—Santa Lucia; S—Scottish Lament. The order of the upper case symbols denotes the order of alternation while lower case symbols indicate the level of unitising: p—phrase; b—bar; n— note.

The investigations just described were framed in terms of determinants of the listeners’ enjoyment or liking of very simple melodies. They were designed to assess the relative importance of the grammatical rules, which organise the musical material, and the motivic content, which presumably reflects its composer’s intentions. Music entails the tantalising quality of ‘aboutness’; it seems to mean something. Yet the results of these simple experiments imply that the meaning is illusory, that the grammar, which is void of specific meaning, represents the musical content.