If we do not go along, then, nothing can continue singing.
That a note has consequences to which one must give in is certainly not based in the note itself. That one has to sound out which way the phrase wants to turn, how long it has a need to descend, and where the point is at which it pulls itself together in order to ascend: all that would not even be possible without an empathetic, powerfully applied effort of will, which remembers, travels alongside, and anticipates just those con sequences which are not even present yet in sound.
The Philosophy of Music
Certainly the note in itself also leads itself forward and builds itself up by means of related frequencies. In the overtone-rich pealing of bells it excites even distant chords, and in every other struck note at least the three partials of the major triad. In this way the note pushes forward by itself, and a movement inherent in it reaches toward other notes by ca dential compulsion. It rejuvenates itself, builds bridges, forms relation ships of a fifth, and insofar as it treads the path of octave, fifth, third, in other words the path of the first melody, defines for itself certain points in the harmony to which it is drawn quite independently of our wishes, purely numerically.
But now of course that is a meager sort of singing, which soon fades again. It is the singing of the basses over a sustained fundamental, a rise and fall essentially only of pure fifths; the riches of dissonance are absent. Once the note has arrived back at the tonic, it stays there; the descent of a fifth is too short, the tonic is a pit and its consonance more the tomb than the womb of music. Things would absolutely not even really con tinue if only the natural chord progression predominated, if there were no new leading tones, scales, suspensions, anticipations, fragments of other directions that were intermittently heard and then immediately, de liberately pursued. The only crucial thing here is to think in terms of the scale, which dissolves the compulsion of the circle of fifths and as such posits the deliberately chordal as well as the freely contrapuntal system. Certainly, then, what is given must be used; one can also concede that the singing teakettle and the gale blowing past the chimney already in themselves let us hear something like a wondrous spectral l�nguage. And it likewise remains remarkable that the charm of the simple, triadic, pri mordial facts have often been used by Marschner, Beethoven and StrauB with great melodic success, but really only as raw material, in itself com pletely meaningless, extramusical, and in contrast to which the explosive melody of the scale, which has thirteen notes in Siam and seven in Eu rope, already represents a purely human, unphysiological and certainly unphysical construct.
This is as much as can be accomplished, then, without our hands' fruit ful Violation of the note and its related frequencies. The note, if it is to be come musical, depends absolutely on the blood of the one who takes it up and performs it, like the shades that had to give an account to Odysseus: not of themselves, but of the interrogator. The full extent of all potential partials or of exploded tonality, into which the more modern music again
dares to go, is good, and will supply new impulses to the depleted Ro mantic and even Bachian systems; but every so-called aesthetic acoustics remains barren if it does not serve a new metapsychology of sound. Hence the life in the sound, precisely while it is being played, and its par ticular determinacy, its intermediary, unbroken material idea, is ulti mately never the essential intention. Such a thing has never occurred to even remotely the same extent, at least till now, in visual and plastic art. Precisely because sight, and the optical element as such, does not consti tute their body, less of the material element needs to be sacrificed here. Therefore it also reappears more faithfully, as a more remote accompani ment, only diffracted into wood or as a filigree of light through the trees, or adapted in some other quietly natural way. In contrast, precisely be cause music reaches more closely, deeply, it also adapts the sound more deeply, the totally broken sound, as the stuff of musical essence as such: and must therefore, precisely on the grounds of its deeper correlation to the inspirited sound, to the sound of spirituality, the t>hysical sound, all the more decisively give up everything within the means which still acts only for itself. Thus while Erwin of Steinbach only gives up the stone of the Strasbourg cathedral because he actually thinks in terms of wood (cer tainly not only for that reason, for