The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone: Selected Lectures from the Work of Rudolf Steiner

Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner #CW 283

by Rudolf Steiner, Alice Wulsin (Editor)

7 lectures in various cities, December 3, 1906 – March 16, 1923 (CW 283) "A tone is at the foundation of everything in the physical world." This is one of many astonishing statements made by Rudolf Steiner in this collection of seven lectures on the inner realities of music. These lectures are an unusual treasure, since they are the only two groups of lectures that Steiner gave primarily on music, other than the lecture cycle for the tone eurythmy course, Eurythmy as Visible Music . In the first group of three lectures, given in 1906, Steiner explains why music affects the human soul so powerfully. Music has always held a special position among the arts because it is the only art form whose archetype, or source, lies not in the physical world, as with architecture, sculpture, and painting, but purely in the spiritual world-the soul's true home. Music thus directly expresses through tones the innermost essence of the cosmos, and our sense of wellbeing when we hear music comes from a recognition of our soul's experience in the spiritual world. In the remaining lectures, given in 1922 and 1923, Steiner discusses our experience of musical intervals and shows how it has undergone profound changes during the course of evolution. The religious effects of music in ancient times and the union of music with speech are considered, as well as the origin of musical instruments out of imaginations that accompanied singing. New insights are offered on the nature of the major and minor modes and on future directions of musical development. “Major and minor keys, this strange bond between music and human subjectivity, the actual inner life of feeling―insofar as this life of feeling is bound to the earthly corporeality―came into being only in the course of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch and are related to the experience of the third. The difference between major and minor keys appears; the subjective soul element relates itself to the musical element.” ― Rudolf Steiner (lect. 5) This volume is a translation of 7 lectures (of 8) in Das Wesen des Musikalischen und das Tonerlebnis im Menschen, published by Rudolf Steiner-Nachlaftverwaltung, Dornach, 1969 (GA 283).

Genres: Music, Spirituality

108 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1983

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.

Reviews

[Nicole Wagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strange, provocative, occasionally maddening, and genuinely thought-provoking book. It's a collection of transcribed lectures in which Rudolf Steiner attempts to connect music (its creation, its experience, its very existence) to the spiritual world. You will disagree with parts of it. You will also find yourself underlining things you can't stop thinking about.

A quick primer on anthroposophy: Steiner writes from the framework of anthroposophy, and if you're unfamiliar, here's the bare minimum you need to engage with these lectures. Humans are made of a fourfold structure: a Physical Body, an Etheric Body (life forces), an Astral Body (sentience/consciousness), and an Ego (the individual self). Human development occurs over successive lives, as in karma and reincarnation, and in childhood development happens in stages, roughly 7-years per cycle: imagination (1–7), feeling and arts (7–14), intellect (14–21). This is the basis of modern Waldorf Education, by the way, so it's not totally apocryphal. Anthroposophy aims to let individuals connect with the divine without reliance on traditional religious dogma.

You don't need to buy all of this to find the lectures interesting. I certainly don't accept it wholesale. But it's the lens, and knowing it helps. Here are some of the excerpts I underlined in my own copy:

"The child will comprehend a certain inner rhythm while it is still very young. Aside from this instinctively experienced rhythm, however, the child should not be troubled until after it is nine years old with the rhythm that is experienced, for example, in the elements of instrumental music."

Young children are not thought to have the sort of musical proficiency or capacity for rhythm that even casual observation proves many children much younger show readily. I've seen four-year-olds playing drums that sound amazing. And Michael Jackson surely didn't emerge as a full-fledged world-class dancer and performer starting at age 9. He'd been developing his craft and appreciating rhythms long before that. This is one of the pieces that irritated me!

"The musical instruments are derived from the spiritual world; the piano, however, in which the tones are abstractly lined up next to each other, is created only in the physical world by man. All instruments like the flute or violin originate musically from the higher world."

This is a very strange bias against the piano. I can't understand it. The piano is not abstract. It's string and rhythm together. Why does the flute get a spiritual passport and the piano doesn't?

"One must not believe, however, that an artist is always intellectually aware of what is concealed in his work. The precipitations of his astral vision need not penetrate as far as physical consciousness in order to live in his works."

The biopic "Michael" just came out, and there's a good amount of renewed conversation about Michael Jackson's claim that his songs flowed THROUGH him, that he channeled them rather than composed them with full autonomy. Steiner's framework here gives that claim a surprisingly coherent philosophical home. The artist doesn't need to intellectually understand what moves through him; the work can carry more than the conscious mind put there.

"These echoes pervade the lower world with inklings of a glorious and wonderful existence; they churn up man's innermost being and thrill it with vibrations of the purest joy and sublime spirituality, something that this world cannot provide."

"As it is above so it is below, and as below so above."

"Musical creations, however, must be generated anew again and again. They flow outward in the surge and swell of their harmonies and melodies, a reflection of the soul, which in its incarnations must always experience itself anew in the outward-flowing stream of time."

I like this. It implies that performance and communal listening are as important as recordings and archives. Music isn't a fixed object. It's an event, every time recreated in part by the experience of the listener receiving it.

"Only a truly irrational understanding--an understanding of the human being beyond the rational--will permit us to grasp the musical element in a feeling way and to acquaint the human being with it."

"We stand much closer to the spiritual world with our rhythmic system than with our thinking system. It is the thinking system that influences speech which has become prosaic."

This actually makes sense. Poetry and rap can be much more powerful than long-form prose. There's something about rhythm that bypasses the analytical mind and hits somewhere deeper, somewhere the thinking system can't reach on its own.

"In physical space we feel all other beings as outside of us. In Devachan, however, we do not feel ourselves outside of other beings; instead, they permeate us, and we are within them as well. Therefore, in all esoteric schools, the sphere of Devachan and also the astral realm have been called 'the world of permeability.'"

Ignoring one of the weird terms Steiner uses, I do think there is more permeability and spectrum than our binary patriarchal capitalist present of information tech suggests. We experience ourselves as discrete units, but that might be a limitation of the framework rather than a truth about existence.

"It is as ridiculous to claim that thoughts originate in the human head as it is to claim that the drink of water originates in the mouth."

Fascinating and thought-provoking. And it reinforces the Michael Jackson thread: if thoughts (and by extension, melodies) don't originate in us, then Jackson's insistence that he was a vessel rather than a creator isn't mystical woo-woo nonsense. It's a philosophical position with real lineage.

Thoughts, gods, tones, intervals, spiritual and physical realms of various kinds, human evolution, the evolution of humanity's concept of ourselves, the origin of our thoughts and feelings and the presence of the divine. All connected, at least in Steiner's telling.

You don't have to agree with him. I don't, on several points. But this is a book that made me think differently about what music is and where it comes from.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with most lectures by Dr Steiner, they are more easily read than his books. That does not make this an easy read. To understand the depth of Steiner's lectures, one must first be acquainted with his book "An Outline of Esoteric Science". In these lectures, knowledge of both Esoteric Human Evolution and the Seven and Nine Fold human being helps immensely. According to Steiner, music is the highest art form because it is purely spiritual. Music tones must be reborn each time a tune is expressed via the physical world (versus the permanence of art through material mediums. Further, it seems Steiner does not consider recordings as "music" as he is primarily concerned with art as the act of creation, and so far as music is concerned, once a piece is played it remains in the ethers, lacking physicality).

This is a beautiful series of lectures, covering the development of the ear, the evolution of tones from pre-Earth, the perception and acquisition of and individual's musical-ness from World of Devachan (places visited by the Astral body during dreamless sleep and between lives), the quality of notes as related to physiology, color, Eurythmy and the Zodiac, the different spiritual realms accessed by Imagination Inspiration and Intuition and possessing musical 'talent' as related to karma and physical heredity.

A beautiful philosophy of the experience of music.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good information but a very dull read.

[Maura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting read for serious singers.