ABSTRACT
Musical organization is largely based nowadays on principles of serialization. Non-thematicism is in music what the non-representation, the non-figurative is in the visual arts, or is indeed in the other arts, poetry, novel-writing, or play-writing. Obviously, in thematic music, the thematic thread and network of relations was as much the main organizing agent as representation or figuration was in painting, story-telling in the novel, or plot in the play. Some degree of predetermination is obviously of the very essence of any musical system. The most important features of scales – in Western and Eastern music alike – are the inherent, in-built form-determinants that characterize modes, ragas, Arab magms, Byzantine echoi. They prescribe: note-catalogue; ambitus; centre-note; fixed and subsidiary dominants; leading tones; fixed subdivisions of scale for order of exposition: and also actual typical motives and note-progressions.
