Musical form and the listener

Abstract

Abstract There have been many attempts to define what music is in terms of the specific attributes of musical sounds. The famous nineteenth century critic Eduard Hans lick regarded ‘the measurable tone’ as ‘the primary and essential condition of all music’ (trans. 1957: 105). Musical sounds, he was saying, can be distinguished from those of nature by the fact that they involve the use of fixed pitches, whereas virtually all natural sounds consist of constantly fluctuating frequencies. And a number of twentieth-century writers have assumed, like Hans lick, that fixed pitches are among the defining features of music (Radocy and Boyle 1979: 170—2). Now it is true that in most of the world’s musical cultures, pitches are not only fixed, but organized into a series of discrete steps (Dowling and Harwood 1986: 90—1). However, this is a generalization about music and not a definition of it, for it is easy to put forward counter-examples.