While it is certainly simplistic to state that music has not been well understood, it remains true that most discussion which addresses it has been insufficient. Generally music has been relegated to a vague category associated with human intuition where activities are seldom considered capable of a very high level of articulation in language other than that used to generate the specific activity. For music this has resulted not only in musicians not being expected to talk about what they do, but also there has seldom been serious discussion of what music as a phenomenon might actually be. To some extent this has been liberating. More often it has reduced music to an exploitable commodity for either commercial merchandising or as a thoroughly mystifying illustration for philosophic or religious metaphor...