ABSTRACT
The psychology of music has seen several shifts of emphasis over the last fifty years. Studies of the expressiveness of music inevitably run into one major obstacle: any account by people as to how expressive character is perceived will inevitably be metaphorical, poetical rather than analytic. The expressive character of a musical passage is thus determined by the perception of its apparent weight, size, forward impulse, manner of movement and other components of posture and gesture. Music that is heard as strongly characterized will, like meaningful words, be the more easily recalled or at least recognized. Music expressively neutralized, as is often the case in aural tests, will not haunt the mind for long. The ultimately distinguishing feature of musical individuality, originality and quality is not found at the level of inventing new sound materials or even in making expressive gestures, but in unique relationships brought about by musical speculation, the transformation of sound and gesture into musical structure.
