The Problem of Prolongation in "Tonal" Music: Terminology, Perception, and Expressive Meaning

style? This article presents terms and concepts inspired by recent work in cognitive science that provide interesting answers to these questions. My work builds on that of Rudolf Arnheim in art history and Gestalt psychology, and of Douglas Hofstadter in artificial intelligence and musical creativity. The ideas on prolongation I advance here grow out of a theory of meaning in music that colleagues and I have been developing in a series of recent papers (Larson 1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1993d, 1994a, 1994b; Hurwitz and Larson 1994; Pelto 1994). Some repetition of the content of those papers is necessary, but a detailed discussion of that theory is beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, while I will be claiming that these terms clarify our intellectual understanding of prolongation, I do stress that my view of prolongation is cognitively oriented: it is motivated by an attempt to understand the experience of music.' By expressive meaning, I mean that quality experienced in music that allows it to suggest (for example) feelings, actions, or motion (or even stillness, a special kind of motion).2 That quality may not translate well into words nor relate clearly to the emotions of a composer. But it is tied to our perception of music as an interplay of directed tensions-