Micro Music Laboratories - Music Theory - Part 3 - The inner Mechanics of creating Music - Control over the Composition

However, this integration of feeling and understanding is so vital to the musician for yet another reason: a balanced relationship between the warming force of the feeling and the cooling force of the understanding within the composition – so that the listener is not overthrown by uncontrolled ice-cold or glowing-hot waves, which would unneccessarily shock his inner perception.

Therefore, it is a further fundamental step in practical music education to develop the coordinating power of the intellect which takes a harmonizing, mediating position between the integrative feeling and the differentiating understanding, and which furthermore keeps the musical elements together as well as apart – those elements which have been distinguished from one another by the power of differentiation.

This will be the systematic, scientifically founded cultivation of the coordinative functioning of our intellect.

Without this aspect of coordination between the feeling and understanding, and without its well-directed application under the direct guidance of the self-awareness, the musical artist is not able to compose in a harmonizing, holistic and meaningful manner, because:

with the aspect of intellectual understanding dominating, the composer would tend to prefer dissonances, that is, variety at the expense of unity, and the result would be, for example, the clean construction scheme of serial music as an extension of the twelve-tone music – dissonant, lifeless, unpleasant;
with the aspect of feeling dominating, the composer would tend to prefer simplicity, that is, simplicity at the expense of multiplicity, and the result, for example, would be shallow entertainment music – consonant, uncreative, sentimental.

Only the integrated application of feeling and understanding by the composer and by the performer will create an enlivened impression of perfection within the listener.

For the music-lover this revelation of perfection is truly fulfilling and convinces him of the divine spark within man. Thereby he gains an inner, general, human stability, and personally unperturbed by doubts he gains insight into the potential of human-divine freedom.

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