ABSTRACT A series of experiments,investigated,cognitive processes,involved,in listening to a piece of music, focusing in particular on the abstraction of surface features (here referred to as cues). Subjects listened to an,unfamiliar,piece in a familiar musical,idiom,and,their sensitivities to aspects,of the just-heard piece were,employed,to elucidate,the nature,of their representations,of the piece in recent memory., The study,also sought,to assess the capacities of subjects to employ,any,declarative,knowledge,of aspects of tonal structure that they possessed,in organising,musical,material. Three experiments,made,use,of different procedures to address these issues, employing either a single short tonal piece - Schubert's Valse Sentimentale, D 779, Op 50, n° 6 - or a variant of this. The first two experiments employed non-musician subjects and examined, respectively, the cues abstracted in listening to the piece, and subjects’ post-listening ability to identify the temporal,location,of segments,of,the,piece. The third,experiment,explored,the constructional abilities of musician and non-musician subjects, requiring them to create a coherent,piece by ordering,the segments,that made,up the original piece. The results of these experiments,indicated that while the abilities of musicians differed from those of non- musicians, both groups of subjects exhibited a weaker sensitivity to features of musical structure than to cues abstracted from the musical,surface. Musical,schemata 3