Psychology of Musical Experience

Abstract

I HAVE long been impressed by a passage about Lagrange, the prince of mathematicians, in Thomas Young's biographical sketch: “In the midst of the most brilliant societies he was generally absorbed in his own reflections: and especially when there was music, in which he delighted, not so much for any exquisite pleasure that he received from it, as because, after the first three or four bars, it regularly lulled him into a train of abstract thought, and he heard no more of the performance, except as a sort of accompaniment assisting the march of his most difficult investigations, which he thus pursued with comfort and convenience.”