Halm's search for deep musical understanding and for the secrets of effective composition was a lifelong quest. Dissatisfied with mechanical harmony-manual teachings and superficial composition-manual guidance and dismissive of fanciful hermeneutic contrivances, he sought to penetrate to the innermost workings of music to identify and understand its essential processes. Halm located them in configurations of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and complementary elements (texture, register, timbre) that combine strategically to produce music's compelling dynamic flow. There, in music's dynamic qualities and emergent, teleological design, he discovered the foundation of its structure and psychoauditive impact. “The dynamic activity, the drama of dynamics suffices fully for me,” he declared, “is for me the actually concrete element.” “Knowledge about music is based on knowledge of musical processes, of the function of musical forces as they operate in chords and chord progressions, in forms, i.e., in laws of existence and evolution of melody and larger organisms, e.g., of a fugue, a movement of a symphony.”

For Halm, the ebb and flow of music's interior dynamics trace a profile of escalation and attenuation in a “drama of forces” (“Drama von Kräften”) that unfolds consequentially, according to musical rationality, which he calls “the most important discovery of human musicality … the most beautiful, most powerful revelation and example of musical Spirit becoming flesh.” That rationality and resultant sense of consequentiality (Folgerichtigkeit) among dynamically charged musical events Halm called musical logic (musikalische Logik).