I love music and am currently learning guitar so I found this very interesting and insightful. But to be quite honest, I didn’t really understand the part on musical notation and the shading meant to “indicate[s] passages of rhythm- meter correspondence.”

I seriously never realized how much goes into writing music. But some people are just musical- do they put all this thought into the details or does it just come naturally? “Composers can write cadences with all possible shades of solidarity and finality,” “Composers also take care to make sure some phrases contrast with their neighbors.” There are so many qualifications for good music and I never realized how much of a science it really is. But, for someone who can just write good music, do they think about all this as they’re writing it? Can there be an excellent composer who doesn’t know all this…?