It is obvious, then, that the only possible way to understand a symphony is to accept it as it is and not try to make it into something else. Music is not a language; it does not exist in other terms, but is untranslatable. When a trumpet blares and you make any of the conventional associations with the trumpet, such as a battle, a hunt, a proclamation, a signal, off goes your mind on a stream of alien ideas that may carry you anywhere and that will certainly carry you farther and farther away from the music itself. Each of the orchestral instruments has its own individual association--the oboe reminds you of a shepherd’s pipe, the flute of a bird’s song, the French horn of hunting, and so forth; but each one of the instruments in the orchestra as you listen to it is forming lines, and adding colors, as it were, in a great design. And this design, always complete at any one point, goes on unceasingly forming itself ever and ever anew. It is always complete and always incomplete, always moving onward, always delicately poised for inevitable flight. As you listen you have lived a thousand lives; dream after dream has dissolved itself in your consciousness; each moment has been a perfect and complete existence in itself. When it is finished you awake to what you call happiness or unhappiness, peace or struggle, satisfaction or chagrin; the unreal spectacle of the world imposes itself upon you again; you are once more a human being. Why ask that glorious world in which your nature has been freed and your soul has been disencumbered of your body to assume all the imperfections of this one? The gods, of necessity, dwell in the heavens. No, you cannot understand music by translating it into other terms, or by preserving your associations with the world in which you live. Mind and feeling, sublimated by the magic of these sounds, must detach themselves and rise to a world of pure imagination where there is no locality.