The term “musical thinking” entered—the sphere of music along with the concept of musical logic. After all, one of the ways of interpreting the meaning of logic is as correct thinking. The tendency of the Age of Enlightenment to accord priority to the intellect also encouraged musicians not to be satisfied with an artisanal approach to their activities, but also to develop a deeper awareness of them. Johann Nikolaus Forkel encouraged musicians not only to feel sounds, but also to think them. The first scholar to study musical thinking in depth was the philosopher and educationist Johann Friedrich Herbart, who considered musical thought to be the factor which enables us to know the meaning of music. But, without immersing ourselves in the views of the past, it is worth moving on to a more modern way of describing thinking as action.

Heidegger devoted considerable attention to explaining the problem of thinking: “We come to know what thinking [Denken] means when we ourselves try to think [denken]. If the attempt is to be successful, we must be ready to learn thinking. […] Man learns when he disposes everything he does so that it answers to whatever essentials are addressed to him at any given moment.”Footnote 1 Logic, as the doctrine of the lógos, considers thinking to be the assertion of something about something. The Greek word lógos is the noun to the verb légein. In turn, légein means to speak (to say), and logic is an abbreviation of the complete title which, in Greek, runs epistḗmē logikḗ—the understanding that concerns the logos.Footnote 2 Everything in this exposition of Heidegger, based on the etymology of the Greek words, comes down to a very logical proposition: for an expression of something to be possible, there must first be an understanding of what one wants to express. A thought is a decision made, and thinking is the process of searching for (choosing) that decision. Of course, degrees of understanding vary, and the quality of expression also depends on this.

To think for oneself means to look within oneself (i.e. in one’s own reason) for the supreme touchstone of truth; and the maxim of thinking for oneself at all times is enlightenment. […] To employ one’s own reason means simply to ask oneself, whenever one is urged to accept something, whether one finds it possible to transform the reason for accepting it, or the rule which follows from what is accepted, into a universal principle governing the use of one’s reason.Footnote 3

In music, the act of intonation could be such a rule-principle.

When it comes to musical thinking, there are two possible cases of thinking activity. Either to think about music, or to think it. The first case is theoretical—musicological—reflection on music, looking at music as if from the side, as an object of observation or cognition. In this case, the subject of music is no different from all other objects which are reflected on, evaluated or classified. The second type presupposes thinking music as thinking sounds. This type of thinking evidences the possibility of thinking and realising musical works (as Forkel also wished musicians to do).

“The lending of meaning” is produced in a thought understood as a thought of [“something”], as a thought of this or of that. […] The very breath of spirit in thought [is] knowledge. This is what one expresses in saying that consciousness, as the lender of meaning, is intentional.Footnote 4

If one understands thinking traditionally, as an action related to concepts and various symbols (verbal or mathematical) which obey the laws of formal logic, the question arises, is there another way of thinking apart from conceptual?

Musical thinking should embrace the phenomenon of musical philosophy and psychology as the highest sphere of reflecting the aesthetic (spiritual) content of music, through which the spiritual essence of music as art becomes known. “All working and achieving, all action and calculation, keep within an open region within which beings, with regard to what they are and how they are, can properly take their stand and become capable of being said (turned into sound—J. R.).”Footnote 5

Heidegger’s play on words—das Denken dankt, “thinking thanks”: “At its most penetrating, the exercise of thought is one of grateful acquiescence in Being. […] Jubilantly, such acquiescence is a giving of thanks for that which has been placed in our custody, for the light in the clearing.”Footnote 6

The rational transmission of intellectual content also makes it easier to perceive emotional content. However, only by possessing the power of irrational perception will the reproducing musician be able to penetrate more deeply into the emotional and all other irrational content of the work, and by finding the means and expression for it through reason and intuition, he or she will sometimes be able not only to fulfil the composer’s ideas, but also to extend the latter’s creative activity in greater depth and strength.Footnote 7

Thinking is always reflection.

23.1 Reflection (Consideration Based on an Analysis of Something)

“We must distinguish ‘straightforwardly’ executed grasping, perceiving, remembering, predicating, valuing, purposing, etc., from the reflections by means of which alone, as grasping acts belonging to a new level, the straightforward acts become accessible to us.”Footnote 8

Thinking is secondary to our perceptual (from the Latin perceptiō, meaning perception) emotional and volitional experience (it takes place between them), whereas experiencing is immediate and primary. Because of this immediacy and primacy, experiencing in itself appears meaningless. As has been said, the surface is significant, the inside is meaningful. The essence of the phenomenon does not manifest itself externally. Artistic fantasy, reinforced by knowledge of the subject, helps to penetrate the outer shell. “Reflection is fully capable of the act of fantasy in the form of the determinate consciousness of what an artwork at a certain point needs.”Footnote 9

René Descartes considered reflection to be an individual’s ability to detach themselves from everything external (and thus from the superficially grasped text of notes), and from everything corporeal, and to think only about the content of their thoughts. That means, the more I have an understanding of the contemplated subject which my mind contains (the more content it has), the more the subject will enlighten my consciousness. Reason is the ability to derive the particular from the universal. That is why it is so important to widen the circle of interests so that it can serve the immediate goals of activity.

Locke distinguished sensation from reflection, arguing that the latter is a special source of knowledge—an inner experience distinct from the outer one known to the data of the sense organs. “Reflection is blind intuition if it is not mediated by what Dilthey called the expressions in which life objectifies itself.”Footnote 10 Unfortunately, the everyday practice of performance is not based on these expressions and lurks at the level of narrow practicism. Without reflection, artistic expression is only physical work, not creation. Reflection enables one to accept or reject traditional proposals. The criticality of reflection is a decisive reason for rejecting trivial acts which distract from meaningful activity. However, giving up the old is more difficult than getting used to the new: it requires willpower. Reflective philosophy claims that the desire to be different, to move closer to meaning, means that “the self [le moi] must be lost in order to find the ‘I’ [le je].”Footnote 11 Meanwhile, “existence becomes a self [un soi]—human and adult—only by appropriating [the] meaning, which first resides ‘outside’, in works, institutions, and cultural monuments in which the life of the spirit is objectified.”Footnote 12

Reflection as a characteristic of thinking is not a given in itself. The purpose of reflection is not the repetition of the initial experience, but its observation and clarification (interpretive analysis of the text)—what we can discover in it for ourselves, and convey and express once we have perceived it. “Interpretation […] is the work of thought which consists in deciphering the hidden meaning in the apparent meaning, in unfolding the levels of meaning implied in the literal meaning.”Footnote 13

The process of musical thinking takes place on the basis of musical language, and its result—the musical concept—is an intonational-spiritual construct realised by means of this language. Musical language is, therefore, analysed together with musical thinking (legein in relation to noein), that is, together with an understanding of that language, and only then the utterance. People think in a language they understand, searching within it for words to express a thought that occurs. Both the interpretive process and thinking are based on analogy. We search for means of expression to express a musical idea which has been perceived. Any thinking (empirical or theoretical, scientific or artistic) is always connected with the intellect.

23.2 Intellect: The Ability to Recognise the Essence (Georg Hegel)

“Intellect is an old philosophical term meaning either the mind in general, or the function of the mind by which it performs the inner discernment of being (and thus, in the absence of this power, discernment of the inner form is not possible—J. R.). In the latter case, the intellect is to be contrasted with ratio, namely that function of the mind by which it manifests itself as discursive thinking, passing from one conclusion to another.”Footnote 14 And musical intellect is the specific mind that enables us to understand the logic of music and the immanent spiritual meanings hidden within it. At the same time, it is also the power which allows us to evaluate musical phenomena, and the ability to reveal their connections. The intellect and the mind are related as potential (possibility) and actuality (action, reality). The mind is a manifestation of the intellect. The intellect is the potential of the essence within a person.

Artistic intellect is the ability to draw closer to the essence of a work. From the perspective of musical perception, artistic intellect is (1) the ability to “read”—to hear the language of music in its texts—and (2) the ability to think music—through the creation of its intonations. “Action must be guided by both intellect and experience. […] Only when wisdom, courage (and, according to Albert Camus, ‘courage comes only after knowledge’—J. R.), timing, and perseverance are combined can one have a sound basis for initiative.”Footnote 15

Intellect (including musical intellect) is the ability to contemplate the objects of sensory observation or the understanding of the essences present in phenomena.

It is […] only the intellect that is capable of perceiving the truth, but it has to be assisted by imagination, sense-perception and memory if we are not to omit anything which lies within our power.Footnote 16

“The intelligence active within its possession [viz. within its image] is the reproductive imagination, the going forth of images out of the proper inwardness of the I which is now their power.”Footnote 17 Moving towards understanding is based on a will which is driven by desire and talent. “To understand (intelligere) means to read what is inside a thing (intus legere). Sense and imagination know only external accidents, but the intellect alone penetrates to the interior and to the essence of a thing.”Footnote 18

Musical theory, and the practice based upon it, should abandon its concern for the syntactical elements visually encoded in the score, and instead strive for the visual form of a musical work and the analysis of its structures to be focused on the plane of sound as the principal mode of musical life.

The substance of music is sound and the duality of its existence: on the one hand, the tendency towards abstraction (the sound in itself), on the other hand, sensory specificity (the sound of this or that instrument, the importance of timbre). Thus, on the one hand, there is pure feeling, unfolding through pure sensuality (a sound, the whole sound), and on the other hand, pure form; on the one hand – pure emotion, on the other – pure thought.Footnote 19

The basic unit of musical thinking is not the concept, nor the lifeless schemes and forms of sound structures, nor the special features of the structures, but life-giving intonation, whose logical development in the music leads to the aesthetic spiritual content being expressed. “One has to discover the autonomous time proper to a piece of music, the autonomous time proper to a poetic text, and this can only happen in one’s ‘inner ear’. […] The constituent elements with which we construct the work are not provided by the reproduction, the presentation, or the theatrical performance as such, but by the work that has been raised to ideality in our inner ear.”Footnote 20 Intellect in music also manifests itself as a norm, a criterion, which enables the evaluation of musical phenomena. When a thought is to be expressed out loud, it becomes an intonation. Intonation is not, by the way, a stranger to thought expressed in words. But, oh! how it can change the meaning…!

The universal need for art […] is man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self. […] On the one hand, within by making what is within him explicit to himself, but correspondingly by giving outward reality to this his explicit self, and thus in this duplication of himself by bringing what is in him into sight and knowledge for himself and others. This is the free rationality of man in which all acting and knowing, as well as art too, have their basis and necessary origin.Footnote 21

Musical intellect and musical consciousness are terms which are often used alongside musical thinking and musical perception. The differences between the terms musical intellect and musical consciousness are inconsequential. They are conceptually interrelated terms. “As the destiny of the intellect is to light and guide the steps of the will, the more vehement, impetuous, and passionate the inner impulse of a will, the more perfect and penetrating must be the intellect which is assigned to it. This must be so in order that the vehemence of striving and willing, the ardour of passions, and the intensity of emotions may not lead a man astray or precipitate him into ill-considered, false, and ruinous action. All this will inevitably be the case if the will is very violent and the intellect very weak.”Footnote 22 That is why the trait of self-criticism, rather than self-sufficiency, is so important when action overtakes thinking, and the mind lacks sufficient control. The mind must be guided by the intellect. Intellect is “first of all merely a feature of a human (a person), in a similar way that freedom is a feature of a person. This feature manifests itself as the ability to think. What is essential for this ability is not just formation of thought, but recognition of the truth, distinguishing between what is true and what is not.”Footnote 23

23.3 Musical Thought and Intuition

Intuition is often understood primitively as the passive perception of certain data which does not itself mean or express anything.

There is no principled difference between intuition and understanding, for even in the original intuitive cognition of objects and phenomena there already is a certain act of understanding. […] Intuitive knowledge is characterised by the same general structure as is the knowledge that we call understanding. […] Sensory perception first of all plays the part of a sign or signal indicating how to react in every particular case.Footnote 24

Therefore, experiencing intonation that is heard in practice already implies some understanding. Because only what is felt deeply can be understood and expressed in one way or another. That enlightenment, when one feels that one has understood, is based on the data of previous experiences, which have been fixed in the subconscious and rise to the surface of consciousness in a particular situation. Regarding the role of the subconscious in the activity of intuitive acts, it should be emphasised that the subconscious differs from consciousness in that the reality it reflects is related to a person’s feelings, and a person’s relationship with things which provide cognition; therefore, the subconscious cannot through the will control a person’s actions or evaluate their results. Consciousness does that. The structure of activity determines the structure of consciousness and its most important, specific characteristics. Accordingly, musical consciousness is formed from musical impressions and purposeful information accumulated in the subconscious. The information stored in our subconscious is the material of all our conscious decisions. Therefore, the wider the range of interests, the richer the subconscious database. After all, what we encounter, what we think about, gradually penetrates the subconscious and is registered in it. After that, those thoughts, through consciousness, turn into principles and beliefs that begin to intentionalise activities.

Latent thinking (from the Latin latens, meaning hidden, invisible) is the product of the artistic experience which is formed during a process of constant reflection, creative practice and aesthetic study, which manifests itself in the act of creation almost as an unconscious tendency, without conscious effort on the part of the artist.Footnote 25

Therefore, the first musical impressions, value orientations, relationships with the works and ways of perceiving them are especially important. Edmund Husserl called intuition every act of consciousness whose intention was fully realised, that is, in which the essence of the object, rather than some symbol representing it, is revealed. Intuition can be based on senses and extra-sensory data. In the first case, specific phenomena are manifested, in the second, the pure idea or essence of the phenomenon. “Husserl spoke of two kinds of intuition—sensuous intuition and categorical intuition. Sensuous intuition is what many contemporary philosophers call sense data, whereas categorical intuition is the immediate, non-empirical insight into the genus, species, or structure of any possible empirical experience.”Footnote 26 The second kind of intuition registers exactly the semantic side of the subject, which is musical phenomena.

23.4 Musical Concept

This is a perception, a sound image, ready for realisation (Latin conceptus, meaning taken hold of, perceived; the notion of a sign or denotation). An artistic musical concept is what we usually call a musical idea, an artistic image, sensing of musical intonation. In etymological terms, the notion of concept means what is captured, embraced, understood (Latin concipiō, meaning I understand); in psychological terms, it means the image of the object in the consciousness; in epistemological terms, it means the result of cognition, which is special in that it reflects only the essential values of the components of the object which is recognised, leaving the incidental ones aside.

The musical concept is an ideality, a subjective and generalised representation of existing intonations (in a broad sense) through intuition, feelings, musical thinking and, of course, the process of conversion into sound. “It is only through the perception of an idea that can one gain access to what must be”Footnote 27 (how it must be expressed—J. R.). The musical concept as knowledge that is non-verbal (rather, the tonal outcome), non-signified, can only be disclosed in the coordinates of musical time, using the intonational-sound method of expression which is unique to music. The emergence of this concept, to which the sensory material has been given by perception of music and which has been created by musical thinking, implies an understanding of music. Only such conversion into sound which crowns the process will be meaningful and valuable. “Once one grasps the essence of art, it is easier to understand its different types. Each proclaims artistry in its own way.”Footnote 28

The musical concept is a holistic construct. It is a project of the interpretation of the work and the result of its realisation. Conceptuality is a condition for the meaningfulness of expression.

23.5 The Hearing of Meaning or Meaning in Myself

To hear so as to evaluate art entails strained attention, consequently, mental work.

—Boris Asaf’evFootnote 29

Musical consciousness, of course, manifests itself through hearing, but is far from being identical to it; one should recall here the many non-musical people with perfect pitch.Footnote 30 The same author explains musicality as follows: “Musicality is above all an ability to think related to intonational thinking.”Footnote 31

By listening closely (rather than analyzing), the inquirer seemingly becomes part of the music, but at the same time the music becomes part of the inquirer. The inquirer (interpreter – J.R.) finds themselves in a situation of listening attentively to themselves – in a situation of understanding their own understanding. This process consists of several procedures. The first is “open listening”. You need to listen in such a way that you can capture the pure sonic surface without trying immediately to perceive its structural granularity. The second and subsequent procedures constitute a set of syntactical listenings. Syntactical listenings start at a more fundamental level than the level of musical form. […] Above syntactical listenings lie “semantic listenings”.Footnote 32

Only in the semantic context (in the framework of the whole) can one hear the quality of the timbre, the dynamics, in sum, the means of expression which are subordinated to the intonation. The music heard dictates its extrapolation (the externalisation of the inner) through the sound expression—because, in reality, the meaning of music is revealed only to the perceiving consciousness. Without emerging within me, without being heard and understood, music as meaning is not realised. “In music, being and meaning are inextricable. They deny paraphrase. But they are, and our experience of this ‘essentiality’ is as certain as any in human awareness.”Footnote 33

Aesthetic consciousness is the set of skills through which a person expresses their relationship with the aesthetic impulse. On the other hand, all consciousness is individual and unique. To rely only on this, in discerning the meaning of one work or another, means abandoning the principle of theoretical perception, which presupposes a perception based not only on distinguishing the features of an individual work but also on the knowledge and perception of the substantive common characteristics of the works which make them pieces of music. This is a matter of experience, of musical and extra-musical horizons, and mastery of one’s totality of musical-intonational sounds.

What connects all types of thinking, regardless of their individual character? In short, it is a mode of expression achieved as a result of thinking, and thinking is the process of finding a solution. Since musical thinking is determined by the specifics of the objects and phenomena on which it operates, the question of the nature and properties of the data of musical thinking (operands) is important and requires addressing. What music is made of, how and through what it is manifested, how its understanding is realised, constitutes the value of musical expression and the meaning of that expression.

23.6 Operands

From the Latin operandus, meaning the data on which an operation is performed.

“The operands which musical language applies to musical thinking come in two forms. Real-sounding, that is, as structural elements of music which already exists, and abstract—as units of grammars, as models of syntactical structures. […] In an abstract form, musical language exists as a system of possibilities in the musician’s mind, possibilities which can be realized and turned into phenomena which sound.”Footnote 34 So the written musical work is only an abstraction, a possibility. The work is realised by the interpreter: they transform that possibility into a sounding reality. Musical thinking deals first with the relations between sounds, which are exactly the operands that musical thought lodges in the text; and subsequently they become the basis for interpretation, after one has found the means of expression to realise those relations. The relations between sounds not only make the musical idea possible, but also give it meaning. This is musical meaning, which cannot be described in words. To understand music, one needs to acquire musical thinking which enables one to give structure to sound phenomena, and to decipher their meanings.

Alongside musical thinking, another area of operands that is very important for interpretation is musical language. It realises its possibilities, implicitly established in its grammars, which determine the behaviour of atomised units in the text. Not only the text itself but also each of its elements belongs to musical language. Musical language needs to be seen not only as a system of signs, but also as an event. It unfolds in time and is like an event or sequence of events understood and disseminated in time by the sound of the interpreter. “Musical language appears as a kind of device ‘built into’ the psyche. Language is only a system of possibilities, which is realized in musical speech. Being organized according to the laws of language, musical speech (expression—J. R.) creates its own rules.”Footnote 35 A certain circularity is at work: the composer constructs in the text a language, a system of structures, from the sounding material (“speech”), and the interpreter again gives it (the textualised language) sound, and reveals it through expression. “What we write, what we inscribe, is the noema of the act of speaking, the meaning of the speech event, not the event as event. […] Only when the sagen—the “saying”—has become Aus-sage, e-nunciation, only then, is discourse accomplished as discourse in the full expression of its nuclear dialectic.”Footnote 36 Here it is worth recalling Aristotle, who remains eternally relevant: that the essence of things lies in their transcendent idea, and it becomes reality in the sequence of those things. The process of interpretation is the transcendence of the idea, its elevation to the surface through the realisation of its elements in sound.

There is “the tendency in every idea to resolve itself into action—an idea being simply an inchoate or abortive act.”Footnote 37 Aristotle calls this diffusion of the essence entelechy (entelékheia). In his view, every development presupposes the goal of advancing from the possible to the real unfolding of the ousía.Footnote 38 We can thus draw a conclusion on the importance to be attached to the mission of the interpreter—the perceiver and the performer—in giving life to the meaning imprisoned in the texts of the works.

Our life consists of a multitude of actions or processes at different levels of consciousness. Consciousness is a constantly changing set of sensory and mental images; those images arise in a person as a result of his or her accumulated experience and determine his or her activity. Because we are exposed the whole time to certain impressions, we react to them on the basis of our experience and subconscious memory. “To think is to see what ‘is’, hence, what shows itself, but for whose utterance an adequate way of expressing itself has not yet been found (the ‘is’ is just waiting for its own way of ‘how’—J. R.). The thinking (seeing) saying always and inevitably overtakes the present, that is, the moment of everyday life.”Footnote 39

Understanding the essence of an object or phenomenon, therefore, always depends on the level of knowledge one has about the subject and on the intentions of the perceiver. From this perspective, the essence is understood as: (1) the inner basis of things—phenomena—which is not directly perceptible. The acoustic realisation of the textual signs—the notes—is not sufficient to be considered an act of revelation of meaning; (2) the composition of the “nature” of the work, its true being, that is, the idea, and the idea’s intonational image; (3) the analysis and interpretive expression of structural units as parts of the whole. After all, any work of art requires interpretation—as an answer to the questions it raises. This is the real goal of this action (interpretation), which anyone who seeks meaningfulness in their activity must share.

23.7 Some Approaches to Musical Thinking

One of the most famous music theorists and critics, Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), was considered a formalist by his contemporaries (implying that the role of form in music was something negative), but there were also those who agreed with Hanslick’s ideas. In this respect the German scholar in aesthetics Friedrich T. Vischer stated that “form is nothing but the form of content, the outer of the inner; the two aspects cannot be separated, because the one is in the other, the other in the one, they should be taken into consideration together; they are not two values, but only one value.”Footnote 40 Hanslick gives this quote in his “Autobiography,” as if seeking confirmation of his statements: “Vischer’s general statement […] entirely resembles what I said about form and content in music, some years earlier.”Footnote 41 Finally, Hanslick was openly recognised as a formalist by the representatives of Soviet musical aesthetics. For instance, Aleksandr Mikhailov states: “A worse formalist than Hanslick was Schopenhauer, who also denied the music was capable of expressing the specificity of feelings. […] The symptoms of decline of musical aesthetics and its theoretical level in the second half of the nineteenth century must be noted repeatedly.”Footnote 42 This was the way any non-Soviet approach to art was evaluated.

Hanslick, above all, questions the assertion that music has to represent (darstellen—to convey, embody) feelings. “[No] characterization of music by its effect on the feelings tells us anything decisive about the aesthetic principles of the art—any more, indeed, than [one] who gets drunk establishes anything about the nature of wine! […] The connection between a musical composition and the feelings that it arouses is not essentially a causal one.Footnote 43 […] What part of the feelings, then, can music represent, if not the subject involved in them? Only their dynamic properties. It may reproduce the motion accompanying psychical action, according to its momentum speed, slowness, strength, weakness, increasing and decreasing intensity. But motion is only one of the concomitants of feeling. […]. [Motion] is the element which music has in common with our emotions, and which, with creative power, it contrives to exhibit in an endless variety of forms and contrasts.”Footnote 44

“Observe”, said Leonardo da Vinci, “the meanderings of each thing. If, in other words, you want to know a thing well and depict it well, observe the type of grace that is peculiar to it”. […] Forms and structures can be justified, but life and grace cannot. They are “something more”, and this gratuitous surplus is everything. […] Grace [is] “eurythmia”; that is “movement that does well”.Footnote 45

When talking about the powers of musical expression, Hanslick takes instrumental (so-called pure) music as an example. The nature of the beautiful in music is

something specifically musical—by which we mean a beauty that lies entirely in musical sounds and their artistic arrangement […]. [Sounds] in harmonic concord and contrast, in flight and pursuit, alternatively swelling and dying away—these, presented to our imaginations in free-moving shapes, delight us by what we call their beauty.Footnote 46 […] The basic element of music is euphony, its essence is rhythm: both rhythm in general, as the correspondence of parts in a symmetrical structure, and rhythm in particular, as the changing motions of individual elements of the tempo of a work. [The material consists of] all the notes of the gamut with their inherent melodic, harmonic and rhythmic potentialities. Unexhausted and inexhaustible, the melody reigns above all, as the fundamental form of musical beauty. Harmony with its myriad transformations, reversals and re-enforcements offers perpetually new patterns, while the two combined are set in motion by rhythm, the pulse of musical life, and coloured by the charm of countless different timbres.Footnote 47

“Melody will always be the purest expression of human thought,” stated Charles Gounod, and to a claim of a contemporary that he (Claude Debussy) had “at last suppressed melody”, Debussy replied: “Sir, my music is all melody.”Footnote 48

“Forms set in motion by sounding (tönend bewegte Formen) are the sole and single content and object of music.”Footnote 49 How well this chimes with Asaf’ev’s statement about form as a process! Incidentally, his book “Musical Form as a Process” was published in 1930. Perhaps this is an unintentional development of Hanslick’s idea? The specific nature of music should by no means be understood as purely acoustic beauty or proportionality. But music also embraces these subordinate spheres. “Forms created by musical sounds are not empty […], no mere linear outlines describing a vacuum but the appearance of the spirit being shaped from within.”Footnote 50 In favour of interpretation, one should acknowledge that the spirit determines the form, and that this spirit—the idea of the work, its content—also dictates the nature and means of expression. This form of spiritual activity is especially akin to music because a musical work does not appear before us immediately, stationary in one place, but gradually unfolds as it is heard, and therefore requires not a cursory look which allows for stops and pauses, but following with uninterrupted, emphatic attention.

Language is an artificial product in precisely the same sense as music, since neither exists ready-prepared in nature, but both are uncreated and have to be learnt. Languages are not framed by philologists, but by the nations themselves according to their character and need, and are constantly modified for perfection. In the same way ‘musical philologists’ have not laid the ‘foundation’ of music, but have merely fixed and substantiated what the universal musically capable mind had unconsciously brought forth with sensibleness, though not with necessity.Footnote 51

When perceiving music, and especially when seeking to interpret (perform) it, it is not enough to focus on the signs and the instrument alone. That type of action, if it is not under an “obligation” to values, fails to produce meaningful expression. Interpretation is an act of process based on knowledge of certain regularities and rules. Musical expression is a knowing action. If you know, you can already largely do it. You do not do what you know, but you know what you do. The imperative of action—of interpretation—must be of the same kind.

When recalling other testimonies about musical thinking and the accompanying search for meaning, albeit perhaps not as significant as Hanslick’s, it should be noted that this requires not only musical literacy, but also extra-musical (not only musical) knowledge of aesthetics, philosophy and literature. This determines the freedom and substance of the actions of the person interpreting the music. In recognising that musical activity is knowledge based on both emotions and intellect, it helps to clarify what is meant by “knowledge” in relation to the art of music. Knowledge of music based on the first, rational aspect needs to be linked with knowledge based on theoretical musical intellect. This is an epistemic (cognitive)—descriptive—concept of knowledge, related to the sources in which the practice of perceiving artistic phenomena (not only musical phenomena) is objectivised. The second aspect of knowledge is constituted by the experiencing of music itself as art. This is a value-based aspect of music perception—insight and understanding, beyond the sign-form of the music, of its inner—spiritual—dimension. The third aspect is the very ability to “make” music, that is, to create or perform it. Providing musical works with a sound form based on the “making” of music is an act which requires no less creativity than the creation itself. It is re-creation—the reproduction of the idea of a work not potentially, but in reality, through the process of interpretation. Descartes argued that the reproduction (expression) of the substance requires no less force than its creation. All aspects of knowledge are interrelated. The general principles are applied to specific (concrete) purposes. Musical erudition serves the meaningfulness of expression.

Musical thinking is something through which the psyche, by means of apperception (the understanding of the essence of an observed object), complements and “predicts” musical images in advance, and influences them; in addition, perceptions acquire the significance of norms of taste. One of the founders of the act of thinking in music, Johann Friedrich Herbart, established a good basis for examining the way in which the senses and affects of sounds are “extended” by thinking, and how a holistic abstract understanding of music is formed in the process of perceiving music. Gustav Fechner, an aesthetician and proponent of associative psychology, interpreted aesthetic perception as a stream of holistic impressions. In the nineteenth century, psychological inquiry shifted from the study of perception and images to the study of thinking. The psychology of thinking was developed, to which Husserl’s “Logical Investigations” (1900–1901) provided a huge impetus, where the links between sensory and rational cognition were reexamined afresh. And one of Husserl’s followers, Martin Heidegger, wrote a special work, “What is Called Thinking?” This is a series of lectures given in 1951–1952. The hegemony of sensibility, which prevailed in the Romantic era, is opposed to the view that there are higher than sensory ways of cognition of the inner essence of things and, therefore, of the essence of music. Richard Müller-Freienfels’ book Psychology of Art (1912) emphasises that the experience of musical forms is impossible without an intellectual synthesis analogous to conceptual logical thinking; only an analysis of the emotionally perceived whole enables one to understand the totality of the work.

The Swiss philosopher and musicologist Ernst Kurth distinguished sensory (material) and spiritual (das Seelische) origins in the act of musical perception and its experience. The latter provides a person with psychic energy which is embodied in musical forms. The performer must detect it and tap into it through intonation. Musical experience—the perception of music—is an irrational interaction of sensibility and psychic energy. Husserl’s statement that inner energy can originate in subconscious images is close to this idea. And in full support of the art of interpretation, Kurth claims that music is nothing but the expression of psychic energy through external—material (sonic)—means. Drawing on Wilhelm Ostwald’s concept of energeticism, Kurth explained both the emergence of the totality of the work and the ability of the ear to hear “near to the sound”—that is, to hear what is yet to sound and what has already sounded. Such a model of the intonation process is related to the three-phase concept of St Augustine’s time.

Boris Asaf’ev, whose theories of intonation and the processuality of form constitute the kernel of this book (in respect of the meaningfulness of expression), could not help but touch on the areas described by the terms “musical thought,” “musical consciousness” and, well, “musical thinking.” Like many musicologists of the early twentieth century, Asaf’ev stresses the importance of thinking and intellect in artistic activity. Art is alive with thought, and music is the intonation of that thought. Although Asaf’ev criticises Kurth for not using the term “intonation” in the sense understood by Asaf’ev, does not Kurth’s idea of energy, as the cause of musical thought leading to the emergence of melody (melos), have the same meaning as intonation, which also cannot happen without appropriate energy and effort in giving the sound process the appropriate expressive character? The melodic element, also called “melos,” is judged by Asaf’ev to be the essence of music, its semantic expression. He considers music to be an intonational system, whose form and meaning are known through the intellect—that is, through the analysis of structures. “Like any activity of man which apprehends and reorganizes reality, music is directed by the consciousness and represents rational activity. The sensual (i.e. the emotional) tonus, inevitably characteristic of music, is not its cause, for music is an art of intoned meaning.”Footnote 52