ABSTRACT
Musical imagery, defined here as the vivid imagination of musical sounds that are not physically present at the moment, may occur in at least four different real-life situations. First, a composer may imagine novel music without the aid of notation or a musical instrument. Such creative imagery is likely to be fragmentary and exploratory in nature (see Mountain, this volume). Second, a musically literate person may imagine music as he or she is reading an unfamiliar score. This ability varies widely even among professional musicians (see Brodsky, Henik, Rubinstein, & Zorman, 1999), and in most cases the resulting imagery is probably incomplete and at a much slower tempo than the one intended by the composer. Third, a previously heard or imagined piece of music may be recalled from memory, with or without the aid of a score. Although this process also is often fragmentary and discontinuous, it can be carried out at approximately the correct tempo and in a continuous fashion if the memory is strong enough and if attention is devoted to the task. Fourth, a musician may use musical imagery during performance to achieve the desired sound and expression, and to compare the musical image with the immediate feedback received from the instrument. This imagery must of course be continuous and at the correct tempo, though it can be intermittent or absent when performance or listening is on automatic pilot, as it were. An involved listener thoroughly familiar with a piece of music may engage in an analogous process of what Levinson (1997, p. 16) has called ‘vivid anticipation’. It may be methodologically difficult, however, to distinguish this form of anticipatory imagery from the perception of the simultaneously occurring sounds.
