Micro Music Laboratories, Meditative Music 01

Meditative Music

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The Process of Musical Perception

The purely musical comprehension of reality includes: the outer hearing and the inner hearing which, in turn, includes the (inner) perception of the musical parameters – sound, motif, sequence, and harmony.
With our inner hearing, we perceive these musical parameters in relation to the musical tonal space, and in relation to the motif space, the sequence space, and the harmony space, we perceive them with our intellect, our feeling and our mind.

The outer perception concerns our perception of tones in the acoustic space, i.e. the perception of the musical event that is brought to us listeners from outside.

The structural comprehension of the musical tonal space through our inner hearing is tied to the clarity of the representation of the tone in our mind, and therefore depends primarily on our mind's ability to function.
But it also depends on the sensitive perception of our inner sense of hearing – on its alertness.

Structurally comprehending the motif space in music depends on an even more precise functioning of the mind, because the latter determines the precision of the tonal-structural picture which contains the motif images.

Thus, comprehending the musical motif space depends on the cognitive ability of our intellect, because it is the intellect which, by virtue of our analysing mind, detects the unfolding of the motifs in the motif space and by virtue of our synthesising feeling, realises thisdevelopment of motifs to be a continuous melody a unity of the motif development.

Structurally comprehending the musical melody space is based on an even more powerful functioning of the mind; because, in order to comprehend the melody, the tonal structure must be displayed on the surface of our mind even more precisely. The tonal parameters, in their relation to each other, must be perceived completely, so that we can comprehend the different, manifold developments of the motifs holistically – in unity whilst simultaneously separate from each other.

Only the differentiated and, at the same time, integrated comprehension of the motif developments through feeling and mind allows to grasp the melody, which means: the musical comprehension of the picture of an individual course of life.

If, however, we attempt to comprehend several life paths simultaneously, we have to do so from a higher level of knowledge; for not only must we see and experience one single, individual course of development, but many courses simultaneously.
And the mysterious appeal of this stage of musical knowledge lies not so much in merely observing or understanding the characters in development and the lives based on them from the outside, but particularly in personally experiencing many different roads of individual human perfection simultaneously.

In the musical spaces of the sequences, we can experience living very different lives simultaneously and, thereby, personally walking very different life paths simultaneously – and in our experience we can move about, being one and the same person, in very different bodies and with very different modes of behaviour.

The world of the harmony, however, affords us the personal experience of an infinite multiplicity of lives which are being lived simultaneously, and which move before our mental eye and within our entire feeling like shining stars in free orbits.
And all these individual stars are we ourselves; each single orbit is our own, very individual life path, and this experience, in this highest stage of our music listening, of our musical knowledge of truth, is our very personal truth.

Excerpt from:
PETER HUEBNER – Listening to Music
“The Process of Musical Perception”

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