Surprisingly, many people ask me about the role the Catholic church played in the suppression of musical theory. I recently found the site of Richard Merrick which I found to be fabulous! He has an understandable theory and history of this musical suppression. So I will give you a link to his site and summarize his writings here!
Richard Merrick’s Interference Theory
This is a quote from Richard Merrick!
“As my belief in Western science began to falter, I asked myself how simple harmonic information could be so completely absent from general public awareness. Why is this not common knowledge? Why is this not part of science, music, history and our entire educational system? Why would it not at least rate as a ‘fun fact’ in a sidebar in Popular Science or on an anatomy poster at the doctor’s office? And above all, why would the Church not want people to know all about it? After all, it could be taken as proof of a sacred ordering principle in nature, inferring the existence of a cosmic intelligence (call it what you will).
“So, I reoriented my study of history from this new perspective, and it quickly became obvious to me why we know virtually nothing of this lost knowledge.
“I discovered that harmonic philosophy had long been associated with paganism (the belief of God in nature) and that the Roman Catholic Church had worked very hard over a period of a thousand years to suppress it through canon law. This was the reason the tritone interval of a half-octave, nicknamed Diabolus in Musica or Devil in Music , had been banned from sacred music in 1234 AD by Pope Gregory IX (and still maintained to this day). The Church seemed well aware that the tritone could reveal the symmetry in music harmony and open the door to the ‘carnal knowledge’ of harmonics in the body and elsewhere in nature.
“As the most powerful force in the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was very successful in establishing and promulgating a franchise system whereby the faithful could only reach God through the Church (and its iconic brand) rather than through the study of self and nature. It was through this marketing and distribution network that the Church was able to social engineer vast populations by regulating admission to the afterlife.”
More next week!