Jim bunch wrote:
>I read an article a while back in something like "Journal of Musical
>Perception" that professional musicians prefer listening to music with
>"contextual surprises" the content of which peaked at about the
>Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven period.  I'll bet that preference also correlates
>with a high IQ - or at least a high level of one or another of the various
>"intelligences" that people talk about.
 
I like the phrase "contextual surprise", but I wonder about the correlation
to intelligence.  Another word for "contextual surprise" is "joke".  Why
shouldn't musicians enjoy the joke simply on its own terms since they are
the terms that musicians employ to understand music in the first place.
This is getting awfully circular and I'm hardly out of the third sentence.
I'll be quiet now.
 
Best,
 
Hendrik Broekman