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The Earth, which originated five billion years ago, is now relatively quiet on the surface, although there is seething unrest in its center. On the surface, liquid stone gradually began to cool while , nickel and iron moved to the Earth´s center building its core. Red-hot they continually found paths to rid themselves of superfluous heat. Volcanoes opened the Earth´s crust, water vapour escaped, from the chemical bonding water originated, leveled the craters, built large seas and oceans. The crust because thicker, stronger, broke again, built new plates, continents, which are always moving, wandering, leaving their mark on the stone structure. Stone and water are the basic elements of the planets.
Each of these processes are accompanied by noise, crashes, bangs, sounds and music. This phenomenon is not taken into account by geologists and their disciplines. The musician, however, knows this phenomenon, light sound, which is the primordial substance out of which all substances are built. Out of these, the first pictures and sounds originated, with their different rhythmic forms, made visible and audible for the human spirit. It was said that he who had possession of this music and its forces, was granted infinite power. However, the music of the gods managed to escape and settled in the seas, in trees and stones and finally in drums, zithers, bows and the axels of carts. The world, originally pure sound intelligence, materialized; the sound sank into the materialized matter.
In mythology, sound is understood as the bridge between living humans and the gods. Creation myths recount stories of a dark, incomprehensible sound from the Creator´s mother. It is described as the first audible sound. All other utterances are audible: thunder bound with lightning, the movement of the universe in the mundane music, the glowing song of the ringing dawn.
Much later humans appeared. Hearing was a major human developmental factor; the ability to hear Nature and other human beings. The inability to hear separates from humans, the inability to see separates from things, as the philosopher Kant said in organizing the senses. As time passed, many human cultures took the path of speech materialization, writing and, although much later, symbols for acoustic sounds were sought and found. Cultures which took a different path were marginalized. If human development were not characterized by writing, but only by hearing, how would it have been? Would exactly we middle Europeans have developed a more sensitive, delicate hearing ability? Would our consciousness, because of the much greater and more comprehensive sound perceptiveness, be more developed? Would we be more developed, ethically and morally, because of the fact that music cannot lie? Hearing is a part of every area of human life. The ear, in contrast to the eye, cannot be shut. It determines our sense of balance and controls our state of mind. Every philosophy, every belief, every religion, whether in India, China, the Middle East, the Orient or in America, has to do with music, with sound, rhythm, and acoustics.
The beginning of music in the western world, beyond any ethnological music rersearch, was established in one of Pope Gregor´s written verdicts in the 6th century. He demanded all monasteries to give written form to the sounds for vocal texts. From this point onward, our musical history has been marked by symbols for sounds. The next important epoch, the unaccompanied polyphony, developed around a building and the people who worked there, not because of a person. The Parisian Notre Dame Cathedral, a structure of extraordinary sonority, was made of stone. To continue music history here would be too expansive for out purpose. But in the end, it was always sound which determined development, the debate over the word and sound. In all religious connections, sound was the basic carrier of emotional states, ritual feelings and resonating being. Sound is invisible, it is perceived and processed with all the other senses. Resonance is the phenomenon which arouses sound in the human body, where religious perception occurs, in its own ritual beyond speech. It is there there where sound occurs within the human and meets the other senses to blossom on a new level. The stone was always a part of sound, in its sonority, its domination of space, its extensive resonance; characteristics which no other material offers. It is the material which is the major part of our planet. Second is water, which is bound to stone, and at the same time, is the element which can destroy it. This is the sound world, the laws of the acoustic world, our surrounding world which originated through sound, through the sounding of material. These are worlds that exist outside the human and resonate and spread in it. Every material can be made to sound. In the western world, our immediate cultural group, we do not regard the stone in this manner. Here, the stone is dead matter, a gravestone, symbolic of the life´s end. In China, the phenomenon of the sounding stone has been known for over 3000 years. There the stone is honored as a holy material.
Each stone has a sound; in each sound can be found and brougt forth. It is exclusively a question of artistic competence; the competence of the musician, his technical, mental and spiritual abilities. A stone should always be brought to sound slowly, almost indirectily and unintentionally; time is required. Oten it takes months, even years of artistic work to open the sound and live with it. It is always an significant moment when, after the stonemason´s work, the first sound in millions of years awakes and spreads slowly through space and humans. The power of sound is extremely complex and intensive. In constant, comprehensive work, the elemental forces of the stone have to be revealed. Only when one has achieved the ability to think, feel and communicate with the stone through the tactile senses, and respects and honors it, has he advanced. Stones are spread throughout the world; we stand on them, they influence our consciousness and thinking, our feeling of security, our resonances, although their importance is often forgotten. Stones are interreligious, interdisciplinary, international, intermedial, nothing halfway but always everything; beginning, end and the way. Stones are the Earth´s sound; on them the church is built, as Peter said. They are a bone of contention, the philosopher´s stone, and the noble stars. To live with their sound means being one with oneself, carrying thier power within. In the resonances boundaries disappear, and a music which can only speak its sole nature of truth is experienced. Here humanity can deal with each other extensively. Sound, rhythm, music is always cooperation, never competition; co-creation, as we say today, including all the senses. Co-creation reaches the entire world through the sound of stone. Here, irrespective of colour, opinions, religious beliefs, or education, humans can think, feel, sing and sound together. For about 8 years we have been working on the music of stone, and developing it based on our understanding of high professionalism and a comprehensive musical background, as well as a responsibility to express the universal music of stone at the highest level.
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