The Future Determines the Present
As is the case with all our work, the axiom that must govern music, is that of agape: Plato’s Good, the axiom of cultural optimism. Music written from that standpoint, is what we have come to call Classical.
On the other hand, today, we have a diametrically opposed culture of pessimism, which is better termed Romanticism. The Romantic worldview is driven by eros, the world of sense perception. A nation that tolerates the axioms of pessimism embedded in such forms as country and western music, the wallowings of Richard Wagner, rock, or other forms of modern popular entertainment, or which tolerates such scientific frauds as Hermann Helmholtz, is a nation on its way to fascism. It is therefore of the utmost urgency today, that we learn a lesson from Mozart, and create the foundation for the survival of the nation—a foundation built on the sanctity of the human creative life.
Go back to what I stated earlier about Mozart and Plato’s concept of agape and the Good, the hypothesizing of the higher hypothesis. This is what governs the metaphor, which takes its form in Mozart’s mind, and governs the unfolding of the entire composition. Unfolding in music, is what Plato would call “the becoming.” So, it is this One, that must prevail, from that pregnant moment just before the performance starts, to the moment after the last sound is heard. But this, in turn, presents us with a fundamental paradox: Whereas the composition must be performed sequentially from beginning to end, in linear time—A, B, C, D, E—it is nevertheless generated from the future, to the present. In other words, A does not generate the next section B, nor does B generate C; the past does not generate the present.
This paradox flies right in the face of the “pit creatures” of the Enlightenment, who claimed that the ordering of ideas occurs only according to a naive sense perception of space, with continuous linear extension and three categories of direction: back-forward, side-to-side, and up-down; time, meanwhile, being extended, in a similar way, from past to future. The failure even to admit the existence of this paradox, is what is wrong with standard music training today, and with anyone who insists that the printed score is the literal statement of the composer’s intent. The score is no such thing; it is only a footprint of the metaphor in the composer’s mind.
Full paper here.