““Of these five features, harmonic consistency is clearly the most culturally specific. The idea that music should consist of rapidly changing chords is a deeply Western idea, in a double sense: it is deep, insofar as it characterizes much Western music since before the Renaissance; and it is Western, since there are many cultures in which the notion of a “chord progression” simply plays no role. (Many traditional non-Western styles are purely monophonic, or feature an unchanging “drone” harmony;””
