Professor Andrew Schultz: The minor fall and the major lift - Music, power and the composer's black art So What? Lectures

What is it about those rare and fleeting moments of musical beauty that
fully captivate a listener’s attention? Does a composer calculate such
junctures or are they happy accidents? How could a composer shape and
guide the listener’s experience to create these events? Does detailed
analysis of the notes tell us all we need to know to explain them? From
Beethoven’s Sonata in E Major, Opus 109 to Leonard Cohen’s song,
Hallelujah, as in many other works before and since, there are precise
moments where a listener may experience a superb glimpse of ‘musical
truth’. Understanding how and why they happen calls for an awareness of
the psychoacoustic and social contexts for the musical experience and
has unavoidable aesthetic implications for the way a composer thinks
about music.