A Mason's Work

Clearly, when we start talking about things like music, we're talking about a whole domain

of ideas where people have been dedicated their entire life or entire departments and universities

to the study and understanding of music as a concept.

But in free masonry, we have kind of a very specific purpose for the recommendation of

the study of these things.

One of those purposes is like every other thing in free masonry we were doing is using

music as it lends into the realities of the experience, the human experience.

And so with that in mind, with the understanding that music means something kind of specific

in that context, how does that apply to the work that we do?

So music is, there's tons of definitions and I remiss if I don't suggest that this is,

you're looking for, you start getting into the sort of lexical conversation and it just

goes on forever.

But when we talk about music and free masonry, I think it's easy to agree that we're really

talking about emotional content.

Music is the language of emotional content, a nonverbal language of emotional content.

And it has rules and patterns and behaviors just like everything else.

There's tons of evidence for this if you go out and look online.

There is a standard, for example, for chord progression format that people will use.

It makes, you know, whatever 80% of the hit songs out there.

So when you start to understand though that music is effectively a means of emotional

communication, we get to start to look at the problems we're solving in our everyday

lives with that perspective.

And so for example, let's suggest we're talking about something as, you know, probably in

liveening as thing like accounting.

There are some folks that there's not a way you can frame accounting in context that they

really will understand that or grab it.

But if you can communicate the emotional content of accounting through music, things change,

right?

There is all sorts of ways that we can use this emotional language as if it were rhetoric,

as if it were explanatory or exploratory in a meaningful way.

Now I can't tell you what the language of accounting and the musical language of accounting

is.

It might be, you know, some sort of heavily math-based composition.

It might be some rhythms and things like that that really focus on relationships.

So find that as you start to explore music, it really does kind of open up in a really

linguistic way.

And you get to use some of the roles of music, chord progressions, circle of fifths, all

that kind of stuff, and get from a place where you may be trying to solve an intellectual

problem without providing the emotional content.

Now what does that mean?

That means there's a reason why, for example, companies have jingles.

Why would you have a jangle?

Well, in the days of radio you would create a jangle because people couldn't see your

tagline.

So you would put it to music and make it easy to remember.

The underlying, the underpinnings sort of thought there, though, is that the musical

accompaniment creates a different sort of mental and emotional hijack that operates

on an entirely different sort of physiological context than language.

And so oftentimes the jingle itself becomes, or the music itself becomes the replacement

or alternative to the message in a way that is so compelling and so meaningful that

the message itself is often discarded.

And you'll see that in a lot of the, like the stingers for things like Netflix, for example.

You listen to that.

It's designed to essentially get you sort of mentally and emotionally prepared for whatever

Netflix content is and whatever that stinger is designed to create.

So as you're stepping through the musical sort of perspective and understanding, don't

limit it to strictly speaking like song or melody or harmony or rhythm or any of that

kind of stuff.

Think about it in the context of that emotional sort of means of communication and evaluate

whether or not there's opportunities for you to flex your understanding in such a way

that the problem you're trying to solve or the challenge you're facing or the future

you're trying to build is there a way to leverage the understandings of music to create

better outcomes for what you're trying to do?

And with that, we'll talk to you next time.