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Tonality

The Artistic Structuring of the Tonality

Tonality reveals itself in the artistic mastery of the overtones in a tone: in the lively and confident use of that natural, physical, inner structure of a tone which due to the present, incorrect way of reading scores has completely fallen into oblivion.

Feelings, Mental Impressions and Moods through Tonalities

The overtone-spectrum may be produced and perceived in very different ways, and depending on the arrangement of the overtones, on their tonality, it evokes very different feelings, moods, and mental impressions within us listeners.

Since an overtone-spectrum, due to its nature, contains an infinite number of diverse tones which appear as individual overtones, their different combinations result in an endless variety of musical sound-space structures – an infinite diversity of tonalities.

The conscious perception of overtones in our sense of hearing depends on the delicacy of our hearing ability. The further away the overtones are from the basic tone, the finer is their structure, the fainter the sound, and hence the more difficult they are to hear. Also, they are much closer together, and thus much more difficult to differentiate.

The Limits of Recognizing the Tonality

Thus, while listening inside, the listener will eventually reach a limit where he can no longer discriminate the pitch of two neighbouring overtones; a limit where his mental ability to differentiate his intellectual ability to discriminate – with regard to the tone – are no longer efficient, and all further overtones will at best be perceived as noise.

Training the Mental Power of Discrimination

With the systematic training of the mental power of discrimination the musician or the listener penetrates, with his inner ear, deeper and deeper into the nature-given cosmic world of musical sound-spaces, and on the level of his feeling, depending on the refinement of his perception, he will hear and recognize the different tonalities in the innermost worlds of music: those manifold “planetary orbits of the musical sound-space.”