Describing Petrucciani's Performance

Petrucciani begins the piece exercising the rules of pitch, key, scale, timbre, harmony, rhythm, and meter. When he abruptly altered the tempo while maintaining tonal quality and scales, he created interest. Because I could still follow the melody within his expression of the piece, I could still anticipate the key and harmony to come. He also created interest by abruptly using loudness to alter his attack of the piece. I especially enjoyed the shifts that occurred in me when he employed these particular tactics. This created an entirely different experience for me. His changes in key, tempo, and loudness throw me off balance and provide contrast. What I found the most challenging to recoup from were the two occasions I perceived as dissonant. One was a disharmonious note; the other was a discordant run. Both times his “breaking the rules” disrupted my experience of the piece. These “interruptions” caused me to lose the sense of meter and rhythm of the composition. Even though he throws us off balance by his use of contrast in keys, tempo, volume, harmony, and pitch, he does use all those elements to
return us to balance.

When I listen to Michel Petrucciani’s rendition of “My Romance,” it reminds me of Vince Guaraldi's “Christmas Time is Here” from A Charlie Brown Christmas (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6545283), which elicits pleasant memories for me. I am unsure how much this influences my positive experience of Petrucciani’s performance.

My Question: Levitin says that "real music succeeds or fails because of the relationship between the major elements of music - pitch, timbre, key, harmony, loudness, rhythm, meter, and tempo" (Page 75).
Is a relationship between these same elements necessary for music to be successful for other species, or for our interpretation of other species' music as "successful real music"?