 Meyer’s influential Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) attempts to makes sense of musical emotions by holding that these depend on the syntactical features of the music itself. Meyer’s view rests on the questionable assumptions that emotions arise when a tendency to respond is inhibited. A tendency to respond is one’s inclination to behave in a certain way. For instance, a smoker who feels like smoking but is unable to find any cigarettes will feel increasingly frustrated and upset. This person’s emotion is generated by the inhibition of his tendency to respond (Meyer 1956: 13–14; for criticism, see Budd 1985: 155–157). In music, a tendency to respond is generated by the expectations that naturally arise in more or less sophisticated listeners with regard to the syntactic development of the piece. Music, and valuable music especially, momentarily frustrates our expectations whenever it develops in unforeseen ways, and thereby arouses emotions without requiring any reference to extra-musical reality.