I might as well throw my 2 cents to this thread, which is a very good thread, BTW. There are, of course, so many magical moments in music. I think that the one that is very effective at what it is trying to do is in the Pastoral, where the sun comes out after the rain storm and peace and tranquility are restored to the meadows. I tell people who use my music generation software that the bad compositions or passages that come out from time to time should be seen as a learning experience, believing as I do that we learn from the bad as well as the good - the bad teaches us what not to do (wisdom comes from pain, great wisdom comes from great pain). Apart from what my software sometimes generates there is little bad CM around since it can't make it through the various marketplace filters if it is bad. I tell them to ask themselves "why is this bad, what's wrong with it, what is it missing, what does it require to make it good or better?" I answering those questions, one can learn a lot about music. A good thread might also be "Bad moments in music", that is, passages in a composition that seem to fail at what they are trying or should be trying to do. Bill Pirkle