Music

An orderly succession of sounds of definite pitch, whose constituents are melody, harmony, and rhythm. Almost as fundamental to a perception of the nature of music, however, is articulation, which embraces not only the phrasing, dynamics, etc that breathe life into a musical performance, but also the composer's creative use of silence. Music, even when it is imagined silently without an interpreter, exists in time, which means that, except for certain types of composition in which words are paramount (such as operatic recitative and some plainchant), virtually all musical structures entail a degree of audible repetition, even if this cannot always be fully grasped at a first hearing. Music is therefore a kind of aural patterning rather than aural painting - abstract rather than representational. This is not to deny its capacity to elicit a strong emotional response, mainly by creating and eventually resolving harmonic and rhythmic tensions which somehow mirror those of the human body and mind, but the essential nature of music is possibly closer to mathematics than to any of its sister arts.