 Gurney’s framework is a formalist one, as he holds music’s value to depend primarily on its presentation of abstract forms. This is achieved through music’s “ideal motion”, where “ideal” refers to music’s capacity to convey abstract forms (Gurney 1880: 164–165). Form and motion are thus the two essential aspects of music, and specifically of melody. Although talk of motion may suggests an analogy with physical space, Gurney is explicit in saying that this is nothing but the “faintest metaphor” (1880: 337), as the spatial character of melodic motion is radically different from that of visual arts and architecture. Through an enlightening contrast with these art forms, Gurney shows that music’s motion is ordered in time, in such a way that the succession of its elements is already fixed. Not so in the properly spatial arts, in which we apprehend elements in an order determined by our act of vision (Gurney 1880: 94). Gurney further argues the value of music must reside primarily in short sequences we are able to grasp in one hearing, and not in the understanding of large-scale structures (Gurney 1880: 96–97; a similar position, inspired by Gurney, has been recently defended in Levinson 1997).