“Appoggiaturas”. What? “The most well-known classical example is the opening phrase of the violin tune in Albinoni’s Adagio for Strings.”

Musical jargon peppers the discussion: for readers who do not know their arpeggios from their appoggiaturas, parts of the book will be difficult to understand.

“There’s a superabundance of appoggiaturas and acciaccaturas and phrase marks and so forth,” Sacks says, “which together compose a sort of nonsense.”