Steve Schwartz:
>See Deryck Cooke's The Language of Music. In it, he essentially lists
>various conventions that help "locate" the emotional "meaning" of music
>for us. To take one extremely simple example, we tend to hear minor mode
>as more emotionally complex than a major mode. This is solely a matter
>of convention.
As I remember this very interesting book, Cooke makes a stronger claim
than one based simply on conventions, but it has been a while since I read
it, so now I will have to go back and reread it.
Jim Tobin