ABSTRACT
To understand the formal structure of a piece of music, we often use visual images in one form or another. One of the strengths of visual images – in contrast to auditory images – is the overview giving us the complete musical object accessible for inspection at one and the same time. Much of traditional music theory aims at making visual representations on paper of musical objects, to characterize and show structures of these objects. Images of form are of course not limited to representations on paper. As musicians and listeners, we spontaneously make our own internal images of form, and part of the process of learning to listen to and to play in a specific genre of music, consists of the development of images that ‘work’ in some sense, giving us what we experience as an understanding of the music in question.
