In our proc­ess of gain­ing knowl­edge in mu­sic, a sys­tem­atic eval­ua­tion iden­ti­fies dif­fer­ent stages of cog­ni­tion.

By means of the physi­ol­ogy of our ear we per­ceive the tone which reverberates in the acous­tic space, and this is our first step to­wards knowl­edge.
Now one can eas­ily doubt the cor­rect or com­plete per­cep­tion of our or­gan of hear­ing.

The com­plete­ness of our per­cep­tion can be veri­fied by ex­amin­ing the tone, which reverberates in the acous­tic space, with our hear­ing and with meas­ur­ing in­stru­ments si­mul­ta­ne­ously, and by com­par­ing the re­sults of the in­stru­ments with the re­sults of our hear­ing. Natu­rally, in this case only that as­pect of the tone is be­ing ex­am­ined that can be meas­ured physi­cally-struc­tur­ally.

In our analy­sis we mu­sic lovers go a few steps fur­ther – be­cause we hear mu­sic, and not just a sin­gle tone – and ex­am­ine the in­ner shape of the tone by means of our fac­ulty of logic.
By means of our un­der­stand­ing, we ex­am­ine the struc­tural changes of the tone, and by means of our feel­ing we ex­am­ine the in­ner na­ture of these struc­tural changes.

If our cog­niz­ing un­der­stand­ing finds that the struc­tural changes of the sound are not really har­mo­ni­ous, but rather in steps or pe­ri­odi­cal, then we infer the absence of a liv­ing soul – of a liv­ing mu­si­cal for­ma­tive force in a tone – or a lack of life in the mu­si­cal state­ment, and we miss the mu­si­cal mean­ing.
Our in­tel­lect, there­fore, re­lates the mean­ing of that kind of sound – in ref­er­ence to its struc­ture – to the ma­te­rial world, i.e. to our physi­ol­ogy.

This is where the ori­gin of schematic dance is lo­cated.
The lis­tener be­gins to move his body to the ma­te­rial struc­ture of the tone – he taps the beat, for ex­ample, with his foot or with other parts of his body, or he be­gins to dance by rote to the sim­ple pat­terns of the mu­sic.

The cause of these physi­cal kinetic im­pulses we find hid­den in the atomic or mo­lecu­lar struc­ture of the mu­si­cal sound-space.
And this lim­ited kind of tonal-struc­tural move­ment finds its equiva­lent in man, in our physi­ol­ogy.

Thus, in a com­pletely natu­ral man­ner, we lis­ten­ers react physio­logi­cally with mechanistic move­ments to that which, by its very struc­ture, con­cerns our physi­ol­ogy.

From the re­sound­ing event our feel­ing gathers its dy­namic im­pulse, and trans­forms its stepwise struc­ture into the im­pulse of our physio­logi­cal mo­tions.
At the same time, on the basis of the tonal struc­ture, our un­der­stand­ing de­ter­mines the kind of our mo­tions.

If mu­sic, then, is struc­tured in such a way that its ele­ments, the tones, appear to our ana­lyz­ing in­tel­lect in steps and in pe­ri­odi­cal seg­ments, then it is suited for schematic dance mu­sic, and in­deed, it even forces us into the world of primi­tive danc­ing motion.

And it de­pends on the sim­plic­ity or com­plex­ity of the pe­ri­odi­cal or­ders or steps within the sub­tler tone pat­terns, whether the dance will appear clumsy or grace­ful.