Responsiveness is all, and it is cultivated through sound and its sequences. Speaking in this vein, about music as an aspect of the human spirit, Copeland commented: "Music is designed . . . to absorb entirely our mental attention. Its emotional charge is embedded in a challenging texture so that one must be ready at an instant's notice to lend attention to what is most required so that one is not lost in a sea of notes." Music is thus a training in attentive hearing, a cultivation of a certain mindfulness. ...
For the human subject, so often caught in the blur of noise, the majesty of music can therefore also serve to restore one's hearing to the hearable, and attune our sensibilities to its unfolding processes. How we heaer overtones and silences is fundamental for our human being; and it is music that may restore these qualities to us in all their timbre and significance.
We should therefore not ignore the moral or value dimensions here either. No less a person than Beethoven remarked, in a conversation reported to Goethe, "It takes spiritual rhythm to grasp music in its essence. . . All genuine [musical] invention is moral progress. To submit to its inscrutable laws, and by virtue of these laws to overcome and control one's own mind, so it shall set forth the revelation: that is the isolating principle of art." In this way, music may instruct the self in a patient attunement to the hearable. This is an artistic retrieval of the most formative elements, in their very elementariness."
--Michael Fishbane
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