Music E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

'Our neurosensory system is inwardly configured music, and we experience music as an artistic quality to the degree that a piece of music is in tune with the mystery of our own musical structure.' - Rudolf SteinerWhat is music? Rudolf Steiner regards the essence of music as something spiritual, inaudible to the senses. The world of tones, borne on the vibrations of air, is not the essential element. 'The true nature of music, the spiritual element in music', he says, 'is found between the tones, lies in the intervals as an inaudible quality.'Rudolf Steiner spoke repeatedly about music as something inherent both in the cosmos and the human being. It played an important role in many forms of ritual and worship, and people once perceived a link between music and the world of stars, which was seen as the dwelling place of the gods. Nowadays our view of music is divorced from such religious outlooks, but research repeatedly demonstrates the profound effect it continues to have on us. In this unique anthology of texts, compiled with a commentary and notes by Michael Kurtz, Steiner describes the realm of the spiritually-resonating harmonies of the spheres and our intrinsic connection to this cosmic music. He also explores the phenomenon of musical listening and experience, as well as Goethe's approach to music.

Leseprobe

RUDOLF STEINER (1861–1925) called his spiritual philosophy ‘anthroposophy’, meaning ‘wisdom of the human being’. As a highly developed seer, he based his work on direct knowledge and perception of spiritual dimensions. He initiated a modern and universal ‘science of spirit’, accessible to anyone willing to exercise clear and unprejudiced thinking.

From his spiritual investigations Steiner provided suggestions for the renewal of many activities, including education (both general and special), agriculture, medicine, economics, architecture, science, philosophy, religion and the arts. Today there are thousands of schools, clinics, farms and other organizations involved in practical work based on his principles. His many published works feature his research into the spiritual nature of the human being, the evolution of the world and humanity, and methods of personal development. Steiner wrote some 30 books and delivered over 6000 lectures across Europe. In 1924 he founded the General Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches throughout the world.

MUSIC

Mystery, Art and the Human Being

RUDOLF STEINER

Edited and Introduced by Michael Kurtz

Translated from German by Matthew Barton

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

Rudolf Steiner Press Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2016

Originally published in German under the title Die Welt der Musik by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Basel, in 2012

© Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Basel, 2012 This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2016

All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Inquiries should be addressed to the Publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Print book ISBN: 978 1 85584 526 8 Ebook ISBN: 978 1 85584 481 0

Cover by Morgan Creative. Cover image © Frog-travel Typeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. ‘Musica Mundana’—The Music of the Spheres as Universal Force

2. The Human Being as Music—’Musica Humana’

3. The Art of Music—’Musica Instrumentalis’

4. The Intervals as Fundamental Musical Phenomena and Human Evolution as Reflected in our Experience of Them

5. The Effects of Music, and the Human Experience of Tone

6. Rudolf Steiner on Goethe and Schopenhauer, and their View of Music

7. Rudolf Steiner on Diverse Composers

Notes

Sources

INTRODUCTION

‘The true nature of music, the spiritual element in music, is found between the tones, lies in the intervals as an inaudible quality.’1

From the ancient, sophisticated cultures of the East through Greek antiquity to medieval Christianity in Europe, music has always played a natural and clearly defined role in many forms of ritual, worship and education. In past eras people still felt there to be concord between music, humanity and the world of stars, which was regarded as the dwelling place of the gods. But that time has passed. Nowadays our view of music has sundered itself from these general religious outlooks, and the classical modes of, say, Bach, Beethoven or Bruckner, have become just one idiom amongst many other possibilities. Today every composer has their own distinct view of music.

What is the reason for this change of outlook? A signature of the modern age is that people release themselves from traditions and prescribed rules, instead taking autonomous, individual decisions and actions. In a questionnaire Rudolf Steiner once completed in Weimar in 1893, he coined the phrase ‘The free human being in place of God’ as his personal motto.2 This emancipatory process is still in its birth pangs, but is certainly a feature of daily contemporary life.

Born three years after the end of the Second World War, I have always felt an interest in the cultural atmosphere of those post-war years. It was a time of reflection, of sober assessment after the horrors of the war, and in the arts led to a radical new beginning but at the same time also to an imaginatively impoverished ‘material art’. At the time two small works threw open the doors to literally radical new developments; going to the very root of things they sought to start again from zero. These were two experiments that made history by helping to dismantle the final vestiges of tradition. In Cologne, at the ‘Electronic Studio’, Karlheinz Stockhausen composed his Study I in 1953, himself creating its electronically generated tones and tonal qualities (pitch, volume, duration) in strictly rational patterns. This ‘musical homunculus’ opened up the possibility of a world of all conceivable tones and noises. This absolute control of acoustic tone was diametrically opposed to the Zen Buddhist gesture of complete relinquishment, which John Cage created in his silent piece, 4’ 33”. The time structure of the work's three movements was determined with the aid of the Chinese I Ching oracle. But the ‘composer’ here makes no indication of notes since the music consists of any accidental noises that can be heard during these 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

This raises questions, such as: What is music? Is anything we hear music? Is everything my ear receives already music? And finally: Where do we stand as human beings in all these matters? In recent decades there has been a great deal of research to show that this art form, specifically, has a profound effect on the human being.3

In the birth pangs of these new developments, Rudolf Steiner's reflections on the ‘world of music’, as this compilation shows, can offer us new perspectives and reveal deeper strata of experience. The quotation above—’The true nature of music, the spiritual element in music, is found between the tones, lies in the intervals as an inaudible quality’ - may seem too intangible for some. Rudolf Steiner regards the essence of music as something spiritual, inaudible to the senses; and the world of tones, borne on the vibrations of air, in some sense already as a kind of ‘banishment’ from this loftier condition.4

Thus the seven chapters of this collection of texts start with the intrinsic world of music as Rudolf Steiner sees it: the realm of the spiritually resonating harmonies of the spheres. It is here that we dwell during sleep and in the period between death and rebirth. The astonishing potencies of this music of the spheres appear, for instance, in the chemistry of earthly substances or in the growth and developing morphology of plants.

Chapter 2 identifies how this music of the spheres is connected with humans, our inner and outer form being the outcome of this world, as Rudolf Steiner describes in many diverse ways. Following this, we explore the art of music itself in relation to this realm: the creative shaping of tones by human beings. The works of great composers can give expression to memories or echoes of these harmonies of the spheres. From 1915, Rudolf Steiner offered stimulus for a new kind of composition drawn from a deepened experience of the single tone. Independently of Steiner, various composers since then have been preoccupied with the phenomenon of the individual tone—for instance, the Italian Giancinto Scelsi, French composers of the ‘Spectral’ school such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, joined more recently by Wolfgang von Schweinitz. These compositions and experiments are largely concerned with the acoustic spectrum of a tone, whereas Steiner was engaging with the spiritual, moral realm of tone experience.5

For Rudolf Steiner, the essence of music consists of the intervals and their qualities, as chapter 4 reveals. These qualities are the inwardly sensed movements between tones. Besides this, the intervals also have their significance as, if you like, a musical embodiment of human evolution: from the interval of the ninth in Lemuria through the seventh in Atlantis to the third since the beginning of the modern era. Thus they express the distinctive soul moods inherent in the development of human consciousness.6

In chapter 5 the phenomenon of musical listening and experience is accorded its own section. Connecting acoustic with soul-spiritual experience, this theme was one that preoccupied Steiner throughout his life. In 1917, after 30 years of study, he first formulated his findings in this realm in the book Riddles of the Soul (GA 21), pointing there to the connection between musical experience and the human being's rhythmic system, especially as this works in the relationship between cerebrospinal fluid and breathing. Since then, findings in modern neurological research have confirmed his discoveries.7

Chapter 6 concerns the view of music of both Goethe and Schopenhauer, figures with whom Steiner engaged in his years in Vienna and Weimar, and to whom he repeatedly referred subsequently in his lectures on music. Goethe's phenomenological approach to music seemed significant to Steiner since he felt that it was moving towards a ‘spiritual-scientific, anthroposophic approach’.8 In Schopenhauer's major work, The World as Will and Idea, Steiner greatly valued this philosopher's clear and apt account of the art of music and his sense that unconscious human will was at work here, coming to expression in the musical tone itself.

Finally, music played an important part in Rudolf Steiner's own life. He loved music, attended a great many concerts and operas and followed debates in the music world in those years with keen attention. Of the composers of his time he engaged very fully with Richard Wagner and his works. He knew various composers of his generation personally, or witnessed them in the concert hall—figures such as Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf and Gustav Mahler. He particularly valued Josef Matthias Hauer's reflections on music. Because the latter's views were founded not on acoustics as such but on the spiritual nature of music—the melos—they are a world away from the twelve-tone ideas of Arnold Schoenberg.

1. ‘MUSICA MUNDANA’—THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES AS UNIVERSAL FORCE

The music of the spheres as a structural cosmic principle was taught from ancient times in the great cultures of China and Egypt, and in particular at the school of Pythagoras in Greece and in Plato's philosophy. Subsequently, the teachings on music in De institutione musicae by the Neoplatonist Boethius (c. AD 480 to 524) described music in terms of a threefold ‘musica mundana’, ‘musica humana’ and ‘musica instrumentalis’;9 and this view held sway well into the late medieval period. Rudolf Steiner did not offer a comprehensive account of the music of the spheres and its actions upon the earth but, drawing upon his own research, did identify certain aspects of this, some of which are reproduced from his lectures and writings in the passage below. In his basic text, Theosophy (GA 9), Rudolf Steiner gives a general introduction to this world of purely spiritual musical resonance, which the sensory ear cannot perceive. For the ‘seer’ who has undergone esoteric schooling, it becomes spiritually perceptible as a second realm of spiritual discernment: spiritual vision of the ‘archetypes’ is joined by spiritual hearing of the ‘primal tones’. This world of archetypes and primal tones is in continual movement and ceaseless creative activity.

In the world of spirit everything is in continual activity and movement, in ceaseless creation. There is no such thing there as resting in one place, as we know it in the physical world. The archetypes are creating beings. They are the creators who craft everything that arises in the physical and soul world. Their forms swiftly change; and in every archetype lies the potential to assume countless different forms. In a sense they allow the specific forms to emerge from them, and no sooner is one engendered than the archetype begins to bring forth another. And the archetypes all have a greater or lesser affinity with each other: they do not act in isolation. Each needs the help of the other to be creatively active. Countless different archetypes frequently work together in order for one or another entity to arise in the physical or soul world.

Apart from what can be perceived through spiritual vision in this ‘spirit land’, there is something else as well that can be regarded as an experience of ‘clairaudience’ or spiritual hearing. The moment the seer rises into the land of soul and spirit, the archetypes he perceives also become spiritually audible as music. This ‘music’ is still a purely spiritual process and must be conceived as being devoid of any physical tone. The observer feels himself to be within an ocean of tones; and in these tones, in this spiritual music, the beings of the world of spirit come to utterance and expression. These melodious accords, their harmonies, rhythms and melodies, express the primordial laws of existence. What our reason perceives as law or idea in the physical world becomes apparent to the ‘spiritual ear’ as a spiritual-musical element. (This is why the Pythagoreans called these perceptions of the spiritual world a ‘music of the spheres’. To someone who has developed a ‘spiritual ear’, this ‘music of the spheres’ is not merely metaphorical or allegorical but a spiritual reality with which he is fully conversant.) If one wishes to form a proper idea of this ‘spiritual music’, though, one first has to relinquish all ideas drawn from audible music as perceived by the ‘material ear’. These perceptions are spiritual in nature, and thus inaccessible to the sensory ear. [...] We need only conceive of everything that is described as luminous in a visual sense as being, at the same time, also musical in nature. Every colour, every light perception, corresponds to a spiritual tone; and every interplay of colours corresponds to a harmony, a melody and so forth. We must realize that the presence of tones does not mean that ‘visual’ spiritual perceptions cease; the ‘sounds’ join the ‘light’ perceptions. Thus wherever we speak of the spiritual ‘archetypes’ we must also conceive of them accompanied by spiritual ‘tones’.10

In the following passage, Steiner illustrates the mathematical and astronomical relationships underpinning the harmonies of the spheres.

Let us now consider the nature of the music of the spheres. I am well aware that modern mathematical astronomers would regard it as pure madness to speak of the planets as esoteric science does. Nevertheless these things are true.

We have spoken of the gradual evolution of our earth and of diverse embodiments of this planet. Our earth was originally Saturn, then became Sun and Moon and is now Earth.* In future times it will become Jupiter, Venus and then Vulcan. Now you may ask this: Today we see a planet Saturn in the heavens; does this have a connection with the Saturn by which we call our planet's first embodiment? Observing the starry heavens we see the planets known to us by outward perception. But the names they have been given are not random or arbitrary, as is often the case nowadays—things named after a particular person or inventor. The names are significant, and were drawn from profound knowledge of the nature of the stars and planets. Since this is no longer practised, the name of Uranus does not have the same deep meaning, for it was discovered at a later date. The planet you now see in the heavens as Saturn is currently at the stage of evolution that our earth was at when in its ‘Saturn’ condition. The exoteric Saturn is related to our earth in the same way that a young boy relates to an old man. Just as little as the old man has grown from the boy standing beside him—though he himself was once a boy—so likewise the earth did not evolve from what we now call Saturn. The Saturn we see in the heavens will also one day become ‘Earth’; at present its condition is much younger. And the same is true of the other planetary bodies. The sun is an entity such as the earth once was, but is now more ‘advanced’. And just as various ages of human beings exist side by side, boys next to old men, so the various planets coexist in the heavens at diverse evolutionary stages which our earth, currently in its fourth embodiment, has in part already passed through and in part will still undergo. The planets have quite specific relationships with each other, but the esotericist expresses these relationships in ways that are different from a modern astronomer.

As you know, the planets orbit the sun at quite specific speeds. But the sun also moves, and it is this movement, as well as that of the planets, which esoteric investigators have carefully determined. This research has shown that the sun circles round a spiritual centre, and that the paths of the planets are spirals oriented to the sun's ecliptic. The speeds at which the various planets accomplish their orbits have very precise, harmonious relationships, which for the clairaudient together form a symphony referred to by the Pythagoreans as the music of the spheres. This harmony, this music, is thus a reflection of cosmic processes; and what the Pythagorean school teaches is not something artificially constructed. Ancient astronomers said that the heavens, which appear to be at rest, are in reality in movement, and that the speed of their orbit around the spiritual centre means that they advance by one degree in every hundred years. The different respective speeds of the planets are as follows:

The speed of Saturn is therefore 1200 times greater than that of the whole heavens, thus advancing 12 degrees a year.

When physical, musical harmonies arise, this is because, for instance, different strings vibrate at different speeds. Depending on the rapidity of the strings’ vibrations, a higher or lower tone resounds; and the interplay or concord of these different tones sounds forth as music, gives rise to harmony. Now just as you gain musical impressions here in the physical realm from the movements of the strings, so someone who has risen to the level of clairaudience in Devachan will hear the music of the spheres. And through the relationship of the different speeds at which the planets move, the basic tones of the harmonies of the spheres arise and resound through the whole cosmos. In the school of Pythagoras, therefore, people speak quite rightly of a music of the spheres, and one can hear this with spiritual ears.

In these reflections we can point to another phenomenon as well, the ‘Chladni’ patterns. If you take a thin brass plate and strew a fine dusting of sand on it, then draw a violin bow down its edge, you not only hear a tone but can see the grains of sand form specific patterns and shapes. All kinds of figures arise as expression of different tones. Each one causes substance to be differently distributed.

When spiritual tone first resounded through the cosmos, it ordered and arranged the planets’ reciprocal relationships, creating the harmonies of the spheres. What you now see spread across the heavens was given its forms by this creative, divine tone; and by virtue of the fact that this tone sounded forth into cosmic space, matter was ordered and shaped to form the solar system. The expression ‘harmony of the spheres’ is therefore not just an inventive metaphor but an actual reality.11

In 1910, in a brief passage in his lecture cycle on the folk souls in Christiania/Oslo, Steiner again speaks of the music of the spheres, this time from the point of view of the angelic beings who are at work in this realm.

Initially a person has no organs of perception to gaze upwards into what lies beyond the powers of light, which we also call the Spirits of Form; no organs to discern what is interwoven with the light. Everything that determines composition and decomposition on our earth and acts on these processes as chemical forces is here still woven into the light; and this is largely the sphere in which the Spirits of Movement are at work. When a person learns to perceive something of what he otherwise sees only as maya in the actions of chemical compositions and dissolutions, then he hears these Spirits of Movement, perceiving the music of the spheres to which the esoteric Pythagoreans, along with other mystery schools, refer. This is also what Goethe describes when he speaks of the sun not as the bestower of light but as a resounding entity:

The sun in ancient guise competing

With brother spheres in rival song,

With thunder march his orb completing

Moves his predestined course along.*

This music of the spheres is still present today, though ordinary consciousness does not discern it. It is real and exists, and approaches all of us from without as astral action. It is just that people do not hear it. If, as is the case with light, the music of the spheres alternated with periods when it disappeared, then people would learn to hear it at certain times. In fact, it resounds ceaselessly day and night and so we can only hear it when we have undergone a certain esoteric schooling and development. Whereas light streams towards us during the day, and weaves on during the night as the light that has been received and absorbed, the music of the spheres sounds day and night. Thus, like the miller who only hears the sound of the mill when it stops turning, we usually fail to hear it.

There are also the Spirits of Wisdom, who send their impulses to us from without, working in to the weaving light and the music of the spheres that weaves through space. Their emanation is the cosmic ether that streams towards the earth. Life streams from the cosmos down to earth and is received and assimilated by the beings there. This comes from the Spirits of Wisdom.

Thus we raise our gaze to far distances of the cosmos and initially look towards the sun in which we see these powers concentrated, and can recognize how the threefold qualities of the second hierarchy, of streaming life, weaving tone and configuring light, enter the earthly sphere from space.12

During the night our soul dwells in the world of the music of the spheres; but in the day, though it still sounds forth, we cannot experience it until we undergo esoteric schooling.

Now something else occurs by virtue of the fact that the rational or mind soul lifts each night into the astral world. If we use this spiritual-scientific term ‘rational soul’, we must conceive of it as different from the dry, prosaic rationality that this word usually evokes for us. For spiritual science, ‘mind’ or ‘reason’ means a sense of the harmony that cannot be embodied in outward substance or matter, a sense for the inner experience of harmony. This is why we also use the word ‘sensibility’ here.* Each night the mind soul or ‘sensibility soul’ immerses itself in the harmonies of the astral world, and each morning it becomes aware of this again in the astral body—the same astral body that has now returned but which, in modern human beings, is not aware of its inwardness during the night. Each night the following occurs. The mind or sensibility soul lives in what we have always referred to as the music of the spheres, the inner lawfulness of the world of spirit, the harmonies of the spheres of which the ancient school of Pythagoras spoke, meaning conditions in the greater world of spirit that can be heard by someone who raises himself to perceptions of this world. Goethe also referred to this [...] in Part 2 of Faust, when Faust is once again raised into the spiritual world and says:

Spirit ears now hear sound forth

The day once more in its rebirth;

Hear rocky gates’ great opening clang

And Phoebus’ chariot wheels ring.

What a racket does light bring!

Thunderous it trumpets, blares

To blinking eyes, astonished ears ...

In other words, during the night the soul lives in these sounds of the spheres, which are kindled to awareness as the astral body becomes conscious again.13

When we awaken in the morning, returning to our body from the world of the music of the spheres, we can often discern an echo of this world.

Some of you may have noticed that if you attend a concert in the evening which makes a vivid impression on you, when you wake up the next morning you feel as if your soul were lifting itself out of an ongoing re-experience of the music you heard. It seems as if the soul has listened to the whole concert all over again while you were asleep. But the process involved is more complex than it appears to ordinary awareness. In fact, you see, the soul lifts into consciousness again from impressions of the cosmic music that individualizes itself in the human etheric body. As we return to our etheric body on awakening, the physical body's receptivity to impressions means that everything of the nature of this etheric body is drowned out; but at this moment the human soul translates the individualized cosmic music into the earthly tones we last heard. We can say that these are the ‘clothes’ that this cosmic music puts on at the moment of awakening since it has a certain affinity with the flood of tones we heard in the concert. Because people are unable in their ordinary awareness to hear this cosmic music, it dresses itself in what is most comparable to it in earthly life—the tones we heard in the concert the evening before. This is what actually underlies an experience that most of you, perhaps, have had.14

In the lecture which Steiner gave on 3 November 1912 in Vienna, entitled The Latest Findings of Esoteric Research into the Life between Death and Rebirth’, he describes the differentiated world of the harmonies of the spheres that extends from this side of the sun through the spheres of Mars, Jupiter to Saturn.

We then arrive in the Mars sphere. As long as we were below the sun, we looked outwards towards it. Now the sun is below us and we gaze out into the great expanses of the cosmos. We experience these breadths of space by virtue of what is always called the music of the spheres, though this is little understood—a kind of spiritual music. From then on the visions in which we are immersed have ever less significance while what we hear spiritually assumes more and more importance. The planetary bodies do not appear to us as they do to astronomers on earth, measured and distinguished according to their velocities, but their faster or slower motion instead gives rise to the tones of cosmic harmony. And what we experience inwardly here is an increasing sense that we can only take with us into this region what we spiritually assimilated on earth. By this means we develop our acquaintance with the beings of this sphere, and remain a companionable spirit. Those who shut themselves off from spiritual concerns today, despite their morality or engagement with religious life, cannot enter the spiritual world. There is nothing to be done about it. It is of course fully possible that they will come to this in their next incarnation. All people with a materialistic outlook become hermits when they come to the region beyond the sun, extending to the Mars sphere. However crazy this may sound to some, it is the truth. [...]