Description
This essay puts some fundamental questions concerning intervals in music, the role of the Circle of fifths in relation to understanding major and minor. In particular it sets out to describe the polarity of experience bound up with the Prime and the Octave. Can the experience of inner center and outer periphery give us a clue to how we have such profound experiences of contraction and expansion, sorrow and exhilaration in music.
Brinch maintains that the Octave and the Prime are an instance of such a polarity among other such exponents of this polarity in areas such as rhythm, timbre, attack etc. to be explored in other essays.