Steve Schwartz wrote:

>I say this because, when I was a lad, I was highly attuned to harmony
>and felt a strong animus against composers who didn't surprise me often
>enough: Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Brahms, Bruckner, among others.  I've
>since realized there are things other than unpredictable harmony that
>might make or break a piece.

Well, the judge of 'good' harmony, to my mind, is not exactly
'predictability' but 'inevitability,' a term whose meaning is not clear
even to me.  Again, as with all aesthetic matters, especially those
related to tonality, this is a highly subjective thing.  The interesting
thing is to describe these kinds of ideas *relative to each person,* so
that we know what makes something harmonically X or harmonically Not X
for each of us, withought positing on the way some universal absolute
scale, which may not (and should not, and need not) exist.

*Inevitability* is usually a retrospective judgement.  *Predictability*
is obviously something that has to be decided beforehand and verified
moment by moment, before you hear the next harmony in the sequence.  It
is theoretically possible, of course, but how many of us can say we have
done this honestly?  The point is that they are different ideas, the
latter an objective judment of a piece, and the former an aesthetic
quality of a piece which is harder to describe and establsh.

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