Music … stands quite apart from all the [other arts].
In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man’s innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [“an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting”] which Leibniz took it to be…
We must attribute to music a far more serious and profound significance that refers to the innermost being of the world and of our own self.

from “The World as Will and Representation” by Arthur Schopenhauer.
(Translated from German to English by E. F. J. Payne.

Bahman Mehabadi

January 2020