Classical music knows different steps of empirical gain­ing knowl­edge. Ba­si­cally, we dis­tin­guish:

For the lis­tener, the sys­tem­atic road to knowl­edge be­gins in the mu­si­cal sound-space, where he hears the sound­ing mu­si­cal work.

By means of his fac­ulty of logic he gathers step by step the mu­si­cal mean­ing from this com­po­si­tion, and com­ing from the mu­si­cal sound-space, he en­ters the world of the motif-space. Here, at first, he ex­peri­ences the un­fold­ment of a sin­gle motif, and then the un­fold­ment of more and more mo­tifs.

In this proc­ess of gain­ing knowl­edge in mu­sic, the lis­tener start­ing from the mu­si­cal sound-space reaches finer and finer fields of the mu­si­cal logic, of the truth con­veyed in mu­sic and so at­tains to more and more ful­fill­ing fields of ex­peri­ence.

This in­crease in joy comes about be­cause the mu­sic, as it pro­gresses, dis­creetly leads the lis­tener in­deed, seduces him with skilled per­sua­sion to open him­self to the fields of higher mu­si­cal or­der, and this open­ing him­self is based on a grad­ual un­fold­ment of his own in­ner en­er­gies of life and cog­ni­tion.

Per­ceiv­ing the own, higher en­er­gies avail­able to him now gives the lis­tener the feel­ing of greater own in­ner power. And this in­creased in­ner sense of power casts a stronger aura of ful­fil­ment around him.

Mu­sic guides the lis­tener step by step by mustering all the skill of per­sua­sion at its dis­posal, and with in­fi­nite pa­tience into the fields of higher and higher mu­si­cal or­der. Thus, with the help of mu­sic, the lis­tener un­folds his in­ner, higher worlds of en­ergy for him­self; and even with­out per­ceiv­ing this mecha­nism in de­tail, the lis­tener draws the full per­sonal ad­van­tage from the proc­ess of cog­ni­tion out­lined by the clas­si­cal com­poser.

The clas­si­cal com­poser, how­ever, is fully aware of the ef­fect his mu­si­cal knowl­edge has on the lis­tener, be­cause he had walked off this way him­self, when he des­ig­nated it for the lis­tener.