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So if the aim of music is to conjure up 'images' in the head of the listener, what's the point of bothering to use sound as a medium at all? Why not paint or draw or photograph instead? The entire raison d'etre of music is that it can evoke things that have no tactile form or medium, and particularly scenarios that exist temporaly, something that the visual arts (with the partial exception of cinema) cannot do. To expect music to serve as some kind of accompaniment or enhancer of another visual medium is, on the part of the composer, to fall far short of its expressive potential; and on the part of the listener, to lack the imagination neccesary to interpret ideas and schemes in a purely sonorous language.

^^sore drop-out. I like Sojar Voglar's proposal. I don't know how does a work get into the "Major Works" file, but if there are different criteria, we could as well just have another file for "YC Members' Choices".

i get colours (instinctively, as a kind of synaesthesia) and performative gestures (learned) from music. hearing a piece for me is imagining performing it, & at times imagining the physical sensations of bow touching strings, air flowing through tubes etc—at least, if the piece is good. this tends to annoy people who sit next to me at concerts. people try to explain the emotional states music suggests with ideas or pictures or stories they can relate to. they always have. (time was each classical mode was associated with a different temperament.) i think people basically don't understand or believe that pure sound alone can generate emotion, due to coming to view music as a commodity—"something to _____ to". it's not understood that music can have power and, in consequence, a lot of the popular music produced nowadays doesn't have very much power, & falls by the wayside while the classics of the 1960s and 70s remain as popular as they ever were.

More often than not, these kinds of associations are tiring for me (and tend to reveal how dull people are), not that there is anything wrong with the music of Debussy creating images of fauns and the body of music written in the last 100 years homogenously sounding like "people getting murdered". I think people desperately try to find something that music reminds them of, as if every piece of music written needs to be something else in addition to music. For me, I interpret kinds of energies from music. These energies can't really be properly explained: it's a visceral feeling.