Daniel Barenboim: Sensation-> Imagination-> Reason

I have learned a lot about music by reading books that have nothing to do with it – books by Spinoza and Aristotle, for instance. Aristotle tells us about the faculties of the soul – sensation first, then the internal sense of imagination and memory, and then reason. To me this represents the right path to absorbing a musical composition. It is a never-ending process of adaptation to the work, of absorbing it until it becomes part of ourselves. Only when we reach this stage, can we recreate the work. In the actual performance, the Aristotelian order is reversed: we reason before we start, and then through our senses, recollect our first sensation. The sensory impression of a musical composition can be experienced either through reading or through playing it. His first sensory contact is extremely subjective – he perceives the work through the effect it produces on him and this perception is not always reliable or necessarily compatible with knowledge of the work itself.