ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the selection of the record sleeves included in the conference presentation, on which it is based, and the text has been abridged and adapted accordingly; references to additional sleeves may be found in the endnotes. Reproductions are taken from the record library in the Department of Music at the University of Southampton. The text on the back of record sleeves comes from a nineteenth-century tradition that aligns it with the aesthetic process: its source is the descriptive or analytical programme note. The aesthetic interaction between image and sound is possible only because music possesses an intrinsic openness to semantic completion through the intervention of the image. The formal narratives of twentieth-century music analysis can be seen as serving very much the same purpose: stabilizing the reception of music through the formation of an intersubjectively comprehensible terminology for describing it.
