"I feel as if I was inside a song"The Presence of Music in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Songs and Poems set to Music

The Presence of Music in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Songs and Poems set to Music

The only purely vocal music in a way was the First Music of the Ainur. As this music was heard before matter was created, no instruments can have existed. With the music being similar to a “solar symphony”, as discussed earlier, this music is vocal music insofar as the Ainur did not use any instruments or tools to create it, they only used their own abilities. The First Music cannot be heard in the physical world in its original form, so for the purpose of this paper it makes no sense to speculate about its definitive sound. We may argue that Ilúvatar himself has taught the Ainur to sing, but we can be fairly sure that this is not meant literally since the Ainur clearly had no physical form back then, so this is not a process of learning how to articulate sounds. Ilúvatar introduced the Ainur to the concept of music in the first place and taught them the theoretical framework used for the First Music.