THEORETICAL FUNDAMENTALS

Nature’s Laws of
Harmony in the
Microcosm of Music

MUSIC + BRAIN
Part 1   •   Part 2

Chronomedicine

Music as a Harmonic
Medical Data Carrier

The Special Status of the
Ear in the Organism

The Ear as a
Medical Instrument

The Significance of the
Soul to Medicine

The Significance of
our Consciousness
to Medicine

The Significance of the
Soul to Human Evolution

Scientists of Tuebingen discover the Brain Regions responsible for
Self Awareness

The Future of Pharmaceutics

Peter Hübner

 

 






Peter Hübner - Micro Music Laboratories

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Peter Hübner

Music as a Harmonic
Medical Data Carrier

An information-theory approach
to the Digital Pharmaceutics

The musicologist
Peter Hübner at the
‘9th International
Montreux Congress
on Stress’

Lead­ing sci­en­tific ex­perts met at this con­gress to ex­change thoughts, ex­peri­ences and knowl­edge about de­vel­op­ments in the field of stress re­search and stress man­age­ment. The fol­low­ing con­tains ex­cerpts from the dis­cus­sions – com­piled by the pub­lish­ers for this spe­cial pub­li­ca­tion.

Question: Herr Hübner, you are a classical composer; how does this craft benefit you in the drawing up of the harmonic information in your Micro Music Laboratories?

Peter Hübner: Very much. The har­monic in­ves­ti­ga­tions in the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic lead us right into the cen­ter of the craft of our great­est clas­si­cal sound crea­tors. We can view our mu­si­cal his­tory – i.e. that of Europe, es­pe­cially of Ger­many and still more par­ticu­larly of Thur­in­gia – as a proc­ess of cog­ni­tion in terms of the laws of har­mony of the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic. In do­ing so we must not take too nar­row a view of the his­tori­cal as­pect since, up un­til Bach, this har­monic cog­ni­tion proc­ess saw its great­est pro­gres­sion, whilst af­ter Bach it al­ready went into de­cline again.

Ques­tion: Does this de­cline ex­plain the ‘sal­va­tion­ist’ leap into ato­nal­ity?

Peter Hübner: With­out a doubt! It be­came more and more ap­par­ent to com­pos­ers that they had lost the spon­ta­ne­ous in­ter­nal ac­cess to har­mony and, for atonal mu­sic, one does not need such ac­cess.

Bach’s mu­sic, and in­deed the mu­sic of his time, dem­on­strates the high­est de­gree of cog­ni­tion in terms of the laws of har­mony of the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic in our Euro­pean mu­sic tra­di­tion, since these sound crea­tors de­vel­oped the high­est ar­tis­tic craft in work­ing at one with these natu­ral laws of har­mony.

In say­ing this, I do not wish to imply that this ar­tis­tic craft is fin­ished and can­not be fur­ther de­vel­oped, rather that, his­tori­cally, this was the time when the great­est in­sight into the laws of har­mony of the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic can be proven, and that this in­sight has since been in gen­eral de­cline right up to mod­ern times.

Ques­tion: Can you ex­plain that in more de­tail?

Peter Hübner: Let us take, for ex­ample, po­lyph­ony, the counter point, the art of the fugue. In Bach’s time, deal­ing with these com­po­si­tional ele­ments was, for him and his col­leagues, still some­thing com­pletely natu­ral. It was clear, too, that these com­po­si­tional meth­ods only made sense with har­monic mu­sic, and also that it was only here that they could be viewed as ar­tis­tic craft. Af­ter Bach, how­ever, the ar­tis­tic craft of po­lyph­ony lost its pre-emi­nence in mu­sic and sim­ple ho­moph­ony be­came more and more wide­spread: the melody with added ac­com­pa­ni­ment came to the fore.

“Both in clas­si­cal and also in mod­ern medi­cine, the dis­rup­tion of the natu­ral har­monic or­der of our bod­ily func­tions has been ac­cepted as one of the prin­ci­ple causes of ill­ness.

In par­ticu­lar, mod­ern chrono-medi­cine has, with nu­mer­ous stud­ies, been able to sub­stan­ti­ate this con­nec­tion.

Par­ticu­larly in the pre­sent cli­mate of grow­ing prob­lems in medi­cal care, sci­en­tifi­cally based har­monic mu­sic medi­cine is there­fore gain­ing greater and greater sig­nifi­cance.”

Peter Hübner
Gen­er­ally, Bach’s suc­ces­sors only dis­play this art of the fugue in high spots of their great­est clas­si­cal works. As such, some of them who to this day enjoy great ac­claim as op­er­atic com­pos­ers had dif­fi­cul­ties with the sim­ple fugue.
The mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic rec­og­nizes no ho­moph­ony what­so­ever – in the same way that the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic does not, in a struc­tural sense, rec­og­nize the phe­nome­non of dic­ta­tor­ship. But in ho­moph­ony we find that syn­the­tic, un­natu­ral sys­tem of dic­ta­tor­ship – where the melody plays the role of the dic­ta­tor, and the voices of the ac­com­pa­ny­ing in­stru­ments as­sume the roles of lack­eys.

The fugue – as a spe­cial area of po­lyph­ony – does not know this syn­the­tic un­natu­ral sys­tem of melody with added ac­com­pa­ni­ment.
In­stead it is here that the melody en­gages in a mul­ti­fac­eted re­la­tion­ship with it­self and, in do­ing so, as­sumes the role of its own ac­com­pa­ni­ment.

In so­cial terms, this kind of struc­ture is known to­day as ‘de­moc­racy’. In the sim­ple fugue the melody en­gages in a mul­ti­fac­eted re­la­tion­ship with it­self – simi­lar to the natu­ral re­la­tion­ship be­tween re­lated fam­ily mem­bers. In the case of the dou­ble fugue it is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the natu­ral re­la­tion­ship be­tween the fam­ily mem­bers of two fami­lies. Ac­cord­ingly, with a triple fugue it rep­re­sents the natu­ral re­la­tion­ship be­tween mem­bers of three fami­lies, etc., etc.

His­tori­cally the art of the fugue had its limits, mainly due to the limi­ta­tions of the tech­ni­cal per­form­ance skills of the in­di­vid­ual in­ter­preter – in the case of Johann Sebastian Bach, for ex­ample, in that he only pos­sessed two hands and two feet with which to pre­sent a multi-voice fugue on the or­gan. In prac­tice then, he was him­self tech­ni­cally un­able to exceed 4 poly­phonic voices. In the case of the or­ches­tra, the pos­si­bili­ties were in­deed greater, but nev­er­the­less quite lim­ited.

His­tori­cally, the growth of the au­thori­tar­ian lead or­ches­tra has brought about a de­cline in the ar­tis­tic craft of po­lyph­ony. Con­se­quently, un­der the dic­ta­tor­ship of star con­duc­tors, the ques­tion of us­ing an ‘or­ches­tral ap­pa­ra­tus’ of this kind for the lib­er­ated high art of the fugue, of the po­lyph­ony, of the coun­ter­point arises less and less often, and ul­ti­mately not at all, be­cause po­lyph­ony de­pends es­sen­tially on the ar­tis­tic free­dom and in­de­pend­ence of each in­di­vid­ual mu­si­cian – also in the face of a con­duc­tor who is him­self striv­ing for ar­tis­tic domi­nance.

It has thus come about that the mod­ern mam­moth or­ches­tra, with its re­stricted free­dom, is barely ac­quainted with the ar­tis­tic mu­si­cal craft of po­lyph­ony. And if to­day a per­son wishes to gain mean­ing­ful in­sight into the coun­ter­point and into the art of the fugue, then he is best ad­vised to look back to Bach’s works for the or­gan.





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