53Categorization is at the heart of nearly all our mental activity, and hence all our musical activity.
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54The gestaltists formulated a number of rules describing how we make sense of the world visually, rules that work just as well in explaining how we assemble melodic fragments into whole tunes. See Law of Completeness, see law of good continuation
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55The importance of harmony is also attested to by research showing that people have trouble learning melodies that are harmonically anomalous.
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56Musicologists point out that most composers become less melodic and more thematic as they grow older and take on more ambitious projects.
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57Cerebral dominance for melody "migrates" from right brain to left brain as the individual acquires musical training.
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58When we speak of a "deep" understanding of music, it is to deep, many-layered hierarchies of reduction that we refer.
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59Rules of Melody
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60What a composers intellect can imagine is not necessarily something that a listener's auditory system can perceive.
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61Topic - Storytelling
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62For their part, composers write complex harmonies only by instinct. It is simply too complex for textbook rules to be of much help.
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63Meter is brick, phrasing is poured concrete.
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64Much of history's greatest music is written to such specification (form). So is an ocean of bland, paint by number tripe.
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65Memory is music's canvas.
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66Perceptual Present: William James. The practically cognized present is no knife edge, but a saddle back, with a certain breadth of its own time in which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions..."time."
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67Musical anticipations are based in earlier hearings of a particular work.
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68Research has confirmed that we normally handle only about seven observations at any moment, plus or minus two.
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69At a certain speed of presentation, musical objects cease to be observed in their parts and begin to be perceived as textures.
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70Composers steadfastly insist that they seldom resort to words when writing music. There's little inner dialogue like "Now let me see...how about the second inversion of the subdominant chord here, and then a suspension back to the tonic?" The principles of composition can be taught this way, but they're only really useful when they become automatic.
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71It's a bit like learning the fox-trot from maps of footsteps; later the maps are discarded and your legs just move.
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72This is to say that the brain perceives by anticipation. It formulates perceptual hypotheses, then confirms them. In the view of many cognitive psychologists, imagery arises from the unfolding of such anticipatory schemes in the absence of actual perceived objects. So a composer would imagine an arpeggio by unleashing the perceptual routine that listens to one.
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73Whatever the brain encounters, whether a sight or sound or smell or sensation, it dissects it for its deepest relations and it is this network of relations that the brain retains. Later, when the brain recollects something, it evokes these relations to generate "a memory." This means that memories are not so much retrieved as they are recreated.
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74Individual memories are processes, not things.
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75Composing is a matter of doing, not thinking.
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76How many native speakers of English can describe its grammar? And how fluent would a student of English be who laboriously reasoned through the grammar of every sentence?
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77Significantly, some composers see no value in formal knowledge of the rules of music. Stravinsky claimed to have studied the rules only after employing them instinctively. Rimsky-Korsakov confessed that he knew nothing of music theory when he was appointed to the University of St. Petersburg, despite having written many fine works.
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