ABSTRACT
In Indian canonical musics, simple “competence” tests of grammatical acceptability and of semantic meaningfulness appear at a level well that of conformity with “style” or “genre,” and yet well that of merely finding out blunders. Middle Eastern music uses “melody models” that, like ragas, serve as matrices for both memorized and improvised items; transcriptions of Middle Eastern music are not infrequently laid out so that recurring variants of a basic configuration are vertically aligned while the horizontal order represents the seriatim concatenations of phrases. In Indian raga music musicians are expected to be able to manipulate middle-level musical entities; it is part of their everyday professional equipment. In European art music of recent centuries, in which music historians have their roots, this reification of music into discrete units like statues and frescoes is so nearly a reflection of truth as to be true.
