The interval whose arrival let the human being feel music as his own inner experience, the first moment a person could truthfully say, "I sing."
The Interval of the Third in Anthroposophy is the musical interval whose emergence in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch marked the moment music incarnated into human subjectivity. In Rudolf Steiner's lectures gathered as The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone (GA 283, lectures of 1906 to 1923), the third is the first interval through which a person could truthfully feel "I sing," with the musical element resting within his own physical organization rather than transporting him outward, as the fifth and seventh once did. Steiner places its bearer in the etheric body, sounding from the tone e upward. The third made inward musical feeling possible, and with it the whole polarity of major and minor mood that still governs how Western music carries human feeling.
In Steiner's Own Words
This transition to the experience of the third signifies at the same time that man feels music in relation to his own physical organization. For the first time, man feels that he is an earthly being when he plays music. Formerly, when he experienced fifths, he would have been inclined to say, "The angel in my being is beginning to play music. The muse in me speaks." "I sing" was not the appropriate expression. It became possible to say this only when the experience of the third emerged, making the whole musical feeling an inward experience; the human being then felt that he himself was singing.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim that the third interiorized musical feeling lands precisely on a date musicologists already know. The third was treated as a dissonance in early medieval Europe, and its rise to a stable consonance is documented in the fifteenth century, above all in the English style John Dunstaple carried to the Continent around 1430, the contenance angloise that Burgundian writer Martin le Franc praised in his poem Le Champion des Dames. Where the older organum leaned on open fifths and octaves, the new sound was built on full triads, thirds stacked into chords. Western harmony as we hear it begins there.
Leonard B. Meyer, in Emotion and Meaning in Music (University of Chicago Press, 1956), argued that musical feeling arises when a listener's bodily expectation is met, delayed, or denied. That is a phenomenology of music heard from inside the listener, the same place Steiner located the third. The Thalira reading: what Steiner called the moment a person could say "I sing" is the same hinge musicology dates to the triadic turn of the 1400s, the point at which an interval stopped lifting the singer out of himself and began letting him feel the music as his own. A Waldorf music teacher works directly with this. Steiner advised that children before the age of nine still dwell in the mood of fifths, and that the full sense for major and minor thirds should be cultivated only after that ninth year, when the etheric body has loosened enough to carry inward feeling.
Where to Read More
- The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone, GA 283
- Find at SteinerBooks
- Internal Family Systems Therapy: Complete IFS Guide
- Parts Work and Internal Family Systems: The Multiplicity of the Inner Self
- Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday: The Internal Obstacle, Shadow Work, and the Stoic Path to Humility