First of all, a link:
The NYT publishes a weekly breast-beat about grammar & usage errors, which is stimulating reading, even if, not being speakers of American English, you don't always agree with it. If you peruse the comments you can quickly get a feel for the importance of language qua language to a lot of people. Sometimes, as in the link above, the editor provides a list of what they (gender-neutral) believe to be good writing; I quite like the NYT house style, but sometimes I scratch my head to work out why they nominate some of the excerpts. But it is at least challenging to try to articulate the reasons.
There is a relatively short list of people who like mail-order cigarettes: teenagers, adults evading sales taxes and the Seneca Nation of Indians of western New York, which dominates the national market.
Taking the first excerpt as a jumping off point. How can we try to quantify musicality? Frankly, I don't know, but I look for/at sentences which I enjoy, and try to find patterns. Explaining the patterns is hard.
This extract ticks a lot of boxes; the list of three items is really common. Each item being longer than the previous, a kind of crescendo, is absolutely the standard pattern. (We could diverge here and talk about punctuation - I am a fan of the "Oxford comma" which precedes the "and" introducing the final clause with a comma. I know, from bitter experience, that others aren't)
That sentence then is paradigmatic in structure, but it really gains its excellence from the contrast of the twist in the tail with that formal regularity, the balancing of predictability (structural) and unpredictability (thematic). It's the meta-structure of a lot of jokes, in fact. If I wanted to be nasty, I could call it a cliche, but since I enjoyed the sentence I won't.
The fulfilment of expectation, and the thwarting of expectation, are both effects. The other day I had cause to discuss this little triad in a writing class:
"...Acquisition, retention and use..."
It's the classic three-item list with a thematic coherence imposed by temporality (first we acquire, then we retain, eventually we use), but it thwarts expectation with its monosyllabic finish. I like that though, because it focuses on the most important idea (to my mind). I could have opted for "Acquisition, retention and utilisation", thus fulfilling both rhythmic and rhyming expectations but then it seems to me like a swamp of syllables, noise for its own sake.
I went a bit OCD on this (local effects are easy to analyse in detail). You really only need to look at polysyllable vs monosyllable to judge the effect, but I went a step further an looked at the prosody.
Acquisition, retention and use
../. ./. . / assonance frustrated
Retention, acquisition and use
./. ../. ./ assonance frustrated
Retention, acquisition, and utilisation
./. ../. ..../. assonance fulfilled
Look at the neat footing of the first option; three nice anapests. The second isn't too bad, but I would suggest the virtue of variety doesn't outweigh the disadvantages of losing the thematic coherence. But the final one reveals its awfulness in the unstructured proliferation of unstressed syllables; we need to organise it into tetrasyllabic feet to make it scan, and, based on the evidence of poetic history, tetrasyllable are not comfortable music to the Anglo-Saxon ear.
Musicality is not all local effects of course. In a sense they are the easy ones. More difficult is the organising of thematic effects across paragraphs and ultimately texts.
Music can be thought of as something which maps or structures time; a text certainly is consumed in time, but an alternate metaphor would be the text as space.The structuring of space is the business of architecture (amongst other arts), and the architectural qualities of prose is another trope frequently used.
Later.
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