The Music of the Spheres is more like jazz than classical.
Structured chaos, open plans, and conductor-free conduct.
Jazz at its best is a model of social democracy — enabling individuality and freedom within a cohesive structure. And this structure is not imposed by geometer gods, kings, or police (those social metronomes), but through resonance and syncopation. Auditory empathy.
Each player contributes to the emergent rhythms and textural coherences. But each player can be a soloist, if they want to. Figure and ground. Performer and listener. Subject and object.
This is unity in diversity.
This is America’s unique contribution to world culture.
This is the sounds of slaves turning their chains into musical instruments.
The libertarian vision of freedom is the vision of a soloist who merely wants to be left alone to play their own tune. This is the cold freedom of the spiritual miser. A genuinely American — and therefore, properly understood, global — freedom cannot be reduced to the petty dreams of slaveowners and stockbrokers.
Let us take the live jazz ensemble as our model of freedom instead. A perpetual round robin that began before we were born, and must be allowed to continue after we are all dead. The Higher Jazz Collective is no restriction on free expression, but the very medium through which the freedom and creativity of the universe itself finds voice.
And this voice must not be asphyxiated.
