In applications of the music-as-language metaphor we should attend to diverse musical traditions in musical terms, including not only traditions of t… - Harold Powers

[A. Merriam] neglects to take sufficiently into account the possibilities of critical musical analysis as though from within the culture, be it by a native or a native-trained foreigner.

A tonal type is minimally identifiable by its three markers and thus objectively observable completely apart from its musical or cultural context; it is 'scientific,' it is 'etic.' 'Mode' conversely is all bound up in sixteenth-century musical culture, not as a living doctrine of the music of the church and a heritage fomr the Middle Ages but also as a musical construct being expirimented with by members of the culture, from both humanistic and traditional points of view; it is thoroughly 'emic' and requires study on its own terms....

Counterpoint texts tend to resemble one another in the underlying principles of voice-leading they espouse and in the kinds of orderings of rules they provide, but no one could accuse the harmony texts of, let us say, Heinrich Schenker and Hugo Riemann, or of Allen Irvine McHose and Walter Piston--or for that matter, of Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Roger Sessions--of being mutually compatible, either in premise or in practice.