A portion from the first chapter of my forthcoming book, Music:
Notation and Practice in Past and Present, published by National
Social Science Press. Before discussing the seven elements [of
music] in detail, it is important to think about just what
constitutes a piece of music. We are all aware of the existence
of songs that have been recorded multiple times by different
artists, or even by the same artists. These “covers” may hold
very closely to the original or may be completely different,
even falling into a separate style. Are all these versions
separate pieces, or species of the same piece? With a painting
or a sculpture, it is possible to point to a specific
object—perhaps even to pick it up and consider its physical
properties. Similarly, a book or a poem has a specific text that
is the work of literature, and while there may be variant
editions, there is a core sense of being to a book that keeps
even different versions of the same story somehow separated from
each other. No one would dare suggest t