In making music, particularly music that is designed to communicate at a profound level, it helps to consider what it is that that music consists of.
Sounds are not just sounds, physical sound can be a lens or mirror for the whole gamut of energetic fields of experience. Despite being a placebo (mere sounds, or is it?), music can evoke consciousness and restitution that the conscious creation of sounds can blend and tap into.
Why do you think folk love music so much if it is merely physical. Is it because the richness of aliveness can be stored and shared through sounds, not simply as acoustic patterns? All that comes out of a cd player is numbers becoming transformed into soundwaves, yet they attune to a super-physical energy. The art of composition, improvisation or performing music is ultimately a human experience that communicates, as with the more descriptive or evocative sharing of human experience that literature brings us.
To invest energy into music may be as natural as sucking eggs, as with Mozart who never had to exert himself to remember compositions he had “heard” or it may require more willpower of aspiration or rewriting and reworking as with Beethoven who “sweated blood” over his scores. But either way music becomes so by an act of ceremonious agreement, by deciding that “these sounds” are worth listening to, reproducing on instruments. It is at root a ritual. The intent subsumes the form with its aroma.
Music linked to meditation is especially like this – because the effect on the listener so much more transcends the sonic perceptions than music which distracts the deeper awareness more. All this hinges on treating sound as a medium of transmission, as a radio receiver for subtle as well as more earthy energy.
It may be that this language switches you off. I’m sorry if it does, as I do appreciate that the internal worlds accessible through music are impossible ultimately to pin down. I find that putting it this way can help us question and thereby bring more alive the mystery and the wondrousness of the experiences possible.
Sound is taught at school physics lessons as being physical. Music lovers the world over realise without knowing it that that is a crass perception. Just as all matter has associations with thoughts and feelings, music particularly exemplifies how music physically is the footstool of a much greater energy, of a sandwich or spectrum of energies which we can embrace, inhabit and joyfully celebrate. Our associating sound with beautiful or depth intent gives it three quarters of its full scope as music.