The knowl­edge about our in­ner hu­man forces is defi­nitely not new; most proba­bly it is very an­cient.

Mu­sic is par­ticu­larly quali­fied to convey this very knowl­edge – which might in­clude all other knowl­edge – but how then should one ex­pect mu­sic to sud­denly pro­duce some­thing com­pletely new?

The tools with which the tone crea­tors draw from the an­cient well of knowl­edge since times im­me­mo­rial have cer­tainly be­come obsolete again and again in the course of time – rusted, or in need of repair or even of re­ne­wal.
But nev­er­the­less, at all times the pure spring wa­ter in the well of eter­nal wis­dom was drawn vigourously and in­ces­santly.

And those who pos­sessed the great­est skill here are known as the great com­pos­ers.
Cer­tainly, their urge arises from their per­sonal knowl­edge – their own in­ner ex­peri­ence – of the true nour­ish­ing value of this im­mor­tal­ity-grant­ing sound­ing sap of life.

The im­pulse for their greater crea­tive deeds, how­ever, came just as much from their knowl­edge of the de­mand for this nectar in their sur­round­ings.

Only in this way can we ex­plain the tirelessness and imperturbabil­ity with which they repaired the ves­sels of mu­si­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion of truth which had be­come leaky and there­fore less ef­fi­cient, or with which they in­vented and em­ployed com­pletely new sound­ing ves­sels to convey knowl­edge.

All this ac­tiv­ity we com­monly call “mu­sic his­tory,” and we in­ter­pret it as the “de­vel­op­ment of the mu­si­cal forms.”

This craft of re­pair­ing, im­prov­ing, and newly de­signing the mu­si­cal con­tainers for the ob­tain­ment of truth, was then mis­taken for the evo­lu­tion of a mu­sic the­ory.

But just as lit­tle as a vessel is iden­ti­cal to the wa­ter it car­ries, as lit­tle is our outer mu­si­cal his­tory and the mu­sic the­ory linked to it iden­ti­cal with the mu­sic – al­though it bears wit­ness of it.

No sur­prise then, if to­day one at­tempts to iden­tify mu­sic by its as­pect of sound, by ana­lyz­ing the grossest as­pects of the sounds, their rela­tive pitch and du­ra­tion, mak­ing one­self be­lieve to know mu­sic.
This effort re­minds of some­one look­ing from all sides at the wreck of a bucket, riddled with holes, and meas­ur­ing it, in or­der to deduce the na­ture of wa­ter in this way.

Cer­tainly, from the tightness and size of a con­tainer we may deduce, by usual stan­dards, its po­ten­tial of car­ry­ing wa­ter.
But the na­ture of the con­vey­ance of knowl­edge in mu­sic is not such that it al­lows in­sight into its magi­cal realm by so sim­ple a logic.

If we in­tended to enter the finer mu­si­cal layers of knowl­edge with a mu­si­cal vessel to fathom the truth en­closed in mu­sic, then we would need to adapt the struc­ture of the con­tainer to the con­di­tions of the mu­si­cal or­der pre­sent in each mu­si­cal layer.

Now, a con­tainer for draw­ing mu­si­cal truths may be com­pared to a sieve which has holes of vari­able size so as to sift out the pieces of knowl­edge that are em­bed­ded in the vari­ous mu­si­cal layers of knowl­edge, and that are most con­spicu­ous there.
Thus the sieve re­mains very light, for if the holes were filled it would be harder to han­dle.

If one re­stricted one­self to draw­ing wa­ter, for ex­ample, then a com­pletely closed vessel might be re­quired.
If, how­ever, one wants to catch live fish in the wa­ter, then for vari­ous rea­sons the shape of a net is more suited, and it has there­fore been most widely adopted.