Recognising a musical style implies managing a number of similarities. However, the nature of such similarities and their organisation within a piece of music are radically different from those discussed in Forum A4, where themes, patterns or melodies were compared. The perception of a style involves the totality of the structural features present in a given piece or set of pieces. According to the theory put forward in the present article, the arrangement of these features is governed by a hierarchy of rules, whose lowest level organises minimal features such as pitches, scale degrees, metrical accents, durations and so on, each of them enjoying a relative independence from the others. Each rule is repeatedly used, resulting in a series of variously connected minimal features which are distributed in different places throughout the piece. When listening to a style it is not possible to manage such kinds of similarity analytically: one simply perceives a certain feeling of familiarity. This effect is particularly enhanced by comparisons between slightly different but not identical styles. Familiarity is not merely the perception of the objective presence of diffuse similarities, but also of the internal coherence among the expressive intentions.
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