Timbre as basis of music?

In classical music sound is treated as something that just serves to transport the information of tone pitch and patterns of repeated appearance – rhythm. Sound color is not treated as an experience for itself. Music looks abstract, and orchestration just as a superficial packing of “musical content”.

Most people are not aware of what sound timbre really is and how important it is. German philosopher Rudolf Steiner asserts in his book “A Bridge Between Universal Spirituality and Physical Constitution of a Man”: “How the thoughts are born? On the basics of the fact that inside of the fluid organism something stands apart in a particular metamorphoses – namely, in something that we know in outer worlds as a tone.”. Even a single sound, out of every context, can be artistically interesting, inspiring to someone and inspire a musician to make a piece from it. This is how Vangelis describes his composing.

Bob Doerschuk: When you begin composing, do you hear the music as an abstract theme, or as a specific sound?

Vangelis: "As a sound. I might call it a violin, but I don't know what that is. Then it's a strange feeling. You feel that you have to start creating.”

Musical ideas come from within a musician completely as a sound; they contain a timbre as they contain a melody; they come as an atomic sound&melody idea. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer describes true poets like this:

The sign that identifies the real poet, of the lower order as well as of the higher, is the unforced quality of his rhymes: they found themselves as by the will of the God; thoughts come to him as rhymes already. Secret prosaist contrary to this searches for the rhyme for a thought; a hack thought for a rhyme. Often one rhymed pair of verses tells which of the two can has a thought as a father, and which a rhyme.

On this same way electronic composer has arrangement and melodic idea in the same time, atomically united. The idea comes together with the sound.

For the first time we have before us the opportunity to be exactly like a sculptor standing in front of his stone. All the acoustic instruments have a sound that is determined from the beginning. When you build a piano you determine its sound forever, and everybody knows the sound of the piano. But nobody knows the sound of the synthesizer. You have to invent it. You have to work on the sound with your hands the way a sculptor does with his stone.

Jean Michel Jarre