Jeremy Denk has an astonishing post on Ives' Concord (and the flavors of tunes and yoghurt and all else good).
Musical ideas have both generality and specificity -- they can be repeatable and malleable or they can be be so precisely stated and identified with a particular moment in a particular context that they even resist resemblance to other instances of the same idea. Keeping these two qualities in balance is an important compositional skill and the "taste", even the very identity of some composers (Ives, Mozart, Ockeghem...) is closely tied to their individual, if often idiosyncratic, sense of this balance.
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