Steiner's account of how a single musical tone is felt not in the air but inwardly, in the ether, by the whole human being.
The experience of tone is what Rudolf Steiner described as the listener's inner meeting with a single musical note. He taught that a tone is not heard the way a knock or a rustle is heard. The ear strips away the air that carried it and throws a purely etheric event back into the inner being, so the listener feels a kinship with a world of tone that the senses cannot reach by themselves.
In Steiner's Own Words
As you know, the tones we ordinarily take into consideration have as their medium the air. Even if an instrument other than a wind instrument is used, the element in which tone lives is still in the air. What we experience in tone, however, no longer has anything to do with the air. The ear is the organ that first separates the air element from tone before our experience of tone. In experiencing tone as such, we thus actually feel a resonance, a reflection. The ear really hurls the airborne tone back into the inner being of man in such a way that it separates out the air element; then, in that we hear it, the tone lives in the ether element.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave these two Stuttgart lectures of March 1920 to Waldorf music teachers, and the seed he planted there has grown into a living clinical practice: anthroposophical music therapy. If the single tone is received inwardly, in the etheric body, rather than merely registered by the ear, then a sounded interval can reach a patient in a place that talk cannot. That is the working assumption behind the training Maria Schuppel founded in Berlin in 1963, the Musiktherapeutische Arbeitsstaette, where therapists learn to play a single tone, a fifth, or a rising scale for a person and to watch how the breathing, the warmth, and the bearing answer it. The lyre built for this work, the Choroi and Auris instruments developed from the 1930s onward, are made deliberately quiet so that the listener leans toward the tone instead of being struck by it. A therapist will hold one tone for a child who cannot settle, because Steiner's claim is that the tone is met by the whole human being and not by a sense organ alone. The same insight shapes Waldorf music lessons, where the youngest classes sing in the mood of the fifth before the more earthbound third is introduced. In each case the practice rests on the distinction this entry names: a tone is not a fact of the air but an event in the inner life of the one who hears it.
Where to Read More