5. The Four Elements of Music II. MELODY ５．音楽の４つの要素 II. メロディ Melody is only second importance to rhythm in the musical firmament. As one commentator has pointed out, if the idea of rhythm is connected in our imagination with …

4. The Four Elements of Music I. RHYTHM ４．音楽の４つの要素 I. リズム Music has four essential elements: rhythm, melody, harmony, and tone color. These four ingredients are the composer's materials. He works with them in the same way that…

3. The Creative Process in Music Most people want to know how things are made. They frankly admit, however, that they feel completely at sea when it comes to understanding how a piece of music is made. Where a composer begins, how he manag…

2 How We Listen We all listen to music according to our separate capacities. But, for the sake of analysis, the whole listening process may become clearer if we break it up into its component parts, so to speak. In a certain sense we all l…

Preliminaries All books on understanding music are agreed about one point: You can't develop a better appreciation of the art merely by reading a book about it. If you want to understand music better, you can do nothing more important than…