ABSTRACT
One of the major difficulties in discussing music lies in its multi-dimensionality. The stream of sounds a listener hears is composed of rhythm and harmony and melody and instrumental timbre and lyrics and, quite possibly, other elements as well. The primary medium of transmission of music throughout the European art tradition is, and for centuries has been, stave notation. The instrumentation of British beat groups, and the majority of rhythm'n'blues based bands, was simple and quite static, consisting of voice(s), two guitars, bass guitar and kit. In the mid-1960s, the kit primarily acts to provide a separable rhythm layer, that rhythm being stratified through different timbres. Patterns involving a minimal number of elements may connote 'stasis' and 'timelessness'. Melodic 'contour' is a way of discussing the shape traversed by a melody-such contours can be broadly ascending, descending, pendulous, terraced, or static.
