The Same Four Chords (in Music and Religion)

The Same Four Chords (in Music and Religion) July 30, 2016

The above video is a fun illustration of something that is well-known to musicians but which sometimes surprises others: music recycles the same notes, chords, and intervals constantly.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Music is, after all, a kind of language, and in language we are not for the most part inventing new words, but using words that we already know in new and interesting combinations. Sure, there is musical plagiarism. But it takes more than simply using the same notes. Can you imagine someone accusing a composer of plagiarism, on the grounds that “they use the exact same twelve tones as in this famous piece by Schoenberg”? Music by definition involves creative use of the same notes and intervals, just as visual art involves the same colors and sometimes the same objects.

Alan Hovhaness is a composer whose music I’ve mentioned here before. Early in his career, he followed the trend of making atonal music. But he later abandoned that approach and decided to focus on composition that largely followed traditional forms of tonality. In many ways, it is more challenging to find new ways to make interesting music within a tonal framework, than to throw tonality by the wayside, since the result is (ironically but not at all unexpectedly) that one’s music ends up sounding very much like that of most other atonal composers.

My favorite music skirts the border between the two, retaining beautiful melodies that make tonal sense and yet doing daring things with the harmonies.

It has been said that music that we enjoy finds that balance between the predictable and the unexpected.

I wonder whether the same could be said about religion.

Some are surprised when they find the same images, ideas, and symbols recycled throughout religion. Some even think that all such similarities are evidence of plagiarism, direct borrowing from one religion by another.

And some try to deny the similarities, insisting that their religion is unique.

But in fact, the similarities in religion are no different than what we find in music, and have the same significance. Religions are human constructs, and explore that same edge between trying to be original while also having to work within the constraints of the palette of human ideas, words, concepts, and cultural values.

The extent to which anyone is ever truly completely original and innovative in either religion or in music is debatable. But if they were, it would likely sound like noise or gibberish. Without a common set of assumptions, we don’t have communication, whether musically or linguistically.

What do you think? Does this comparison between commonality and originality in music and religion help you understand either or both better?

Or is this just me repeating ideas you’ve already heard before, pretty much in the same way that others have expressed them?


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