I only just got my hands on a copy of
Music in Middle-earth--spurred on, perhaps, by a post-Christmas trip to a bookstore that, while it did not include this particular book, reminded me of it, and made me brave my first trip into the Amazon to fetch it. Thanks to a seven or so hours of power outage (since restored) in a snowstorm, I finished the book I was working on before--an august tome about adult fans of LEGO
--and made it two chapters into
Music.
In reading through this thread, it strikes me as interesting that most of the comments made thus far have addressed the sonata analogy, which I found interesting, but do not have the musical expertise to address with words any deeper than "what he said made sense. to me."
However, no one seems to have made much comment about the topic (to me, more interesting) of Melkor's dissonance and the moral implications that are made by it being subordinated by consonance. Naveh seemed to touch just to the edge of this topic, when he suggested that the reason Melkor was so evil in Middle-earth and yet reconcilable to Eru in the Ainulindalė is that his dissonance was still resolved in the music, but through Free Will and the opportunity to "adorn the blank spaces" in the actual history of Arda. It seems to me that he didn't give quite enough weight in this respect to Eru's unilateral "no" in "
no thing may be done in my despite."
However, as I said, that particular moment was a very briefly touched upon part of the essay, within the context of both the musical comparison to the sonata form, and the smaller context of Melkor's dissonance therein.