WMF WORLD MUSIC FORUM
 
WMF WORLD MUSIC FORUM
 
 
 
The MUSICAL SPIEGEL-AFFAIR
  
 
Home
Contents
late-breaking:
The German
Music Council
without Music:
INSOLVENCY
.
SPIEGEL-AFFAIRS
The CLASSICAL
SPIEGEL AFFAIR
Ignorance in the Fundamentals
of Classical Music
The MEDICAL
SPIEGEL AFFAIR
Ignorance in the Fundamentals of Medical Music
The MUSICAL
SPIEGEL-AFFAIR
Music investigation of the SPIEGEL put to the test
Lie and fraud in music investigation
Investigation
Technology
A SPIEGEL editor
discloses the incredible investigation technology of his news magazine.
Peter Hübner
The Scaffolding Scene
of the German
MusicalWorld
Peter Hübner
The Benefits and Harm of Music in Society
.
.
Under the Auspices of the German Cultural Foundation
 
  Music investigation of the SPIEGEL put to the test – Lie and fraud in music investigation  
       
  MEDICINE HORIZONS:    
     
 
“Harmless cascades swoosh down in thirds and fifths, and in thirds and fifths the whole swooshes back up again”
          


Spiegel
readers
know
more!
 
  PETER HÜBNER: The term  cascade  does  not  exist  in  the  
 
field of music theory, and thus also no “harmless cascade” – it can here at best be about a “piece of poetry” of a musically uneducated wannabe music critic, which does not contain any musical information.

Next to this: nothing can “swoosh” “down” or “up” in thirds and fifths, as the third and the fifth are two clear and definite intervals.
And in musicology an interval is clearly defined as: the distance between two tones!

A definite distance between two “swooshing” noises or between a tone and a noise does not exist, as the noise by its physical nature has a diffuse structure. For this reason you can define the clearly audible distance between two tones in numbers, that is: you can define it mathematically – and in particular the mentioned “third” and the mentioned “fifth”. This would not be possible if one or two “swooshing” noises would take part in building the interval.
This statement, therefore, reveals substantial music theoretical ignorance.
   
     
  MEDICINE HORIZONS:    
   


Spiegel
readers
know
more!
 
 
“into an Elysium of a sounding deadness“
 
       
 
PETER HÜBNER: By “Elysium“, as is known, one understands also in Germany’s classical music life latest since Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”: the heaven – whatever this may mean for the individual person.
  
 


That far I actually did not want to go, when judging my medical music: that it leads into heaven – as the reporting writers of the SPIEGEL pretend to have experienced.
But I do not believe them here – for the following reason: they claim to have heard a “sounding deadness” in that “Elysium”.

“By sounding deadness” – if one really wants to use that term – we understand today due to musicological insight but also due to medical research results that, what musically and/or tonally is structured unnaturally. And this happens only in the combination of homophony and fixed rhythm: purely theoretically, because the practice – if one is exact – can only achieve approximations to this unrealistic case.

The truth is: a “sounding deadness” does not exist in musical reality, and also not in music theory – as for instance also the “nothing”, or that “shadow”, which only means a “nonexistence” of light, cannot “exist” in practice.

Also this statement proves a substantial music-theoretical ignorance of the SPIEGEL writers – and it documents in particular, that the reporting writer or writers are not used, to get to the bottom of things, to question impressions and to uncover deceptions.

In this case the limited capacity of judgment is harmless for us readers – but such a thoughtless dealing with reality by the ruling clergy had once brought those into big trouble, who said, that the earth orbits around the sun – and not, as previously claimed, the sun around the earth.

   
     
 
For the eye it looks as if the sun would move around the earth: “It openly visible rises in the East and then moves in the course of the day in a westerly direction!”, says the stressed “normalo” of the SPIEGEL.

But the independent thinker then nevertheless questions: “according to which laws a heavenly body with many times the mass of the earth shall orbit around the earth?”

Well, the discussions on this issue have died away by now, but today, these narrow minds of alleged music-critic speak of “sounding deadness” instead. In all of creation there is no “sounding deadness” – at least as long as creation exists as a dynamic process – on closer examination the microcosm of music teaches this.

But for those “stressed normalos” of the SPIEGEL an imagined “experience” of a “sounding deadness” seems to be possible anyhow, namely in their deep sleep – although in deep sleep they hear nothing and even lose their awareness of existence.
This experience of “sounding deadness” could be counted among “the medical miracles” of these people then.
 
“To this blind audience, the proportionality of harmonious development is incompre­hensible as far as technicality and tempo are concerned.
The truth of harmony is never true enough to them, except if it is a strong hint.
Keynote, third, fifth and octave are called harmony, that is also the beginning and the end, the ruling spirit of composing. That this is the real, good, beautiful thing in composing – they all admit that, simply, because they sensibly have to.

But to say that the same proportionalizing truth should also apply to the technicality and tempo, that this eternal light of life must create the artistic act – no, that is too high for them!
They do not want to accept such religion, such a heaven of con­scious creation.”
                                      Liszt