The Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet was not only a great master of his immediate profession, but also an original thinker about the meaning of music and its manifestations. Most importantly, these are reflections of a musical practitioner, which in our case is especially significant.

The melody is a trajectory, that is to say, the transfer of [sound] through intervals which are distances between positions of sound and sections of time. […] As long as these movements of sound take place outside of us, we will find nothing in them that can constitute beauty or meaning in itself: there is no pure music, as [modern] theorists understand it […], who advise us to “bring the music back to itself,” leaving in ambiguity what it is. There is only one way for the melody to become meaningful, and that is for it to be experienced as a path (as a process – J. R.). A path is still a trajectory, but it is a trajectory that I am taking. The perceptible event of the melody then interiorizes and the “path”, as an internal event, can take on many meanings.Footnote 1

If the melody is to be felt as a path, the musical consciousness and the movement it produces should have a position which is known in advance and which serves as a reference point for all changes of movement. This should be the governance of intonation as the sense of the inner form. “In fact, music always shows us a path, but a path not to a dream, where a picture or a poem invites us, but a path you have to travel in time, a pull towards a goal which, as the philosophers say, determines itself, that is, it takes place in its own particular internal time.”Footnote 2 With respect to the importance of intentionality for the act of musical expression, Ansermet states: “This dynamism of tensions [constitutes] the melody […]: clearly, [the melody] can only get it from us. The object of music is our creature, it is an object which is imagined, arising from sounds at the will of our affective consciousness. Through the sounds, a path, a movement, arises before us, generating its own special space, distilling its own time and leading us with it into this imagined space and time.”Footnote 3

The performer never finds in the text more than an outline of the motor tensions they must produce; they must always be beyond these notes and, basically, never play what is written—although they must not play anything that does not conform to what is written. […] There is a first stage of musical experience which we can consider immediately accessible and universally human: it is that of what I will call simple structures. It is rare that, in a melodic sequence of sounds, anyone does not catch the beginning and the end of a phrase, or even a simple connection of phrases. […] The musically deaf person is a person in whom this elementary […] act does not ‘take off’, or advance beyond itself, or open itself to the formation of a feeling, which can be endlessly enriched and differentiated. Even when faced with simple structures […] it is not enough to grasp only the general form, you need to feel all its perceptible peculiarities, all its internal connections.Footnote 4

“Music is what responds to musical consciousness; it is circumscribed in advance in a field defined by its foundations […]. [This musical consciousness] awakens in us and then opens up, progressively, to the same degree as our experiences. In order for musical activity, in any of its aspects, to take on the value of culture, music must focus on this experience. […] In this lies the responsibility of whoever engages in this activity for their act—what makes this act futile or unworthy or, conversely, gives it value.”Footnote 5

“Music is not made only with sounds. It is made of melodies and harmonies arranged by rhythm in a certain tempo and which musicians reveal by sounds, just as language is made of verbal forms which the writer or the speaker reveals by written or spoken words. In other words, music is not a physical object nor even a real object, it is an image which its performance, and only its performance, communicates to the listener by a certain way of linking, shaping and accentuating the sounds.”Footnote 6 “When we ask music a question, it brings us back to its act of existence, and since an act can only be understood from its meaning, it is only from its meaning that we can understand music. This meaning arises from a relationship spontaneously established between the consciousness and the world of sounds, in a way that the consciousness has to connect itself to the sounds in their sequence and their simultaneity; it must therefore have a foundation in us and in the sounds. It is this meaning of music in general which is specified in each particular work and which allows us to speak of the ‘meaning’ of a work.”Footnote 7 We have already said that this meaning is only revealed through experience, and this prompts us to move towards new experiences.

“As soon as the musician considers the object [of music] to be autonomous and understands it as technique, the [technique] becomes selbständig (independent) in their eyes; it has meaning in itself; the technique itself confers the ‘musical’ essence on the object.”Footnote 8 And this is a growing tendency, to fetishise instrumentality by forgetting or not knowing that the purpose of mastering an instrument is to serve the revelation of the meaning of the work which the possessor of the instrument is interpreting.