JOURNALIST:
So do you personally only listen to music which is conducive to health?
PETER HÜBNER: No, I also give serious practical thought to dissonant
music. But I use my Medical Resonance Therapy Music®* as a natural counterbalance
for regenerating the influences of disharmonious music.
It seems foolish to me to want to avoid stress on principle. But the more
you subject yourself to stress, the more you must do to counterbalance it,
in order to reduce the stress. A lot of activity must be accompanied by long
rest periods.
Applying endurance tests is particularly common in research into the strength
of biological systems, and here, too, disharmonious music might be able to
play a part.
But that concerns test orders which are scientifically monitored by doctors,
and not tests in kindergardens, schools and public places.
On the scientific side they can be justified, on the other side in
the case of using disharmonious music in kindergardens, schools and public
places or in the media they must be called foolish, because here their
use is unscientific and careless from a medical point of view.
Let me emphasise it once again this is not about taste, about culture,
art or genius, this is about illness or health.
Our society attaches greater importance to health than to art.
That is why in medicine, people are called to account in their training and
activities to a much greater extent than in art.
Even if, according to Basic Law, art, science and theory are considered to
be equally free, the protection of health has a much greater standing than
observing taste or an aesthetic attitude. For this reason, I believe, in modern
society music will sooner or later be subordinate to those important principles
of preserving health, and regarded and categorised just like food or addictive
substances or remedies. And this categorisation will be based on two things:
objective scientific results of investigations in the field of medicine, and
sound musicological research.
JOURNALIST: So in future there will be instructions on CDs, as to whether
this music is beneficial to health, safe in terms of your health or harmful
to your health?
PETER HÜBNER: For me this is only a question of time, and the
extent of democratic development in society.
The higher developed societies will lead the way in this respect, and the
others will follow them. No society wants to be destroyed.
And the core way of averting such a thing is without doubt to support health
as well as to avoid social damage that is to support methods of healing
which are objective and scientifically verifiable and to avoid influences
which damage peoples health as we already know it nowadays from
the fight against the cocaine trade and similar things.
Your original question was previously: why I show so much tolerance towards
disharmonious music, although I have devoted myself to harmonious music. The
answer is that I am able to afford this attitude, because the problems of
harmonious and disharmonious music as I have explained are not
so much a question relating to music or art, but primarily to medicine. And
so these problems are first and foremost the responsibility of medical experts
and legislation, and they can and will only be solved there. As a musicologist,
music creator or artist I dont need to have a strong opinion at all.
But at the same time I dont see this as a question of the producers
of dissonant music who are not the people responsible in kindergardens, in
schools and in the media either.
They offer the disharmonious music products of which they are convinced exactly
in the same way as I offer the harmonical music products of which I am convinced,
and from a musicological and artistic point of view, we can face each other
with musical respect.
And if their artistic products are brazenly removed from lessons for health
reasons, and mine are introduced into kindergardens and schools for the same
reason, I would not want to imagine that I was a better artist, a better composer
or a better businessman, I would only see the reason for this in the fact
that, unfortunately, there are so many people prone to illness in the present
times, so many children and juveniles with health and behavioural disorders
a fact which must, of course, be taken into special account by society.
But if we succeed in strengthening health in our society in such a way that
all children and juveniles are healthy, then the necessity for the use of
harmonical music might possibly come to an end, and there will be more space
again for the stress attacks of dissonant music which are interesting in a
positive sense as a kind of positive endurance test for the immune
system.
One can say that I follow the health trend of our times, with the general
need for individual, social and ecological harmony whilst my colleagues,
who have devoted themselves to dissonant music, follow the very interesting
paths of new musical concepts and developments for which I have a lot of sense
and which, as an artist, I more strongly share than many of them would dream
of.
Well I come from that direction, and for some time was considered an
expert in this field. I dont condemn this developments, instead I continue
to follow them in an artistic sense whereby afterwards I then have
to expose myself very consciously and purposefully to my Medical Resonance
Therapy Music® for the purpose of reducing stress.
But personally, I wouldnt dream of nowadays flooding the public and
among it children, juveniles and adults with interesting musicological outpourings
of the different aspects of disharmony in times when human beings for
purely medical reasons need just the opposite. So I do indeed have my private
life with my musicological research and developments, but at the same time
a clear procedure of selection for what I can ask of the public.
I tolerate anybody who has a different opinion on this or is even of the opposite
opinion, and I am glad that I am able to afford this tolerance, for the social
responsibility for this lies alone in the hands of medical experts and legislation,
as well as the parents who can exert their influence on legislation through
their elected representatives.
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© A A R E D I T I O N I N T E R N A T I O N A L 2001