A friendly reminder: get used to the unheard not to end up devoured.

Abstract

Personally, I associate musics inclined to follow the rules of the common practice with the overwhelming power of the Market; all others (including atonal and post-tonal ones of all kinds) with various statements of aesthetic, political, economic, psychological etc. resistance to it. Through the antithesis common vs uncommon practice in music we can also retrieve a hidden knowledge behind and inside a conceptual assonance that does not belong only to the Italian language: “protensione/propensione” (“protension/propensity” in English) and invites us to an etymological digging. The feeling that music is progressing or moving forward in time was doubtless one of the most fundamental characteristics of musical experience in Western culture; nevertheless, this tension towards a goal in a teleological perspective is still problematic: metrical time remains fi rmly cyclic in a trivial sense, since it involves a cyclic patterning of accents (as in the vast majority of musics created by following common practice’s rules). Music theorists – using a well-tested language and a nomenclature inherited from the traditional tonal past – encounter many diffi culties when analyzing the post-tonal era’s sounds. Indeed, surviving uncommon practices express themselves in musics that refuse a priori categories such as tension and direction: so the evidence shows them to be classifiable only as unica.