ABSTRACT
This chapter looks in to the musical understanding not just as a fleeting phenomenon but as a continuous educational process. It describes metaphorically as a spiralling, encircling motion around a central axis. The point of departure for encircling motion is aesthetic understanding in its narrow sense: that is, the understanding of musical sense as manifested in the music through its self-defining form. The spiral is capable of climbing higher and closer to the axis and reaching its goal within the confines of aesthetic experience directed towards aesthetic understanding. For the listener already recognizes the structural constituents of music at the level of non-conceptual understanding: rising or falling motion, getting louder or softer, melodic units, repetition and reprise, variation, chordal relationships, part movement, to name just a few of hundreds of possibilities. Music forms the axis around which the understanding self moves, and it moves in a spiral upwards towards its goal, its radius decreasing as it approaches the axis.
