The Range of the
Sociological World
of Music

The Original Sociology
of Music

Applied Sociolo-gical
Orders in the Musical
Microcosm

The Phenomenon of
Dissonance

The Natural Ability to
Recognize Music-
Sociological Orders

The sociology of music is concerned with the congenial relations of the overtones of a tone, as well as with the relations of the motifs among each other, the melodies among each other, and the sequences among each other.
But it is also concerned with the congenial relations between the overtones, the motifs, and the sequences.

In this context, the sociology of music not only corresponds to the system of the inner-human, but also to the outer human social relations, which it describes realistically by means of the mentioned parameters.

How far such a description of the sociology of music can go on the surface is demonstrated by the hierarchic structure of classical music, and on to the dictatorship of the masses in twelve-tone music, where all the tones of the scale and their parameters (pitch, duration, amplitude, etc.) have the same value, and in the technique of serial composing – the perfectioned twelve-tone music – in which all these parameters are applied like patterns manipulated by arithmetic operations.

In the field of inner hearing, but also based on the physiology of the outer musical instruments, there are fixed nature-given orders of the sound-space which, after their systematic investigation, lead us to infer a nature-given sociology of music, because they express themselves as firm congenial relations of the tones among each other, but also of sound-spaces among each other.

These natural, sociological orders of the overtone-spectrum are applied by the great musical artists in the macrocosm of their music – in the outer structure of their compositions – where they can easily be traced and identified by way of analysis.

In this context it should be noted that an outer deviation from the nature-given inner order of music creates the impression of dissonance within the listener; a phenomenon that indicates a rift between the macrocosm and the microcosm of music, and which appears each time the logic of the macrocosm has deviated from the logic of the microcosm.

The fact that we recognize a dissonance so directly confirms that in our mental faculty of perception there already exists an awareness of harmony being the organizing principle in music, and that we have at our disposal a built-in, musical mental-spiritual capability for perceiving sociological order.

 

©  Micro Music Laboratories  2001