The Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture

I THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE II

In order to form a just conception of the relation between music and architecture, it is necessary that the two should be conceived of, not as standing at opposite ends of a series represented by a straight line, but rather in juxtaposition, as in the ancient Egyptian symbol of a serpent holding its tail in its mouth. The head in this case corresponds to music, and the tail to architecture; in other words, though in one sense they are the most widely separated of the arts, in another they are the most closely related.

Music being purely in time and architecture being purely in space, each is, in a manner—and to a degree not possible with any of the other arts—convertible into the other, by reason of the correspondence subsisting between intervals of time and intervals of space. A perception of this may have inspired the famous saying that architecture is frozen music, a poetical statement of a philosophical truth. That which in music is expressed by means of harmonious intervals of time and pitch, successively, after the manner of time, may be translated into corresponding intervals of architectural void and solid, height and width.

In another sense, music and architecture are allied. They alone of all the arts are purely creative, since in them is presented, not a likeness of some known idea, but a thing-in-itself brought to a distinct and complete expression of its nature. Neither a musical composition nor a work of architecture depends for its effectiveness upon resemblances to natural sounds in the one case, or to natural forms in the other. None of the other arts are creative to such a degree; they are more re-creative, for in them the artist takes his subject ready-made from nature and presents it anew according to the dictates of his genius.

The characteristic differences between music and architecture are the same as those between time and space. Nature everywhere abounds in such correspondences; it is a fundamental theosophic tenet that nature, in its myriad forms, is the concrete presentment of abstract unities. Music is dynamic, subjective, mental, of one dimension; while architecture is static, objective, physical, of three dimensions. A work of architecture may, and sometimes does, include all of the other arts within itself.