The critical controversy that continues to surround the musical status and cultural value of Grieg's Slåtter underlines the extent to which his folk-music arrangements resist easy interpretative containment. In spite of the music's energetic emphasis on achieving a sense of structural unity and symmetry (often of an innovative formal kind involving metrical and rhythmic elements alongside more conventionally diatonic means), many of the numbers from both op. 66 and op. 72 can also be heard as open or unstable. They articulate different and sometimes opposed musical discourses: urban, rural, local, cosmopolitan, modernist, nostalgic and retrospective. It is the tension between these competing musical styles or voices that, previous chapters have argued, points towards their relationship with the idea of landscape. The simultaneous creation or evocation of various levels of temporal or spatial organisation within a given framework that the music suggests results in the perception of multiple figures and ground. The music operates discursively within such parameters. Furthermore, the manner in which it negotiates these different levels of perception implies a deeper, more abstract, notion of landscape than purely visual means of representation would normally suggest.

This emphasis on musical depth, openness and complexity is not intended simply to displace one set of analytical paradigms and substitute it with another. Critical discourses of fragmentation and disunity are no less ideological than those of symmetry or balance, though they might at first seem to serve different interpretative purposes.