Peo­ples do not know the cus­toms and ex­peri­ences of other peo­ples, and there­fore will natu­rally convey only their own habits and ex­peri­ences – in their own lan­guage, their own ex­pres­sions.

An abori­gine of the Aus­tra­lian bush may not know the lights of a city, but he is fa­mil­iar with the sounds of the night in the bush, and just as a city-dweller, in his lan­guage, spon­ta­ne­ously ex­pres­ses the day-to-day life of the city, a man liv­ing in the bush natu­rally ex­pres­ses the mani­fold world of the jungle.

In our own cul­tural area in Ger­many, for ex­ample, we know the phe­nome­non called “Ge­muet­lich­keit”: a phe­nome­non of finer lev­els, of a more re­fined field of life. Take, for ex­ample, a cozy gath­er­ing of friends at the fire­place. Si­lence pre­vails, in­ter­rupted only by the quiet crackle of the fire, giv­ing rise to a men­tal-emo­tional fa­mil­iarity be­tween the par­tici­pants.

The ex­peri­ence of such group-con­scious­ness char­ac­ter­ized by si­lence can be ver­bally com­mu­ni­cated in the lan­guage of our cul­ture, and our peo­ple will have a natu­ral un­der­stand­ing and an in­ner sen­si­tiv­ity for this situa­tion in which feel­ing domi­nates. Natu­rally, it is not the physi­cal en­vi­ron­ment of the fire­place which gen­er­ates the im­pres­sion of “Gemuetlichkeit” so fa­mil­iar to us, but the cen­tury-old cul­ti­va­tion of a sense of to­getherness.

We know that an Ameri­can, for in­stance, may hardly un­der­stand our con­cept of “Ge­muet­lich­keit,” much in the same way his con­cept of a spruce cocktail party will appear strange to us.

On a su­per­fi­cial level, we rec­og­nize these gaps in ex­peri­ence be­tween dif­fer­ent cul­tural ar­eas from those words which ex­press a par­ticu­lar feel­ing of life in one lan­guage and are used un­changed in an­other lan­guage. Thus, an Ameri­can uses our word “Ge­muet­lich­keit” with as lit­tle suc­cess at home, as we use his term “cocktail party” in our coun­try.

The task of the to­nal­ity is to de­scribe the vari­ous at­mos­pheres of life.

Tonalities dif­fer from each other just as the vari­ous en­vi­ron­ments of men dif­fer from each other quite sub­stan­tially.

And just as man, in dif­fer­ent en­vi­ron­ments, natu­rally adopts quite dif­fer­ent ways of life, like­wise, the motif un­folds dif­fer­ently in dif­fer­ent tonalities and de­scribes these dif­fer­ent ways of un­fold­ment in quite dif­fer­ent melo­dies.