Delicious Moments
A Delicious Moment (“DelMo”) in music has the following characteristics:
[a] It’s a moment (or a segment) which is highly pleasurable
[b] It grabs most of a listener’s attention
[c] It is fairly easy for a listener to recall (accuracy probably not perfect)
A DelMo is similar to what pop musicians call a “hook”, but not exactly the same. (E.g., some commercial jingles have hooks which are not pleasurable but they grab the listener’s attention and are fairly easy to recall).
Outstanding examples of DelMo’s:
- Theme from Elvira Madigan (Mozart Piano Concerto No. 21)
- Theremin in “Good Vibrations” (Beach Boys)
- “Eleanor Rigby” (Beatles) – almost an untinterrupted sequence of DelMo’s
- Moonlight Sonata, Mvt 1 (Beethoven) – pretty much one long DelMo
Much great classical music is rather sparse in the occurrence of DelMo’s (e.g. Brahms symphonies). Some of the best pop music is packed with DelMo’s (e.g. many Beatles tunes).
DelMo’s are so potent experientially that for some listeners they amount to an aesthetic standard (The good-ness of a piece of music is roughly proportional to the amount of DelMo material in the music.)