ABSTRACT
In account of the creation of musical sense and its aesthetic understanding, the chapter discusses the reflexive nature of the process of musical definition. All music consists of sensory stimuli which when perceived cause excitation and sensation. There are, however, also stimuli which need not be defined in this way in order to have a musical effect: they are perceived discretely as stimuli. Historically, timbre pressed hard for its emancipation in the nineteenth century, moving towards independence and equality with other dimensions of music and later in certain kinds of composition even achieved a kind of ascendancy over them. The emotional content is–in the guise of form and content–anchored to the music's form; the two elements are weighed up in relation to each other in the creative process and fused together in the object and its perception.
