ABSTRACT. Kertz-Welzel notes that improvisation means inventing music at the moment of playing without writing it down. Kramer argues that listening to classical music involves both unselfconscious absorption in the sweep of a piece as a whole and quickened attention to special details. Lester explains that cadences are by nature neither metrically accented nor metrically unaccented. Hailey contends that Mahler was exploring the tension between the subjective content and rhetorical demands of his musical language and the abstract demands of rigorous formal and motivic organization.