The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone
"For those who care to reflect on it, music has always been something of an enigma from the aesthetic point of view. On the one hand, music is most readily comprehensive to the soul, to the immediately sensitive realm of human feeling (Gemüt); on the other hand it also presents difficulties for those wishing to grasp its effects. If we wish to compare music with the other arts, we must say that all the others actually have models in the physical world. When a sculptor creates a statue of Apollo or Zeus, for example, he works from the idealized reality of the human world. The same is true of painting, in which today (1906) only an immediate impression of reality is considered valid. In poetry also an attempt is made to create a copy of reality. One who wished to apply this approach to music, however would arrive at scarcely any results at all. Man must ask himself what the origin is of the artistically formed tones and what they are related to in the world.[...]
The world of tone is permeated also with the light and colors that belong to the astral world. The most characteristic element of the Devachanic world, however, is this flowing ocean of tones. From this world of the continuity of consciousness, man can bring the tone element down with him and thus hear the tone element in the physical world. A tone lies at the foundation of everything in the physical world. Each aspect of the physical represents certain Devachanic tones. All objects have a spiritual tone at the foundation of their being, and, in his deepest nature, man himself is such a spiritual tone. On this basis, Paracelsus said, 'The realms of nature are the letters, and man is the word that is composed of these letters.'
Each time the human being falls asleep and loses consciousness, his astral body emerges from his physical body. In this state man is certainly unconscious but living in the spiritual world. The spiritual sounds make an impression on his soul. The human being awakens each morning from a world of the music of the spheres, and from this region of harmony he re-enters the physical world. If it is true that man's soul experiences Devachan between two incarnations on earth, then we may also say that during the night the soul feasts and lives in flowing tone, as the element from which it is actually woven and which is the soul's true home.
The creative musician transposes the rhythm, the harmonies, and the melodies that impress themselves on his etheric body during the night into physical tone. Unconsciously, the musician has received the musical prototype from the spiritual world, which he then transposes into physical sounds. This is the mysterious relationship between music that resounds here in the physical world and hearing spiritual music during the night.
When a person is illuminated by light, he casts a shadow on the wall. The shadow is not the actual person. In the same way, music produced in the physical world is a shadow, a real shadow of the much loftier music of Devachan. The archetype, the pattern, of music exists in Devachan, and physical music is but a reflection of the spiritual reality."
Read more: Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone, GA 283, 3 December 1906, Cologne