Question: Why is it - if music is rhythm - that so often musicians are temperamental and easily disturbed.     

 Answer: But is it not beautiful to have a little temperament? Life is unmusical when there is no temperament. A person who does not get angry once in a while does not live! It is human nature to have all kinds of minor faults. The joy is in overcoming these faults. Music is not all sadness. There are higher octaves and lower octaves. Music is all. That is why music is even greater than heavens.

 All people have music in them, in the rhythm and harmony of their actions and life. If a musician has the desire for spiritual perfection, I think that he can perfect himself much more easily and quickly than another person.

 Question: As music is the means to perfection, are unmusical persons imperfect. 

 Answer: To play or sing oneself, and to listen to music are two different things. A person may become a musician by learning music theoretically and mechanically. But only he is really a musician who lives in music and loses himself in music.

 Question: Is it a distinct disadvantage for a human being to be born without a good ear. 

 Answer: It is, because what is received through the ears goes deeper into the soul than what is received through any other way. Neither by smelling, or tasting, or seeing does beauty enter so deeply into oneself as by hearing.

 Question: Could you please explain what you mean by listening to music spiritually? Can one listen to common music spiritually, such as tunes played on a street organ? 

 Answer: But we do not sit and meditate in the street! Do we? Besides, there is a technical stage. As a person develops in technique and in appreciation of better music, so he feels disturbed by a lower grade of music. But then there is a spiritual way which has nothing to do with technique: it is to tune oneself to the music, and therefore the spiritual person does not care about its grade. No doubt, the better the music the more helpful it is, the higher the music the better. At the same time you must remember that there are Lamas in Tibet who do their concentration and meditation by moving a kind of rattle, the sound of which is not especially melodious. They cultivate thereby that sense of perception which raises a person by the help of vibrations to the higher spheres. There is nothing better to use than music as a means for the upliftment of the soul.

 By composing music a composer must create his own world in sound and rhythm. His work, therefore, is not a labor, it is a joy, a joy of the highest order. If the composer writes music because he is obliged to write something, that is not the thing to do. The composer should write when his heart feels like writing, when his heart is singing, when his soul is dancing, when his whole being is vibrating harmony. That is the time that he should write music.

Composition is an art rather than a mechanical arrangement of notes. A composer of music performs his small part in the scheme of nature as a creator. Music being the most exalted of arts, the work of the composer of music is no less than the work of a saint. It is not only the knowledge of technicality, of harmony, of theory that is sufficient: the composer needs tenderness of heart, open eyes to all beauty, the conception of what is beautiful, the true perception of sound and rhythm, and its expression in human nature.