Music promotes rehearsals of mature emotional responses by walking or carrying us through insightful sequences of tonal gestural gestalts. A given gesture may be harmonized with another; or may be balanced by another, creating a kind of emotional stability through symmetry; or one gesture may resolve—sometimes suddenly, sometimes imperceptibly—into another.
The structure of music’s rehearsals of mature emotional responses is metaphoric and it also elapses in time: because of resonant internal structural relations, a given gestalt is enabled to become another.
Music and myth—in which narratively distinct events are understood to be metaphorically connected—are different embodiments of the same way of knowing. Their logic is, in this respect, the logic of dream.
When music is well constructed, the transformation of one gestalt into another can carry the conviction of mathematical proof.
Jan Zwicky, The Experience of Meaning