Before listening to each piece in rounds two and three, I wrote down how much I expected to like it. Most guesses landed within half a point. These are the pieces that beat the guess, ordered by how far.
They have something in common. Almost every one turned out to show its structure more clearly than I expected: a repeat drawn as one clean line, a subject and its answer caught in the act, a canon whose voices appear as parallel stripes. Clarity is the strongest predictor of what I like, and these are the pieces where it surprised me.
Each entry says why it beat my guess, then what I noticed and how it felt. Everything else about the project, including the pieces that fell short, is on the main page.
pull, out of 10