The Music Was There All Along

What The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music and Fantasia may have been teaching me about hidden order, the unconscious and the strange power of music long before I knew to ask the question.

When I was a child, The Wizard of Oz was one of my favorite movies. I watched our VHS copy so many times that eventually I wore it out.

My other favorites were The Sound of Music and Fantasia.

For most of my life, I thought of these simply as movies I loved. But recently, while following one of my morning intellectual rabbit holes through sacred music, Pythagoras, Boethius, Leonardo da Vinci, Carl Jung and the ancient idea of the “music of the spheres,” I began to see a pattern.

All three films present worlds in which music is more than entertainment.

Music reveals something.

And perhaps I have been interested in that possibility for much longer than I realized.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

The Wizard of Oz begins in Kansas, in a constrained sepia world where Dorothy feels misunderstood and longs for something she cannot quite identify.

Before she goes anywhere physically, however, music takes her there.

“Over the Rainbow” imagines an unseen world before the tornado ever arrives.

Even the melody performs the idea. The opening phrase makes a dramatic octave leap. An octave represents one of music's simplest mathematical relationships: the upper note vibrates at twice the frequency of the lower, a ratio of 2:1.

That same proportional pattern appears elsewhere in nature. Jupiter's moons Io, Europa and Ganymede occupy an orbital resonance approximating 4:2:1. Idealized binary cell division proceeds 1, 2, 4, 8.

These phenomena have completely different physical causes. They are not evidence of a mystical force connecting Judy Garland to Jupiter.

But they share mathematical relationships.

And humans noticed this very long ago.

The Pythagoreans discovered that harmonious musical intervals could be expressed through simple numerical ratios. From this emerged an extraordinary philosophical possibility: if music contains mathematical harmony, and the heavens move according to mathematical relationships, perhaps harmony is not something humans invented.

Perhaps it is something we discovered.

This became the ancient idea of the music of the spheres.

The Harmony We Cannot Hear

The music of the spheres did not necessarily mean planets literally produced songs audible to human ears. It described a universe governed by proportion, relationship and mathematical order.

The late Roman philosopher Boethius developed this idea into three kinds of music.

Musica mundana was the harmony of the cosmos.

Musica humana was the harmony within the human being—the relationship among body, soul and intellect.

Musica instrumentalis was the music human beings could actually hear and perform.

This is radically different from our modern conception of music as something we stream while driving or preparing dinner.

For Boethius, audible music was only one manifestation of something much larger.

We were musical, too.

And that changes the question from “Why do humans like music?” to something stranger:

Why does mathematical order outside us produce such powerful responses inside us?

You Had It All Along

This brings me back to The Wizard of Oz.

Dorothy travels through an extraordinary world looking for someone powerful enough to solve everyone's problems.

The Scarecrow wants a brain.

The Tin Man wants a heart.

The Cowardly Lion wants courage.

Yet throughout the journey each repeatedly demonstrates the very quality he believes he lacks.

And Dorothy ultimately discovers that the Wizard cannot give her what she needs either.

The line many of us remember from the movie is some variation of:

You had the power all along. It was always within you. You just had to find it.

Those are not the film's exact words. The actual exchange is subtler. Glinda tells Dorothy that she has always had the power to return home, but that Dorothy had to discover something for herself first.

That idea may be even more powerful.

Knowledge cannot always simply be handed to us.

Sometimes we must experience something before we can recognize what was already present.

The journey does not necessarily give us the thing we were searching for.

Sometimes the journey makes it conscious.

The Hills Are Already Alive

Then there is The Sound of Music.

The opening contains another remarkable proposition.

Maria does not announce that she has brought music to the mountains.

She tells us:

“The hills are alive with the sound of music.”

The music is already there.

She perceives it.

That is remarkably close to Boethius's musica mundana: the idea of harmony existing in the world independently of the person observing it.

Maria herself doesn't quite fit within the institution containing her. She leaves the ordered enclosure of the abbey and moves into the mountains, singing.

Later she enters another kind of rigid structure: the von Trapp household.

The children are controlled through whistles and military discipline. Maria introduces music, and something changes.

Individual voices become a chorus.

Discipline becomes relationship.

Isolation becomes participation.

Music restores something human to the house.

And then the larger world descends into political disorder. Nazism arrives. The family must flee.

Music cannot eliminate danger.

But it helps them preserve their identity within it.

Boethius would have understood this particularly well. He spent much of his intellectual life thinking about harmony and order, only to be imprisoned and eventually executed after his own political world collapsed.

His great question became: Does apparent disorder mean that deeper order has ceased to exist?

What World Is Inside This Sound?

And then there was Fantasia.

Looking at it now, I find this childhood favorite almost uncanny.

Fantasia essentially asks the audience to watch music think.

Bach becomes abstract shape, light and movement.

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring becomes the formation of the Earth and the evolution of life.

Beethoven becomes mythology and nature.

Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice transforms musical movement into escalating magic and chaos.

Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain gives form to darkness and terror before Schubert's Ave Maria brings dawn.

The organizing force is music.

Sound becomes image.

Image becomes story.

Story becomes meaning.

The animators were effectively asking:

What world is contained inside this music?

I am now asking almost the reverse question:

What inside me responds to this music?

Leonardo and the Search for Pattern

Leonardo da Vinci provides another bridge.

Leonardo was not only a painter and inventor. He was a musician who studied sound, vibration, proportion, anatomy, water and movement.

His notebooks repeatedly reveal the same intellectual instinct: look at apparently unrelated things closely enough and similar structures begin to emerge.

Water curls.

Hair curls.

Air flows.

Blood flows.

Bodies possess proportion.

Geometry appears in nature.

Leonardo was looking for relationships beneath appearances.

But he also understood the danger inherent in the human ability to find patterns. He encouraged artists to stare at stains, clouds and irregular surfaces and notice the landscapes, faces and battles the imagination produced.

The mind does not merely receive reality.

It interprets it.

That presents exactly the problem at the center of my current experiment with music.

When a particular song suddenly feels extraordinarily relevant to my life, has my unconscious recognized something important?

Or am I imposing a pattern because I want one to exist?

Perhaps sometimes it is one.

Perhaps sometimes the other.

The interesting work is learning to distinguish between them.

Music and the Unconscious

A song can affect us before we have explained why.

A melody can summon a person we were not consciously thinking about. A lyric can suddenly articulate something we have been unwilling to say. Music can return us to a former version of ourselves almost instantaneously.

My experiment is not to treat these moments as prophecy.

It is to treat them as evidence.

What was I thinking immediately before the song caught my attention?

Which lyric stopped me?

What memory appeared?

What did my body register before my conscious mind began explaining it?

The idea commonly associated with Jung is that until we make the unconscious conscious, it can direct our lives while appearing to us as fate.

That suggests another possibility.

Perhaps controlling our fate does not primarily mean controlling the external world.

Perhaps it begins with becoming more conscious of what is already operating within us.

The Pattern I Didn't Know I Was Following

Looking back at my three childhood favorites, I see something I could not possibly have articulated then.

Dorothy crosses from Kansas into Oz and discovers that what everyone was seeking was, in some sense, already present.

Maria hears music already living in the hills and uses music to turn disconnected individuals into a family.

Fantasia takes invisible sound and reveals entire worlds inside it.

Again and again, the pattern is:

ordinary world → disruption → wandering → discovery → transformation

And underneath it:

Something invisible was there all along.

Pythagoras looked at musical intervals and perceived number.

Boethius looked at the cosmos and the human being and perceived harmony.

Leonardo looked at water, bodies and movement and perceived recurring structures.

Jung looked into the psyche and perceived patterns operating beneath consciousness.

Perhaps art sometimes allows us to recognize patterns before we possess the rational language to explain them.

That may be what fascinates me about sacred music now. It may also explain something about the movies I loved as a child.

The ancients looked upward and asked whether we could hear the hidden order of the cosmos.

I find myself looking inward and asking whether we can hear the hidden order of ourselves.

And perhaps the remembered wisdom of The Wizard of Oz remains so powerful because it expresses that possibility in the simplest terms:

You had the power all along.

The journey was necessary because you had to find it.

Author’s disclosure: This essay was developed with the assistance of AI as an editorial, organizational and critical-analysis tool. The original ideas, memories, observations and central argument are the author’s. AI was used to assist with research, fact-checking, structural development and editing while preserving the author’s responsibility for the work’s content, interpretation and conclusions.