In this influential book on the subject of rhythm, the authors develop a theoretical framework based essentially on a Gestalt approach, viewing rhythmic experience in terms of pattern perception or groupings. Musical examples of increasing complexity are used to provide training in the analysis, performance, and writing of rhythm, with exercises for the student's own work.
"This is a path-breaking work, important alike to music students and teachers, but it will make profitable reading for performers, too." New York Times Book Review
"When at some future time theories of rhythm...

'In Music, the Arts, and Ideas, ' Leonard B. Meyer uses music as a vantage point to discover patters in the perplexing, fragmented world of twentieth-century culture. The book is concerned with the aesthetics of music and with the relationships between music (and the other arts), ideology, and history--especially as these have shaped contemporary culture. The Postlude, written for this edition, looks back at the predictions made more than twenty-five years ago and speculates about what the coming decades may hold.

Leonard Meyer proposes a theory of style and style change that relates the choices made by composers to the constraints of psychology, cultural context, and musical traditions. He explores why, out of the abundance of compositional possibilities, composers choose to replicate some patterns and neglect others.

Meyer devotes the latter part of his book to a sketch-history of nineteenth-century music. He shows explicitly how the beliefs and attitudes of Romanticism influenced the choices of composers from Beethoven to Mahler and into our own time.

"A monumental work. . . . Most authors...

Leonard B. Meyer's writings on the theory, history, perception, and aesthetics of music have inspired and provoked generations of readers. The Spheres of Music makes available a selection of his most important essays (originally published between 1974 and 1998). Gathering them together in one volume not only enables the essays to "converse" with and illuminate each other, but also allows Meyer to revise, recant, and comment on the ideas they present.

With the same sensitive insight and searching intelligence he has exhibited throughout his career, Meyer transcends the boundaries...