The Net of Knowledge of the Understanding
The Net of Knowledge of the Feeling
The Net of knowl-edge Made of Feel-ing and Under-standing in Action
Music as an Expression of the Music Lover
The Listener
as a Free Ruler
in the Musical Force-Fields
The Wonderland of the Creative Music Listener
The Artistic Achievement of the Music Creator
The Great Musical Sense
of Achievement
Finally,
in the course of this permanently weighing the parts against the whole –
the smaller orders, combined into a great one, being weighed against this
greater one as a whole – the music listener gradually learns to distinguish
the parts within the whole, too, as if one would learn to perceive the components
of the tree within the seed.
This cognizing the diversity within unity systematically increases the intellectual
fulfilledness of the listener and stirs his natural, intellectual joy of knowledge.
At the same time, however, the music listener feels tempted to catch more and more powerful truths with his net of knowledge now structured more and more tightly, for if he succeeds, he feels more and more powerful.
In this process he releases higher and higher inner worlds of power within himself and draws from fields of higher and higher energy.
Finally, the music listener learns the lucky strike: he casts the tightest imaginable of all nets of cognition, the most golden, the most shining of all nets, and makes the greatest catch known in music: he catches the harmony.
And when the successful listener examines his catch more closely, he finds that the net is a mirror and the harmony his own reflection, and he realizes that he has caught himself. This fills him with delight, for now he knows that he has power over himself; after all, who can make such a claim?
At
the same time, the listener understands that, by exercising the power over
himself, he guarantees his outside freedom; because suddenly he becomes so
wide-awake on the level of his own innermost formative forces, that he can
skillfully dodge all outer manipulation.
In this manner he turns into a single fighter on the musical battle-field
of forces: he becomes a hero.
Very clearly he feels invincible from outside.
Thus
he dances in the round dance of his own, free, inner decisions, of his own
inner fantasy of life, with the seven-league boots of his own inner faculties
of cognition through his creative world, and from there occassionally into
his surroundings.
And people will say he is untroubled and happy, unshakeable and determined
in action, liberal and amicable.
Are
such insights new? Do they depend on the sound of certain musical works? Obviously,
such an inner experience already exists within the music listener – within
man – and the art of tones only stimulates this kind of experience.
And the artistic achievement of the musical poet lies in the process of condensation
in his works, and his art lies in teaching his listener how to use the truth-catching
net of knowledge – how to refine his thinking, feeling, understanding,
and hearing: he teaches him the art of poetry – indeed, in such an unobtrusive,
discreet and loving manner, that his listener is willing to travel with him
into unknown distances full of confidence, and that he does not get tangled
in doubts on this path of knowledge.
© AAR EDITION INTERNATIONAL 1982