“Ambience”

There is yet another manner in which musical sound as such can influence our spirit through the senses and nerves (Lawrence’s “helpless blood,” Dr. Head’s protopathic side) direct, and without the necessary intervention of the discriminating and relating intellect. There is another Power of Sound without which music could act only discontinu-ously, in detached and sporadic instants upon the contents of our mind. For Music, or more correctly musical timbre, sonority, rhythm, pace, can select among, determine, reduce to homogeneous unity our trains of thought and states of feeling because it can enclose them and segregating them from every intrusion, force them back upon themselves. Such an enclosing and segregating effect of music is at the bottom of two-thirds of what will be shown as our various Answerers’ emotional and imaginative responses, of the moods induced, the memories and associative equivalences evoked, the various references elicited in them by music. And this phenomenon is so essential a part of musical psychology, and so envelops the rest of it, that it has, to the best of my belief, been taken for granted without benefit of inventory, and never observed in its simpler and daily manifestations, although taken for granted in all the assertions (cf. evidence on “higher planes”) to the effect that music is, or can be a medium for our thoughts and feelings our psychic self, to exist in. A medium, in the sense of the French Milieu or of the Latinised Italian word Ambiente; and which since our own word Environment conveys the idea of surrounding but not of containing, I shall allow myself, by turning the adjective Ambient into a corresponding noun, 142to call, once for all, an Ambience. I commit this neologism the less guiltily because it connects on with the talk of “higher planes,” of music being a “place of asylum,” a retreat, almost a sanatorium; an Ambience because music does occasionally seem to surround us.