Prevost notes (167) that traditional forms like gamelan music draw from "common experience, aspiration, and expression" to create "music for a particular ceremony"
though he ties this, interestingly, to non-ceremonial music like the blues, in which the "expressive needs of the performer [...] vary from one performance to another"
similarly, a once a particular occasion is over, a gamelan piece "give[s] way to another work for another occasion"
"In each of these cases the sense of occasion is a dominating aesthetic impulse. The music is formulated to serve a particular need that transcends the merely musical. This sense of musical meaning outweighs, in my mind, the inner technical preoccupations of much contemporary western 'art' music"