 The perception of one’s own persistence through time requires discrete events that break the otherwise continuous and identical stream of temporality. This is achieved in music through meter and rhythm, which subdivide the music’s unfolding in ordered, discrete units. Harmony fills in this abstract structure with notes. Melody, which Hegel conceives of as a synthesis of rhythm and harmony, is the highest manifestation of music, “the sphere of its properly artistic inventions” (Hegel 1835: part III, section III, chapter II, 2.c).