The starting point for our reflections upon the musical work will be the unsystematized convictions that we encounter in daily life in our communion with musical works before we succumb to one particular theory or another. Naturally, I do not intend in advance to accept these convictions as true. On the contrary, I shall submit them to critical investigations at specific points. But, for the moment at least, they must indicate the direction of further investigations. For how else could this direction be indicated? These convictions, although naively acquired and perhaps burdened with various mistakes, do after all stem from an immediate aesthetic communion with musical works, a communion that furnishes us, or at least may furnish us, with an ultimate experience of those works, thus endowing with truth the views that match the given of the experience. However fully developed, every theory of musical works that is not mere speculation but seeks a base in concrete facts must refer to the presystematic convictions that initially gave direction to the search. It seems that there is another reason why we must refer to the given of the immediate musical experience.