Philosophies

Music is not simply made by following one tone with another, but by a succession of tones which the ear grasps as a unit, like a melodic phrase or a melody. These units are HUMAN IMAGES for they evoke States of life. Larger forms are created involving complex melodic chains, alternation and variation of melodies, simultaneous interplay of two or more melodic lines or polyphony, formations of chords or groups of different notes that, struck simultaneously, merge to sound like a single note with an enriched “feeling tone.” Such complex forms evoke psychological States that are “human portraits.” Through such “human images” and “portraits” music can be said to embody ideas. These are not the ideas that may be found in a scientific tract but commentaries on a society showing what it means to live in it. They embrace developments in sensitivity, in the human’s awareness of his own powers, and in the situation of internal freedom, as conditions change in the external world. In this way music joins the other arts in creating social consciousness, or the individual’s awareness of the internal life he shares with society, and in revealing the internal history of society.

Man is a part of nature, even in his most degenerate and civilized form. A human being will always be a piece of nature. And it is for this reason that his modes of expression must also be at one with the way nature and matter expresses itself.

Our relationship with the environment in which we live is comparable, say, to the relationship between a container and its contents, each of which has developed independently of the other. Such a relationship may or may not imply a reciprocal correspondence. Ours is always a relationship of correspondence—which does not rule out the possibility that such a relationship (as often happens) can turn out to be substantially negative for us and our environment. And yet there is no doubt that here the container and the contents, the human condition and the human environment, are the result of one and the same dialectical process, one and the same process of mutual conditioning and formation.