Jonathan Edwards on music and heaven

The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other, is by music.

When I would form in my mind an idea of a society in the highest degree happy, I think of them as expressing their love, their joy, and the inward concord and harmony and spiritual beauty of their souls by sweetly singing to each other.  But if in heaven minds will have an immediate view of one another’s dispositions without any such intermediate expression, how much sweeter will it [be].

But to me ’tis probable that the glorified saints, after they have again received their bodies, will have ways of expressing the concord of their minds by some other emanations than sounds, of which we cannot conceive, that will be vastly more proportionate, harmonious and delightful than the nature of sounds is capable of; and the music they will make will be in a medium capable of modulations in an infinitely more nice, exact and fine proportion than our gross air, and with organs as much more adapted to such proportions.

Jonathan Edwards, 18th century theologian and 1st President of Harvard, from his Miscellanies #188.  Heaven (HT: Tyler Kenney @ Desiring God)