Publicado en Sound and music

[…] Cook concludes there is a ‘glaring disparity between the way in which the arbiters of musical taste approach musical structure and the way in which listeners generally respond to it’. In fact, people usually follow the surface narrative of a piece of music much as they follow the story of a novel, moving from event to event without perceiving, or seeking, a underlying structural Gestalt. And why should anyone deem this ‘listening style’ flawed, or suggest such listening provides an incomplete experience of the music?

So why has form always been so exalted?

My theory is that it is because form is more readily quantifiable, more easily subjected to scientific-style analysis, than other features of music. Form is easily reduced to diagrams, setting out sections and their inter-relationship, just as harmony can be ‘explained’ by numbering notes, drawing balloons around them, extracting important chords. […]