Dolores O'Riordan and the Great Mother: The Phrygian secret of her best song Dreams

When I recently made the playlist of 48 recordings of Dreams I thought maybe I was going overboard but then I discovered a Billboard magazine article as 10 reasons why Dreams is one of the best songs ever written. There was one crucial secret that article did not notice.

When I reviewed the harmonics of the song Dreams - it is the archetypal Yin-Yang-Emptiness chords (2:3 and 3:4 as the Perfect Fifth/Fourth and 1:2 as the root chord). That is not surprising as that is the backbone of music all over the world. But as I pointed out the Irish singing style of Dolores incorporates microtonal fluctuations and intonations - and she includes an octave overdubbing of falsetto harmonics.

But there is a deeper secret - when Dolores kicks into the Irish "yodeling" - the song shifts to G major! This is very strange. I studied music theory intensely along with playing tons of music. You don't just switch from E major to G major suddenly. They are not the same key. Unless you are doing something very ancient and profound. I mentioned this SAME chord change in Ravel's 2nd piano concerto in G Major - with the 2nd movement in E.

https://www.spin.com/2018/01/cranberries-dreams-perfect-song-dolores-oriordan/ 

 Then, after one chorus, it careens into an unexpected key and repeats almost the same progression there. It’s an unconventional move: Most songwriters would have placed it at a later, more climactic moment in the song, if at all; most singers would fill it with something other than the ecstatic yodeling that would later become a familiar hallmark of O’Riordan’s style. It’s a little jarring every time you hear it, no matter how prepared you are.

I had made a playlist of Ravel's 2nd movement as well - as an example of Frisson Phrygian music from the Great Mother culture of Cybele - Anatolia ...

 The Galatians were a Gallic people of the Hellenistic period that dwelt mainly in the north central regions of Asia Minor or Anatolia, in what was known as Galatia, in today's Turkey. In their origin they were a part of the great Celtic migration which invaded Macedon,

 So in today's DNA biological history - we know this as the Yamnaya migration (or invasion) if you prefer - but this is going back thousands of years. We are tapping into a music harmonics healing secret that goes back to the original human culture. As this pdf of Ravel's piano concertos points out - Ravel used Phrygian a lot and apparently was inspired by Spanish flamenco music - Andalusian. And once again the Phrygian connection is clear:

They spoke Cisalpine Gaulish (a Continental Celtic language of the P Celtic type) closely related to Gaulish or Gallic. ..... northeastern Andalusia, northwest Múrcia and southern fringes of La Mancha, (Spain), mountains of the ...

So here's the deal - Dolores wrote Dreams when she was 18 but Noel wrote the chords - and at the time he only knew 4 or 5 chords. Meaning that the chord structure of Dreams may literally have been all the chords he knew! As the media has described - Noel was self-taught in music and so literally would just add his finger to chords to change the chords around. So for example in Dreams there is a switch to "e minor" as a flourish at the end of the first phrase.

O.K. so why did Noel suddenly switch to G and then C after a solid 1-4-5 (1:2:3:4) structure in E major for 4 verses? Well he was tapping into this ancient Phrygian Celtic sacred song structure of the Great Mother - Cybele culture that is matrifocal. And of course then Dolores provided the perfect singing to go along with his chord structure. The whole thing fit together magically without anyone of them consciously knowing why it did so. That's how good music works - you play by ear and by emotional inspiration.

And so if the music harmonics is correct and if this is the best song of the Cranberries - as I claimed and so too did the Billboard article claim - then how does this line up with the life of Dolores. I blogged on an overview of her life struggles. What was the highlight of her life? http://elixirfield.blogspot.com/2018/09/i-cant-sleep-becuz-i-hear-melody-in-my.html

So as I emphasized in that blog - she had lost her sense of love from the overworking of touring. I found another interview with her that gave more details of what then happened. She describes how she was able to see love in other people again:

I have all these things....but I'm so lonely, so lonely inside, so sad. I really wanted to experience some really strong love, so I think when I had... I never experienced so strong love for so long. It was really like mind blowing, so amazing...I began seeing Nature again...I opened up to love.

 And so what are we engaging with here but the original secret of females as the original human healers. Despite the trendy PC "transgender surgery" craze, as a female medical doctor points out - the female has tons more oxytocin neurotransmitter receptors than the male. So this fetish or as she calls it "gas-lighting" of turning males into females just is not biologically authentic at all. The whole purpose of the oxytocin receptors is that the female giving birth has a huge "climax" of oxytocin and this bonds the baby to the female as real love of the heart. And then breast feeding continues to increase the oxytocin levels - via the vagus nerve. You and Me - will always be eternally - is the song Dolores wrote about her first born - Son Taylor - it's filled with love, just as Dreams

In other words as serotonin levels increase the serotonin converts into oxytocin of the heart - as happens via celibacy meditation as well. So spiritual training is simply recreating the love of the natural birthing process of mammals.

 http://elixirfield.blogspot.com/2018/04/reclaiming-kathleen-schlesinger-and.html

So when I blogged before on the Phrygian secret of Great Mother matrifocal music healing - it connects back to the wind pipes like Chinese culture using the tuning not from strings but pipes of bamboo. So Schlesinger emphasizes that the Phrygian mode is a minor third to the root tonic - so in the case of E major as with the song Dreams then it is G.

So then just as with Ravel's use of Phrygian mode - as Schlesinger emphasizes - this is actually a microtonal scale - with the pan pipes used by covering the holes in different amounts, as well as creating subharmonics.

I read one comment on youtube how the person dismissed the "interlude" of Dreams song as not fitting in - that interlude disturbed them. haha. But in fact that interlude is a secret portal to an archetypal matrifocal healing music that Dolores was part of. She noted how her name meant suffering but she tried to claim she was not suffering. But then she had to finally admit she had great suffering. Professor John Curtis Franklin, with whom I've corresponded, has gone into this ancient healing secret of music from suffering - the "lament" sacred songs.

 in both cases the lyre is held by a mourner, not actually played. [85] The significance of this is quite clear in the famous scene of the Nereids or Muses mourning Achilles: the lyre is the hero’s own instrument, now silenced (Figure 36). [86] In the second case the lyre is held, appropriately, by a paidagōgós. [87] These images are to be connected rather with the tragic trope that occasions of death and war are ‘lyreless’ (ályros)—lacking the festive ease-of-mind normally associated with lyre-music and choruses. [88]

 As I blogged before:

And yet the blacksmith music story may go back to 1300 BCE of the Hittites who worshipped, first, Kybele (Cybele) which was later transferred to the Phrygians. Then Porphyry has Pythagoras worshiping with a black smith. So the author concludes Nichomachus must have conflated Near Eastern mythologies with Pythagorean mythology - by the 2nd century AD

The sacred ecstatics taught by Dr. Bradford and Hilary Keeney - from the original human culture - is really about giving birth - the oxytocin blast from opening up the sacrum.

And so, Dr. John Beaulieu of Biosonics points out the Sacrum, as I quote in my master's thesis is the ratio 2/3 of the body.

Dolores used to do one hour of yoga before her concerts - when she first toured the US.

 The Mother Goddess Cybele is documented back to over 10,000 years ago - and was not castration but rather the ionization of the life force by the males

http://ecoechoinvasives.blogspot.com/2018/03/how-9-muses-were-tricked-by-apollo-to.html

So ever since Western harmonic tuning of logarithms - promoted by Plato, Archytas, and Eudoxus - we've all been "tricked." The secret is actually quite ancient. And so something I had "intuited" just by listening is now confirmed - Just as my Ravel playlist is based on the Phrygian secret (switching a minor third key change from the root tonic)

Now I will rename the Dreams playlist to include this Phrygian secret as well.