Success Quote by Levi Strauss

Suspense, Strauss suggests, is less a polite aesthetic device than a controlled act of sabotage. The “delicious falling sensation” frames musical pleasure as a small, consenting loss of security: the composer doesn’t simply delay resolution, he steals the rung you expected to step on. That’s why the metaphor of a “musical ladder” hits. It assumes the listener has already internalized a hierarchy of stability - tonic as home, cadence as closure - and that we climb through a piece with an almost bodily confidence. When the expected harmony doesn’t arrive, the body notices first: vertigo before intellect.

The subtext is about power and trust. “Withholds more than we anticipate” implies an unspoken contract between maker and audience, calibrated by style, genre, and convention. The composer’s skill isn’t just in breaking the rules, but in knowing exactly how much the listener can predict, then pushing past that prediction without snapping the thread entirely. The “void” isn’t chaos; it’s a temporary suspension where the ear scrambles to re-map the terrain.

Context matters: a 19th-century listener was living amid expanding tonal ambition, bigger halls, and a culture increasingly comfortable with sensation as a virtue. For a businessman to describe music in terms this physical hints at a wider modernity: risk can be engineered, and pleasure can be packaged as a near-miss. The thrill isn’t stability; it’s the controlled flirtation with collapse.