Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

As these very old melodies suggest, there are many ways of patterning and embellishing the diatonic
pitch set, giving rise to any number of historical, culturebound musical styles. Tracing their development
will be one of this book’s primary tasks. Yet history also suggests that the pitch set as such—the raw
material, so to speak, that precedes patterning—may be a natural “datum,” given to a degree in external
nature (the physics of sound) but, more relevantly, in human nature (call it the physiology of sound
cognition). Within the tradition of Western music, there may be cognitive universals that, as in language,
underlie and undergird all cultural practices, and (the downside, some may feel) set limits to them.