Ques­tion: But if I have un­der­stood you cor­rectly, the prin­ci­ple of po­lyph­ony is al­ready pre­sent in the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic.

Peter Hübner: That’ s right. As has al­ready been said, it is pre­cisely this ar­tis­tic craft of po­lyph­ony which we find on closer ex­ami­na­tion of the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic and which leads us to cog­ni­tion of the laws of har­mony of the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic – and which then in turn pro­vokes the com­po­si­tional natu­ral con­cept of po­lyph­ony, of the coun­ter­point and of the art of the fugue.

In as much, one can say that the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic con­ceals within the prin­ci­ples of the high­est com­po­si­tional art of clas­si­cal mu­sic and, on closer ex­ami­na­tion, also clearly dis­plays this crea­tive sphere.

Here one rec­og­nises that, with Bach too, this ar­tis­tic craft did not reach its end – not least be­cause of the miss­ing tech­ni­cal pos­si­bili­ties in mu­sic at that time. Nowa­days Bach would have a far greater in­stru­men­tal range avail­able to him for his poly­phonic art.

Ques­tion: Then ho­moph­ony is sim­ply not pre­sent in the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic?

Peter Hübner: No. Ho­moph­ony can be ex­plained with just a su­per­fi­cial look into the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic – from that lim­ited view where one thinks that the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic con­sists of one base tone with its over­tones os­cil­lat­ing in the re­la­tion­ship of whole num­bers. But this kind of view is as weak and sketchy, as rec­og­nis­ing a per­son from his shadow – it gives us cer­tain clues but does not, how­ever, tell us very much about him.

Closer ob­ser­va­tion of the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic opens up en­tirely dif­fer­ent views and leads to com­pletely new in­sights and un­der­stand­ing.

Ques­tion: But with his use of the mono­chord, did Pythagoras not point to­wards ho­moph­ony?

Peter Hübner: To­day there are very many pseudo-mu­si­colo­gists or mu­si­cal lay peo­ple who be­lieve that Pythagoras’s in­sight was re­stricted to find­ing out with his so-called mono­chord, the over­tones men­tioned and their dis­tance apart, i.e. their in­ter­vals or os­cil­la­tion re­la­tion­ships. But the in­sight of this bril­liant scholar of our early Euro­pean his­tory was far greater reach­ing.

Pythagoras only used this sim­ple ex­peri­men­tal ar­range­ment in or­der to make it clear to non-sci­en­tifi­cally trained peo­ple that there were fixed mathe­mati­cal re­la­tion­ships be­tween the external and in­ter­nal hear­ing and the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic and that, there­fore, not only ex­ter­nal na­ture, but also man’s in­ter­nal na­ture – his mind, his feelings and his soul – could be mathe­mati­cally de­ter­mined.

For him the mono­chord was just the sim­plest ex­peri­men­tal ar­range­ment for mak­ing this natu­ral con­nec­tion be­tween man’s external and the in­ter­nal world com­pel­lingly clear, but in no way did it serve any other pur­pose – nei­ther in­tel­lec­tu­ally, musi­co­logi­cally, nor thera­peu­ti­cally.

For this pur­pose it is too primi­tive in struc­ture. The only thera­peu­tic pur­pose that he pur­sued with this in­stru­ment lay in forg­ing a bridge for an ar­tis­tic scholar to the natu­ral sci­ences or re­spec­tively a bridge to the ar­tis­tic sci­ences for a scholar of natu­ral sci­ence.

Question:
What did Pythagoras teach his stu­dents?

Peter Hübner: The struc­ture of his teach­ing plan re­veals that, with an in­sight into the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic, he let his pu­pils run through dif­fer­ent pha­sic leaps in knowl­edge – in the same way that we ex­peri­ence this to­day when we ex­am­ine the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic.

We know such pha­sic leaps in knowl­edge in al­most all the sci­ences, in phys­ics for ex­ample, the one from me­chan­ics to atom phys­ics.

Pythagoras worked on the prem­ise that the func­tions of our or­gan­ism run in a com­plex fash­ion ac­cord­ing to the same laws of har­mony as those found in the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic.

Stud­ies car­ried out in the field of chro­no­medi­cine con­firm this thesis of his ever more ex­ten­sively – par­ticu­larly in re­spect of the rhyth­mic proc­esses.

Dis­rup­tion of the natu­ral har­monic or­der of our bod­ily func­tions is ac­cepted in mod­ern medi­cine as the cause of ill­ness. These pre­sent–day sci­en­tific find­ings cor­re­spond with the views of medics from all the well–known high civi­li­sa­tions – where­by, even in for­mer times, the as­pects of har­mony and of the bal­ance of en­er­gies were re­garded more fa­voura­bly.

Any har­monic medi­cal ther­apy tra­di­tion­ally aims to sup­port the natu­ral com­plex or­der of the or­gan­ism and those bio­logi­cal en­er­gies work­ing within it, and to ward off dis­har­mony in the bio­logi­cal proc­esses.

If the natu­ral bal­ance of en­ergy in an or­gan­ism is dis­rupted, the har­monic re­la­tion­ships of all func­tions go off bal­ance – the dis­rup­tion of just one sin­gle ele­ment is ca­pa­ble of ef­fect­ing the dis­rup­tion of all other ele­ments in this ho­lis­tic bio­logi­cal in­te­grated sys­tem.

If, how­ever, the natu­ral har­mony of the func­tions of our or­gan­ism are dis­rupted, then we be­come sus­cep­ti­ble to ill­ness and sub­se­quently do in­deed be­come ill.

And all the elec­tri­cal, mag­netic, chemi­cal or bio­chemi­cal sig­nals a body gives to in­di­cate that its natu­ral bio­logi­cal har­mony is off bal­ance dis­play at­trib­utes of dis­har­mony.

Question: And you can take this data into con­sid­era­tion in the mu­sic?

Peter Hübner: It would be ab­so­lutely wrong if one now wished to go and try to cre­ate or­der from the data on the at­trib­utes of dis­har­mony, i.e. on the basis of dis­har­moni­cally or­dered elec­tri­cal or bio­chemi­cal data – no matter how one went about it.

This is just as if one wished to try and build a new car out of dam­aged parts from vari­ous scrap yards.
There are in­deed in­di­vid­uals who do at­tempt this, but their num­bers are few and their suc­cess still smaller – in the ‘motor in­dus­try’ and in ‘mu­sic medi­cine’ alike.

In the motor in­dus­try it is at least usual to build new car com­po­nents and new cars ac­cord­ing to fixed con­struc­tion plans and de­sign pat­terns with the help of vari­ous ma­te­rials.

And bio­logi­cal evo­lu­tion also pre­fers the path of growth to that of re­ju­ve­na­tion. As a rule, at least, old peo­ple do not be­come young, but young peo­ple be­come old.

In the case of mu­sic medi­cine this means ac­cord­ingly: that one must look to natu­ral or­ders in or­der to pro­duce the natu­ral har­mony of bio­logi­cal sys­tems, and never to forms of dis­or­der.

The meas­ur­ing of brain, heart or other flows of a per­son whose bio­logi­cal or­der is dis­rupted may be of value for medi­cal analy­sis. If, how­ever, this data is ap­plied to a form of ther­apy, then it can only have a dam­ag­ing ef­fect – never one that is medi­cally bene­fi­cial. Such a course of ac­tion runs down­right con­trary to natu­ral evo­lu­tion.