The Numinous In Music Composition

Lately I've bene thinking about some of my favorite musicians and composers. I've been trying to pinpoint what it is about them that I find so spellbinding.

After pondering the question over the last several months, I've concluded that what causes me to really be inspired by a particular artist is that she brings the quality of the numinous into her music.

What Is Numinosity?

Well, numinosity is hard to define. It's like the concept of the holy. What makes an object holy? Who knows? What makes a work of art numinous? I don't know, but you can certainly feel it, sense it, ascertain it, in the music. For me, musicians like Keith Jarrett, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Aleksandr Scriabin, Tribe Called Qwest, Bill Evans, Brad Mehldau - all these towering figures of music composition reach the numinous. They don't simply make technically astounding, innovative music. They bring the holy into their music.

To me, it is this quality of the numinous that really separates the great musician from the genius musician. And tapping into the numinous doesn't necessary require superior technical virtuosity; Miles Davis was able to tap into it almost on a regular basis, and most jazz connoisseurs would argue that he wasn't the most technically-gifted trumpeter in jazz - probably not even among the top 10 most technically gifted.

But Miles and others had that uncanny ability to bring that dark, mysterious, almost haunting, evanescence to their music; that undefinable quality that makes the music sound as if it came from a super-sensible realm of Platonic Forms or spiritual being.