Please don't give up, Frogman! Let me try to continue your argument:
Emotional expression is of course very important in music. But let's take Frogman's example, a beautiful melody being played with no sense of time.
Rhythm and meter are the basic framework of all music - they are what make music intelligible to the listener. Once in a master class, a fellow hornist was playing the famous solo from the slow movement of the Tchaikovsky 5th Symphony (for those of you who do not care much for classical music, you may know the John Denver tune Annie's Song, which uses the same melody). This student was very wrapped up in her own emotions, and was too much in love with the admittedly gorgeous sound she was making, and there was absolutely no sense of time at all. Despite the emotional playing, the music simply made no sense - indeed, it would have been unrecognizable and unintelligible to anyone not familiar with what she was playing. The rest of us in the horn studio patiently waited for her to finish.
Then my teacher asked her - "What do you think I think about primarily when I play this solo in the orchestra?" The student replied "Oh, you're probably thinking about your wife, and how much you love her!" He of course replied "No, I am thinking - " and here he started chanting the subdivision of the beat, along with the comment above that rhythm and meter, and the sense of these things, are what make music intelligible to the listener, even if they are not conscious of this.
He also went on to add that no matter how expressively one plays, poor rhythm is the first thing that will get you eliminated at an audition, and this is very true, though poor intonation is a close second.
I am not arguing that one should play like a machine, however, far from it. But to be expressive with musical time, one must have an accurate sense of it first. One cannot learn to manipulate musical time expressively if one cannot give a sense of strict time. If there is no sense of meter underlying the solo, then there is no context for the listener to follow the expression. This is why just about all types of popular music have a drumbeat behind them - this gives the context or framework to the listener for everything else that is going on, even if they know nothing about music.
The student I described above was lost in her own little world - expressive as she was, her expression was only for her - there was no translation there for the listeners, even though we knew what she was attempting to convey! The sense of time is the framework the musician must set up so that he/she can be understood. This is why Frogman is arguing that this issue is so important, though I do not write as clearly and concisely as he, unfortunately.
