ernst bloch on music.
A note of music comes with us and is ‘we’; unlike the visual arts, which seemed previously to point so far above us, out into the realm of the rigorous, objective and cosmic, but which in fact stop at our graves, it emulates good works by accompanying us even beyond the grave. This is precisely because music’s sublime element, the new and no longer pedagogical but real symbol in music appears so very low-lying in our atmosphere and such a mere fiery eruption, even though it is actually a light in the farthest and of course innermost firmament, and indeed the actual problem of ‘I’ and ‘we’. So moulded sound is not something that confronts us but rather contains something which places our hands on our hearts, adjures and transposes us with our own selves. In this way, it answers our exiguous, eternally questioning receptivity with itself, or at least with its question about our home, a question which is undeflected, grown absolute, an echo of itself. A note of music creates a context of meaning both surreal and unallegorical, and symbolic only with regard to the still imperfect State of its ‘I’-ornamentation; a context for what can be humanly intuited of human beings, for a direct gnosis of the ‘we’-problem that outruns the species.
— Ernst Bloch