WHAT MIGHT IT MEAN? also by Nancy Garniez
	AN UNCOMMON GLOSSARY OF MUSICAL TERMS AND CONCEPTS FOR THE STUCK, BORED AND CURIOUS A compilation of 104 provocative and practical definitions, cross-referenced and indexed by composer.

	"What Might It Mean?" (New York, 1999) is a glossary of musical terms. Though it requires a knowledge of music for full understanding and appreciation, it is still--even to me, and I know very little--a remarkably interesting book. I've never seen anything like it. What the book does is describe the significance of such musical phenomena as resonance, overtones, and consonance for somebody who hears them. Here's an example: "combination of tomes that sounds jarring, troubling, or in any way surprising qualifies as a dissonance. The definition is subjective since, like consonance, it depends on context, preparation, loudness, and other variables. Also, like consonance, there are degrees of dissonance. A notated consonant triad, if voiced either with the lower tones too close together or the higher tones too far apart, may have a dissonant effect. Some obvious dissonances are transformed at the moment the listener finds them interesting-'thrilling,' as one young student put it." Poets would find this book valuable, especially if they know music, and so would critics. The book provides an extremely refined vocabulary for meanings and effects that apply to verbal as well as musical experience, rewarding study by elevating your capacity to discern the play of feeling and sense not only in music, but also in the lines of a poem or the sentences of a paragraph. It gives exquisite attention to the fundamental expressive powers of the human voice. These powers exist prior to their realization in notes or words and even afterward, in meaning that lives inside you beyond its immediate expression, that returns to you later, and that qualifies your sensibility and your life, whether you are aware of it or not. I would be surprised if this book didn't become well known and indispensable for many people. Leonard Michaels
	(The late Leonard Michaels, novelist and short-story writer whose work appeared frequently in The New Yorker, co-edited together with Christopher Ricks The State of the Language (U. of California Press, 1990). He taught at the Berkeley campus of the University of California.)
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