply: “The cellar may not have been dark, in fact I am not sure that the cellar existed. I am not sure that you exist. I only know one thing: I have seen the needle!”

And here is the thing: the needle is alive, as surely as I am. In the unitive consciousness of the mystic, the intelligence that we know in ourselves is necessarily the intelligence of the whole. The world is something with a mind, or indeed is Mind itself. Call it God, Atman, Buddha Mind, primordial chaos, or whatever you like, it is (to use the central image of Siddhartha, She) the river from which all spiritualities and religions flow. The world has a soul: everything flows out of that soul, everything returns to it, and in between lie the myriad things, all our doings and desires, all the distinctions and particulars that complicate and obscure the primordial unity of the one world, Unus Mundus. Thus does Antoine Faivre, the father of modern academic studies in esotericism, partially define his subject in terms of “the idea of living nature:” “Permeated with invisible but active forces, the whole of Nature, considered as a living organism, as a person, has a history, connected with that of the human being and the divine world.” And we can trace this idea as it runs like a thread through three pieces of music performed at Aspen this year: Theofanidis’s ritual music drama Siddhartha, She; Wagner’s opera Parsifal; and Holst’s orchestral suite, The Planets.

It might be surprising to learn that The Planets is not really about the astronomical bodies that orbit our sun. Rather, each movement of The Planets is a character-study of an astrological persona. Neptune, for instance, is not a pale-blue ice giant wrapped in a vast water-ammonia ocean; it is “Neptune the Mystic,” a character whose attributes include chaos, confusion, magic, illusion, perhaps delusion … Neptune is not an object, but something like a person whose influence might tug at our own lives. Do you know someone who floats through life as if in a dream, with no firm boundaries or definite plans? That’s the influence of Neptune right there. There is some part of yourself, however small, that is like that, too. What is in you, down here in this earthy realm, is also in the heavens: “as above, so below,” as the legendary mage Hermes Trismegistus said. The Mind of the cosmos is also your mind.

Like many artists of his era, Holst was influenced by Theosophy, a spiritual movement aimed at spiritual regeneration through the rediscovery of spiritual teachings from the East and occult learning from the West. The musicologist Raymond Head has suggested that The Planets was inspired by The Art of Synthesis, an astrological treatise by a Theosophist named Alan Leo. In The Art of Synthesis, we find a pen-portrait of each planetary character, and in some of them we can find strong hints of Holst’s later portraits, not least in the fact that Holst borrowed the title of Leo’s chapter on Neptune for his last movement, “Neptune the Mystic.” And musicologist Meredith Rigby argues that the influence runs deeper. She writes that the wordless and offstage chorus that ushers The Planets to its enigmatic conclusion suggests the annihilation of time and space common to mystical experience. There is no text for the listener’s mind to grasp, no visible singing bodies for listeners to relate to their own, and no definite end to the singing. The breathtaking final gesture by which the chorus fades into silence and invisibility evokes Leo’s description of Neptune as “a state of things undifferentiated, disordered, without shape or definite form.”

Of course, astrology is not the only influence of Holst’s The Planets, which was immediately acclaimed as the English expression of a modernism that contemporaries heard in works by Stravinsky, Ravel, Strauss, and others. The Planets is full of bracingly modernist compositional techniques, notably the 5/4 ostinatos of “Mars,” the bitonality that appears in “Mars,” Mercury,” and “Neptune,” and of course the latter movement’s offstage chorus. And we can also hear echoes of earlier music in the symphonic tradition that The Planets was eager to join. For instance, the brutal end of “Mars,” with nineteen sledgehammered blows of a single dissonant chord (marked ffff) before the final coup de grâce, might recall the murder of the giant Fasolt by his brother Fafner in Wagner’s Das Rheingold.

Wagner was a powerful influence on those modernists who, like Holst, sought to attune themselves to the unseen spiritual world. His last opera, Parsifal, has inspired an entire tradition of occult Wagnerism: philosopher Ernst Bloch called Parsifal “Christian-Buddhist-Rosicrucian art-religion or religious art,” and many artists and thinkers have treated it as scripture for a personal gnosis. English occultist Aleister Crowley wrote that the ending of Parsifal is “the last Word of the Song that thine Uncle Richard Wagner made for Worship of this Mystery”; “this Mystery” being Crowley’s new religion of Thelema. And Crowley was hardly the only one to find in Parsifal a spiritual message addressed specially to him. In his novel VALIS, Philip K. Dick (by way of his fictional doppelgänger) goes in search of the source of the theophanic experiences that beset him, getting lost in a maze of synchronicities and signs, among them Parsifal. “There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive,” he writes: Dick’s spiritual experience was of an ecstatic and terrifying “living nature” that Parsifal both pictured and embodied.

Parsifal is a young fool who wanders into the sacred domain of the Grail knights. In this realm, the knights know every creature as kin, and they are shocked when Parsifal thoughtlessly kills a swan. When the knight Gurnemanz teaches him the sacredness of every life, Parsifal takes his first step on the path to enlightenment. Gurnemanz takes him within the Grail sanctuary, where he witnesses the agony of Amfortas, suffering from a wound that does not kill him and from which he cannot heal. The wound was inflicted by the sorceror Klingsor, who wielded the Holy Spear that Amfortas let slip when he was seduced by Kundry. Klingsor compels Kundry to seduce Parsifal, too, but Parsifal’s compassion for Amfortas awakens him. He is thus set on his final path, whereby after many years he returns to the Grail knights with the Spear. With the Spear, he heals Amfortas, releases Kundry from her suffering, and redeems the community.

The world of Parsifal is, again, a world of living nature, a world ensouled. The Spear is not a weapon, the Grail is not a cup, the Wound is not a piece of mangled flesh: they are spiritual presences with their own agency. Their mysterious presence is expressed through Wagner’s leitmotif technique. At the beginning of the Prelude, a melody arises out of silence, bearing short melodic figures that symbolize the Spear and the Wound. The first minute and a half of the Prelude presents these musical symbols with the intensity of a ritual, like a priest holding sacraments aloft, within an unmoving A-flat-major block. After a charged silence, the block is shifted up a third, to C minor, and the sacraments are held up again in a different light. Thereafter, new musical objects emerge: a theme for the Grail and a theme for Faith. The Prelude is a quarry of motivic materials from which Wagner will mine almost all the music we hear in the subsequent drama. It is a part that contains the whole, summing up both the work’s drama and its abstract and hieratic mood.

In the third act, Parsifal has found his way back to the Grail knights after many years’ wandering. No longer a fool that wantonly killed a swan, he becomes almost an enlightened one, a Buddha. It is Good Friday, and the world reveals itself to Parsifal as a vast single life, blooming and breathing and dying and being born. In his journal, Dick wrote that the Good Friday Music “reaches a synthesis above any single religious system” and concludes, “the anima enters the modern Western world there, precisely.” For Dick, as for Crowley, Parsifal is more than music—it is revelation and initiation.

Siddhartha, She is a new music drama by composer Christopher Theofanidis and librettist Melissa Studdard, based on Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha. In this dramatization, Siddhartha is a noblewoman who rebels against her Brahmin caste and leaves home. Accompanying her on her journey is her friend Govinda, and together they join in the ascetic spiritual practices of the Samanas. After becoming disenchanted with the Samanas, they leave to seek the Buddha, Gotama. Govinda finds her place in the Buddha’s assembly, but Siddhartha remains unsatisfied. She meets a ferrywoman, Dharuna, and senses that the river is a “book of the world”—a realization that foreshadows her ultimate spiritual awakening. But first she falls into a life of sensuous luxury with the courtesan Kamala and loses her way on the spiritual path.

Or does she? Siddhartha, She suggests that spiritual awakening is not something amputated from everyday life; it does not purify us of our desires, aversions, and follies, but in some way embraces them. To paraphrase Shunryu Suzuki, spiritual awakening is one continuous mistake. Siddhartha can only grasp the fullness of the river’s lesson once she has lived out her love for Kamala.

Siddhartha, She differs from Hesse’s story in several ways, most obviously in the gender of Siddhartha, Govinda, and the ferryman. Studdard notes that the courtesan Kamala is the only major female character in Hesse’s novel, and in her new version of the story she seeks to rebalance the forces of masculine and feminine, not only in the casting but within each character as well. In Hesse’s story, Siddhartha is a slightly impersonal figure for whom love is mostly a distraction from his high spiritual purpose. In this music drama, love itself is a path to wisdom. The vision of love at the heart of Siddhartha, She is “more about connection, care, acceptance and celebration of each other, and a spiritual deepening that is enhanced, not hindered, by the relationship,” says Studdard.

However else Siddhartha, She may differ from Hesse’s Siddhartha, it holds true to that novel’s vision of an ensouled cosmos. Indeed, this “ritual music drama” aims at initiating us into that cosmos. Theofanidis and Studdard open up the space of the Klein Music Tent through video projections, dancers, multiple choruses, and Patrick Harlan’s immersive sound design. These elements combine to form a contemplative space that dissolves our sense of the work as a discrete and bounded entity, allowing it to extend indefinitely outward into our outside-the-tent experience. Above all, it is the river that becomes the main symbol of the ensouled world, the Atman, the mind-of-all whose smallest part contains the whole. The river is the great One out of which emerges the Many; it is the source and destination of all earthly complications. In scene 4, Siddhartha encounters the river, and boundaries between self and other begin to disappear:

Suddenly I can’t tell the difference

between my soul lifting

and a bevy of swans

shaking free from dawn,

can’t tell if the river is an hour

slipping through shadow,

or a prayer chanting itself,

the self that is my own self

but not, the river that is the fish

that shimmer within it,

but different—each fish, each swan,

each person, each ripple

its own letter in the book of the world.

This beautiful passage, its melody stammering before the immensity of revelation, is a poetic and musical expression of the mystery that allured Wagner and Holst as well. (The words here might remind us of Holst’s experience of playing chamber music.) If a single phrase could sum up what “the spiritual in art” might mean, perhaps it would be “the book of the world.” Each of the three works—Siddhartha, She, Parsifal, The Planets—is, in its own way, a book of the world: a book in which we might find our own names and faces inscribed. — © Phil Ford