Food for Thought
"This was the situation until Gestalt theory raised the radical question: Is it really true that when I hear a melody I have a sum of individual tones (pieces) which constitute the primary foundation of my experience? Is not perhaps the reverse of this true? What I really have, what I hear of each individual note, what I experience at each place in the melody is apart which is itself determined by the character of the whole. What is given me by the melody does not arise (through the agency of any auxiliary factor) as a secondary process from the sum of the pieces as such. Instead, what takes place in each single part already depends upon what the whole is. The flesh and blood of a tone depends from the start upon its role in the melody: a b as leading tone to c is something radically different from the b as tonic. It belongs to the flesh and blood of the things given in experience [Gegebenheiten], how, in what role, in what function they are in their whole."
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