The Fredösphere

An article from Nature gives us more information on why people hate atonal music.  But beware this garbled sentence:

In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency.

That sure sounds to me like they are saying "words used a lot in a text tend to be present more often," or maybe if I read it even more carefully, it says "words used a lot tend to be present less often."

Anyway, if you read the whole thing I think you discover its point is simply that a conventional piece of music sets up a context for itself early on, and then sticks to it through the rest of the piece.  If it doesn't, we call it a failure, unless it was deliberate and systematic, in which case we call it atonality.

And a tip 'o the hat to the indispensable, inexorable, implacable, incorrigible Arts & Letters Daily.