Isaac Rice: What Is Music?

Isaac Leopold Rice, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 43 pages

A forty-three page presentation of Isaac Leopold Rice's monograph on music, with a note by the series editor, the author's own introduction, and annotation from Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. A contents and central ideas page precedes the text and a list of further reading closes it. The frontispiece is by Victor Molev. The head-note gives the position the whole assembly is arranged to support: that the sound of music is a spiritual and dynamical force acting from within outwards.

The document falls into two halves that do different work. Part I is a survey and analysis of nine theories of music, ancient and modern, taken in order: the Chinese, the Hindoo, the Egyptian, the Grecian, the Arabic-Persian, the scholastic, Euler's, Herbert Spencer's and Helmholtz's — the last two receiving the fullest treatment, Helmholtz alone running from page 23. Part II turns from the survey to the compiler's own subject, insights to the occult origin of sound and music, and proceeds through five headings: space and time, treated as rest and motion; vibrations; colours and forms; internal government; and states of mind. The editor's opening section, “Sound, Colours, and Numbers proceed from 1 to 7,” states the correspondence on which the second half depends, and Professor Rice's own discussion and conclusions close the monograph. The arrangement means a reader can use the file either as a compact history of musical theory or as an argument about what sound is, the first half supplying the material the second half reinterprets.

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