The phys­ics of an in­stru­ment de­ter­mines its ideal sound – that sound, which exerts the least physi­cal strain on the in­stru­ment. Since an in­stru­ment is not an in­di­vid­ual, and there­fore is not a mem­ber of any as­so­cia­tion for the pro­tec­tion of in­stru­ments which might want to pro­tect it from pos­si­ble stresses and strains, the com­poser may well in­spire the per­for­mer to refine his play­ing tech­nique, to ex­pand his in­ner free­dom, to sys­tem­ati­cally ex­pand, and also to ap­ply, his mas­tery over the in­stru­ment.

This means that the so-called “in­stru­ment-spe­cific sound” mu­si­cally can only ex­press very lit­tle mean­ing, and that it is only a very sim­ple groundstate from where the mu­si­cian be­gins to un­fold the world of mu­sic.

There­fore, the con­ven­tional fix­ated use of tra­di­tional mu­si­cal in­stru­ments is a sys­tem­atic mu­si­cal re­stric­tion: only a frac­tion of the pos­si­bili­ties of the in­stru­ments is ex­plored and ap­plied, and even worse:
the per­for­mer, due to this limi­ta­tion, is de­prived of the per­sonal ex­peri­ence of be­ing the mighty mas­ter over the world of tones, and con­se­quently never ex­peri­ences the up­lift­ing feel­ing of be­ing a true mu­si­cian.

If the mu­si­cian leaves the struc­tur­ing of the sound to the physi­cal struc­ture of an in­stru­ment alone, it will only yield a pe­ri­odi­cal, fix­ated spec­trum of over­tones which we iden­tify as the so-called “spe­cific in­stru­ment-sound” of con­ven­tional mu­sic.
Due to the pe­rio­dic­ity of its spec­trum of over­tones the re­stricted na­ture of an in­stru­ment ex­pres­ses only men­tal rigidity (since the in­stru­ment it­self is dead, men­tally rigid, and by the fixa­tion of its sound it only in­duces the lis­tener to men­tal rigidity).

The high speed of repe­ti­tion of the over­tone-pat­tern de­mands too much from the lis­tener’s ana­lyti­cal abil­ity. Due to the ex­ces­sive flow of in­for­ma­tion and the per­ma­nent repe­ti­tion of the spec­trum of over­tones, the sound as­sumes a fixed char­ac­ter.
Such a sound is retained at the pe­riph­ery of the mind like in a filter, and does not suc­ceed in pene­trat­ing the alert, quick and com­pre­hen­sive cog­niz­ing depths of our mind. There­fore, such an un­alive sound can­not stimu­late our feel­ings to lively crea­tiv­ity.

The lis­tener re­gards such a tone or sound, cre­ated purely from the phys­ics of the in­stru­ment, as con­stant and fixed, and iden­ti­fies it as the typi­cal sound of the in­stru­ment.

Here, the in­stru­ment rules the mu­si­cian; matter rules over mind; the seem­ingly dead rules over the liv­ing.

It is a fa­tal “real­ism” of our sci­en­tific-tech­ni­cal age to ap­ply the ad­van­tages of in­de­pend­ently func­tion­ing ma­chines to a mu­si­cal in­stru­ment, which was never given such au­thor­ity by the com­poser, for his in­ten­tion was to put the in­stru­ment di­rectly and ex­clu­sively into the ser­vice of the liv­ing.