The world in which we usually live, the world of our everyday existence—and not only of our everyday existence—is a world of visible things. The sense of sight has constructed it; the eye is our guide in it. Into it we integrate the impressions of the other senses; our speech, our actions, our thinking, are largely formed and oriented upon its pattern. One might almost suppose, and many do suppose, that the visible world is our entire milieu. We integrate even the audible into the frame of the visible—with one exception: music. Only in music, the art of tone, where the audible is, as it were, alone with itself, comes to itself, is the frame of the visible world broken through. Music does not integrate itself into the world of the eye.
Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World (translated by Willard R. Trask)
