210 FROM FISH TO PHILOSOPHER 



be rigidly molded into measures, beats, and rests, and 

 made to ascend and descend on the limited ladder of 

 the conventional octave— interpretation is, in part, a mat- 

 ter of liberating Orpheus's inspiration from this regimen- 

 tation between vertical and horizontal lines. 



The meaning' of music is carried by a variety of ele- 

 ments: melody, rhythm, pitch, timbre, sequence, har- 

 mony, anticipation, suspension and fulfillment. Its es- 

 sence is tonal form, and is not necessarily related to our 

 experience of words, things, or events. Much good music 

 is programmatic, but music need not be programmatic 

 to be good. Nor is good music necessarily descriptive of 

 any one of the emotions, or intended to evoke any par- 

 ticular emotional response: on the contrary, some critics 

 hold that music is at its best when, in composer, artist, 

 and auditor alike, it has been filtered by psychic dis- 

 tance and detachment until its aflFective quahties are 

 uniquely its own. Then it is that it conveys— or perhaps 

 elicits is a better word, because it is hard to say what a 

 composer intends to convey— its own semantics, its own 

 affirmations and denials, syntheses and antitheses, in 

 pilasters and arabesques of sound, substituting myth for 

 reality, complementing, not imitating, other forms of 

 perceptual experience with values of its own. 



But these musical values are not absolute, in the sense 

 of having the same significance for all individuals— as is 

 witnessed by the changes in musical style with the pas- 

 sage of time, and the wide and sometimes vehement 

 division of opinion with respect to style and content. 

 These values, both in respect to creation and reception, 

 vary in different individuals with their emotional 

 make-up, their musical experience and ability, their 

 prevalent interest and emotional set, their intellectual 

 maturity, and perhaps with such fundamental psycho- 

 logical matters as how they hear music— as a plastic flow 

 of sound, as an increase or decrease of intensity, or as 

 isolated notes like blocks of stone placed at different ele- 

 vations. It is the ever-conscious task of the artist to pre- 



