The Essence of Music: Questions and Answers

GA 283 — 29 September 1920, Dornach

Question and Answer Session I

following the discussion after three lectures by Paul Baumann

On the Expansion of the Tone System

It is only really possible to make a few suggestions, because the questions posed by Mr. Stuten alone could be the subject of weeks of discussion if one wanted to answer them exhaustively. And we will see how far we get today. I would like to start with one topic, so that we can then perhaps move on from a center, so to speak. The extension of the tone system has been mentioned, hasn't it, and various speakers have, I believe, been interested in this extension of the tone system; I think there were also musicians and composers among them.

Now, the whole question is connected, as I believe, with another one that is perhaps not as easy to grasp as is usually thought. And here I would like to say first of all: I myself wanted to address a kind of question first to those personalities who have taken part in this discussion about the expansion of the tone system. I will just make a few preliminary remarks and then ask you to express yourself entirely according to your subjective experience.

There is hardly any doubt that with the point in time that Mr. Baumann characterized so well today as the advent of the seventh, a very significant turning point actually occurred in the musical experience of civilized humanity. I believe that we just do not know enough about the earlier musical experience; that is, theoretically, but we no longer experience it in such a way that we feel this change completely clearly and intensely enough. But what has emerged has not yet run its course, and perhaps we are in the midst of a transformation, if I may say so, of people's musical needs. Of course, such things do not happen so quickly that they can be clearly defined; but they do happen, and they can be recognized to a certain extent in the progressive development of humanity.

And here I would like to ask whether the individual previous speakers, when they reflect on what they experience musically, cannot point to something that signifies a kind of turning point in the whole of musical experience. To formulate the question more specifically: I would like to think that today, in musical experience, one could form an opinion about how different people - I will ignore more of the musical aspect for now - experience a single tone differently. Now, that they experience it differently is, of course, beyond doubt; but they experience it so differently that this different experience plays into their understanding of music in some way.

You can clearly perceive, I believe, that today there is a tendency, especially among people who experience music, to go deeper into the sound, so to speak. Isn't it true that you can stay more on the surface with a sound, or go deeper into the sound.

And now I ask the personalities who were previously involved in the discussion whether they can associate any idea with this when I say: the musical experience of the present is increasingly splitting the individual note in its conception, and, as it were, questioning the individual note as to whether it is a melody or not. I mean, whether any kind of idea can be associated with it? Because it is actually hardly possible to talk about the question of expanding the tone system without having a basis from which to talk.

A comment was made earlier about noises. Perhaps the whole discussion about noises can only be answered if such a prerequisite as I have stated here is first settled. Because if I assume, for example – I don't know whether these things are already being experienced very extensively subjectively today – that the gentleman who has been speaking here for some time, who has been talking about sounds, that he is particularly inclined to answer the question of whether a melody can be perceived in a tone can be perceived in the tone, in the broadest sense, then I understand him, then I completely understand how he enters into the individual tones, or into the individual sounds, which the other person merely perceives as a noise, and how, by delving into the depths of the sound, he does indeed find something in the tones that then form the sound that he can pick out, so that something musical comes about that someone who does not delve into these depths of the sound cannot follow.

This morning, Dr. Husemann pointed out that in another respect, too, present-day humanity is in danger of gradually splitting the personality more and more apart. And so it seems that there are already quite a number of people in the present day who simply have a different sound experience of a single note than musicians who have been very sharply trained in one direction or another. And this is connected with the other question, which has also been asked, namely how spiritual science should relate to the whole matter.

Now I would like to ask the precise question of whether any reasonable idea can be associated with it, if one says that under certain circumstances the individual tone can be felt as a melody by going into its depths, by emphasizing partial tones from the tone, so to speak, partial tones whose relationship, whose harmony can then itself be a kind of melody again?

Paul Baumann: It also emerged from my lecture that I associate noise with harmony, that is, with a summarized melody. Can we understand sound noise as something that is a summarized melody, perhaps a harmony, but that we would also feel musically? In reality, every sound is undoubtedly musical, but we do not need to address it as a musical art. We cannot distinguish it, but it can be felt very clearly in timbre that something particularly musical, something of the mobility of things, is speaking here again, that one can clearly distinguish the mere musical tone, which is not heard in itself, from what it very clearly resonates in.

That is not what I mean. What I mean specifically now is to expand the possibility of experiencing sound itself, that is, to go deeper into the depths when experiencing the sound, or, for that matter, to extract something from the sound, so that you actually experience something in the sound itself.

Paul Baumann: I mean the differentiation between what you need in musical art, what resonates, and what you also feel, something that has a musical effect in things.

I don't mean this now, but what you experience in a tone without it somehow contributing objectively. You split the tone itself and synthesize it again. I mean as a pure experience. From time immemorial, the tone was attributed to the spirit of clay. In layman's terms: at a historical performance of the Passau... play from 1250, the devil is introduced as a seducer right at the beginning, before the play even begins; and to make this atmosphere work properly, the devil has to blow into a fire horn; it sounds so shrill that it scares everyone. That is the basis of this sound spirit I am talking about.

Some opinions will still be expressed.

These are all things that do not apply to what I mean, the experience of a sound that appears as a melody. When a note is struck, a melody actually emanates from the note.

Dr. Stein: It seems to me that one must distinguish between the perception of sound and the sensation of sound. I feel something very deeply in my perception, and this feeling then goes deeper when I feel pain or shock.

I don't mean that we should define the things that already exist, but rather: whether we are living in a transitional period with regard to the sound experience, so that it actually becomes something different. I think that it is still understood in musical terms today as a note that is related to others, that is in a melody and so on, but that there is a possibility with the note to go into the depths, perhaps also to look for something below it and then, if one looks at this, only then is a fruitful examination possible.

Further expressions of opinion.

If you listen to a note for a long time, at the beginning of the “Freischütz” overture, for example, you may have a sensation that I can perhaps illustrate figuratively. So, so to speak, the sound would be: half of a bow – that should be a graphical representation – on this half of the bow, I would draw something like small nerves that go out from it, so that one has a sound sensation on this half of the bow, as if as if it were going in there, then going through again on the other side of the bow, then out again at nerves and veins, so that there is a certain inner movement, which is once on one side of this half bow, then once on the other. You could perhaps also express it dynamically, that you put a greater intensity into it and then back out.

Opinions.

The long hold is only to make it more noticeable. The long hold would also make it possible to notice the changes in tone. I am not so much referring to the illustrative curve, which can be drawn in this way, but rather to the one that is actually drawn here vertically on the board.

Further comments:... It's the intensity? That's why I say: go deeper into the sound!

Longer comments from a participant. Mr. van der Pals describes his experiences with a tone; an upbeat to Jacobowski's poems. A tone, indicated by the poem itself, by the content; one had no desire at all to move away from the tone; the tone was there, could just as well have remained there, was a melody in itself – I only moved away because one couldn't play it for half an hour.

Now that we have talked about this a bit, I would like to point out that things that develop sometimes come out very imperfectly in their first stages. For example, it can be pointed out that some things certainly appear in a really quite contestable way as Expressionist art – but that is not meant as a criticism of all Expressionist art, but only of some things that do not get beyond expressions – but that there is certainly an attempt at something in it that will one day mean a great deal.

And so I believe that, in a similar way to how we try to live with color and create from color in painting, this immersion in sound means something today, such as the beginning of progress in music. And if that occurs here or there and you don't like it, I completely agree. But I would like to know how one can actually understand such musical personalities as Debussy if not as a perhaps very vague forerunner of something future that lies in this direction. If we can admit something like that, we come to the conclusion that a certain possibility is indeed presented to us, namely the possibility that composing will be done in a different way than it is now, namely in such a way that the relationship between composer and reproducing artist becomes much freer, that the player, the reproducing artist, is much less determined, that he can become much more productive, that he has much more leeway. But this is only possible in music if the tone system is expanded, if you can really have the variations that are necessary, if you can really vary widely. And I could imagine that, for example, what the composer delivers would be more suggestive in the future, but that because it would be more suggestive, the reproducing artist would need many more variants, many more tones, to express things. If you find your way into the depths of the tone, you can distribute it in the most diverse ways by setting it out again in neighboring tones. In this way, a more flexible musical life would come about. I can only sketch the matter. One could go on talking all night, but we don't want to do that since we are meeting again tomorrow. But a much more flexible musical life will come about. And one can say: Today, this more flexible musical experience can really stand before us.

This is connected in a certain way with the other question that has been asked again and again, namely, how spiritual science should relate to music. In this question, there is always one thing that I dislike. Please, I do not want to offend anyone with what I say, but there is something about this question that I dislike, namely, it is actually posed in an unartistic way! It is actually always posed theoretically and in an unartistic way, even if the person in question does not mean it. And I feel that in a discussion about art, it is very easy to slip out of the artistic realm altogether and into a wild theorizing. Spiritual science, since it is not something intellectual, is not something that only takes hold of one part of the human being, but something that takes hold of the whole human being, will have an essential influence on the whole human being, on thinking, feeling and willing. Whereas our present materialistic-intellectualistic science basically only has an influence on thinking, on the intellectual element in man. Spiritual science will take hold of the human being fully. And the consequence of this will be that the human being becomes inwardly more mobile, that he comes to a greater variability of his partial experience and thus also to a stronger demand for the harmony of his partial experience. And when this happens, it essentially means an enrichment of the whole musical activity and experience. And then, in the case of such personalities, who are so permeated, so imbued, so vitalized by spiritual science, I might say, what can become reality in the field of music out of spiritual science will arise. There is no use theorizing about this. One should not theorize, one should rather feel today how spiritual science actually makes the human being more mobile and how, through this, the human being can also approach a more intense, more nuanced musical experience.

This can be linked to very big questions. You see, the spiritual science movement has often been criticized: Yes, there are mainly ladies there who are always interested in it, you don't see the men in the anthroposophical meetings. — I don't want to decide now to what extent this is statistically true or not. Some people have a newspaper article ready before they have seen the things, and they can't be dissuaded from it even if they then see the opposite of what they have written down. But on the whole – please, it is really not meant so badly – we can say: Because the male world has participated more in education, in the scientific and increasingly scientific education of the last few centuries, something has occurred for masculinity that could be called a solidification, a hardening of the brain. In women, the brain has remained more flexible and softer. These are, of course, radical expressions for the phenomena, but the phenomenon still exists. And so as not to be unfair, I will say: in men, the brain has become more solidified, and as a result they have become more proficient in the use of logic; in women, the brain has remained more agile, lighter, but they have not participated in the education of the last few centuries, which has so solidified the firm logic within itself, and as a result they have become superficial and so on. — Well, you can't just present things one-sidedly. But there is something in the whole matter that can make us aware of the fact that we urgently need to make what has been achieved in our own organization through the stiffening, drying out education of the last centuries, flexible again, by entering into this stronger handling of the ethereal. But here we are entering the musical element again. Here we are entering a completely musical experience. And that will naturally bear fruit.

But one would be quite inartistic if one wanted to create any kind of theory about what is happening. That always seems to me to be the same as if someone wanted to describe the weather of the day after tomorrow very precisely. I am not saying that there is not a state of consciousness in which one can do so to a high degree. But it has no real significance. It is better to let life live than to theorize about it in such a way.

Now, with this train of thought, the consideration has already been diverted from the musical to the human constitution. And so, in a spiritualized physiology, which in itself will already have something artistic about it, one will increasingly associate the musical with the human constitution.

Just think, there is something very deeply justified in Mr. Baumann's assertion of the connection between melos and breathing. Basically, melos and human breathing are two things that essentially belong together.

But now we must not forget: The breathing process is a process that takes place in the rhythmic system. This middle system of the human organization borders on the nervous-sense system, on the brain system, on the one hand. There is an interaction between the rhythmic system and the nervous-sense system. On the other hand, the rhythmic system borders on the entire limb and metabolic system. And this confluence also expresses itself, I would say, in the physical processes. Just think: when we breathe in, we push our diaphragm down, we push the brain water up to the head, so that with the breathing process we have a continuous up and down of the brain water. This means that there is a continuous interplay between the rhythmic movement of the cerebral fluid and that of the organs of imagination. On the other hand, there is a continuous collision of the cerebral fluid, which is going down again, with everything that is going on in the blood, in the metabolic system. More than one would think, the musical element is connected with this inner experience, thought of in organic terms. And in the following way: to the same extent that breathing approaches the head, the nervous-sensory life, with the interplay, the melodious element comes to the fore; to the same extent that the rhythmic system approaches the limb system, the actual rhythmic element comes to the fore; we have only transferred the word there.

And then, if you bear this in mind, you have a guide to answer, I would say, the whole bundle of questions that Mr. Stuten asked at the end, one by one. So what Mr. Stuten has put forward is correct. I would like to go into the one thing he mentioned about the connections between thinking, feeling and willing. This corresponds, in turn, to what I have just explained in terms of the organs. Then we have already discussed, and Mr. Stuten has repeated today, that what the actual musical forms are corresponds to the whole human being, that is, to the synthetic interweaving of thinking, feeling and willing.

Now he has also raised the question of the relationships between the thematic groups. These are, of course, specifically different, depending on whether they come from this or that composer. And now we can say the following: You were quite right to state that the melody corresponds to the imagination, the harmony to the feeling, the rhythm to the will, and the tone form to the whole person. Now we have a partial human being = thinking, a partial human being = feeling, a partial human being = willing, and the whole human being.

But now we not only have the whole human being in real human life, but the human being also lives all the years between birth and death. This whole human being is often present and continuously present, and changes, metamorphoses. And this is where the succession of thematic groupings comes into play. The human life cycle is something specific. And the underlying secret is this: in our consciousness, we do not know what the future holds, but in our feeling consciousness, we are attuned to how the future unfolds. Please observe purely empirically — one does not usually do this, but these things belong to a finer perception of a true anthropology, which then becomes anthroposophy — how the emotional life changes in a person whom one later learns has died. Of course, there are many things that prevent us from pursuing such things, but at least we can pursue them retrospectively. We can see very clearly in a person who died young how the whole emotional life tends towards death, how the future is already contained in the past life. This is also something that is part of the human life cycle.

All this plays a role when the musician lives out in the succession, in the recurrence of thematic groups and so on. The recurrence itself need not surprise you. For you need only look back over your life, if it has already been going on for some time; in particular, the usual periods, which do not cover the same number for everyone but are nevertheless present, could show you exactly the stages, could tell you: in this year a stage ended that lasted until that year, and so on. If someone experiences a phase of life at the age of forty-five, they will experience it again at the age of fifty-two at the next stage. And one can see the recurrence in human experience very clearly when one experiences something at the age of fifty-two, which does not have to be the same, but which, in its inner character, represents something similar to what happened in one's forty-fifth year.

All these things play a part in what is expressed in a musical work of art. For such a musical work of art is, at least at the moment it is created, always an expression of the whole human being. One can only hint at such things.

Some of the other questions that were asked, such as the relationship between Goethe's theory of sound and spiritual science, would really be too much to cover today. I believe that we can still meet on this or a similar occasion. And answering the question about major and minor, about the meaning of Greek music, would also be too much today.

With regard to the one thing that has been mentioned, the theories about breathing, singing and posture, I would just like to note that such things as described in the book mentioned are not without a certain significance if one knows how to take them sensibly.

It is extremely important to consider the human being as a whole. People who write such books do not usually do this, but they do provide material that can be useful even to the scholar, when it is viewed in the right light.

I also do not want to address the question of singing method today, because it can very easily be misunderstood if it is not developed out of some kind of premise, especially since there are so many different singing methods today. And you can meet people who have learned to sing using five or six different methods, which means they have forgotten how to sing altogether! Then, however, one cannot speak in such a simple way about the different singing methods.

Regarding what has been said about temperaments, about thesis, antithesis, synthesis, I must say that it is a rather unfruitful way of looking at things, because as a rule one can really develop anything from such bloodless abstractions. And just as you can say: Wagner – thesis, Bruckner – antithesis, which may be in principle, and spiritual science – the synthesis, so could another, who just classified differently, perhaps say: Wagner – thesis, Bruckner – antithesis, Mahler – synthesis. That would certainly be said by one or the other if one indulges in such bloodless abstractions.

Yes, I really don't think that we should extend the evening any further today, since we can't stay here overnight after all! Although I am happy to talk in detail about the issues I have noted down at a further get-together.