Divine overtones in human consciousness

Abstract

Attunement with signs of the divine is a constant in the story of humanity, with convictions going from declarations of outright godlessness to confessions of intimate nearness, and variations of divine absence and presence articulated in between. Messiaen’s intermedial connection of sound and colour – or son-couleur overture – serves as an appropriate musical threshold to better understand the irruption of the God-question in human consciousness and its multiple expressions down the ages. With Messiaen’s synaesthesia acting as a threshold to one’s ‘inner’ landscape, we are awakened to the hidden dimensions of the human spirit that come alive when our educated senses playfully explore reality, initiating a critical inquiry out of sane curiosity. [excerpt]