[Smt-talk] Fwd: the impossibility of listening

[Craig Weston]

Here's what I think some people find disturbing about the comments in  
question:

They seem to assume a very minimal overlap between what relationships  
we hear and perceive during the experience of listening to music, and  
what relationships we discover when studying the score.

An experiential ("listenerly") analysis of Ives's The Housatonic at  
Stockbridge, for example, would emphasize that we hear two very  
different "teams" in the texture of this music. It is quite possibly  
the most obvious thing we experience in listening to this music. But  
what is it that allows/encourages us to hear the music this way? It's  
all the small details (pitch/intervallic relationships, metric/ 
rhythmic organization, etc) that are so different in the two teams  
that we actually hear them as two different kinds of music co-existing  
in the same piece.

(There are some very rich river metaphors to be explored here, clearly.)

This suggests, to me, that we really do perceive and experience all of  
those nitpicky details of musical relationships that we discuss when  
we do close analysis of a piece. They are, in fact, the objective  
correlates of our experiences of hearing the piece. To divorce either  
(the objective details or the experience of hearing the music) from  
the other seems extremely counterproductive, analytically, to me.


-Craig Weston


********************
Craig Weston
Composer, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Chair, Theory/History/Composition division
School of Music, Theatre, and Dance
Kansas State University


On Oct 31, 2012, at 10:35 PM, Isaac Malitz wrote:

> I don't find the authors' comments to be disturbing.
> In my own research, I am concerned with the analysis of music from  
> the "experiential" side - I'm interested in how music stimulates  
> listeners (from an aesthetic point of view)
> I find my kind of analysis to be fascinating, deep, enlightening in  
> many ways. (It even sheds light on the analysis of musical scores)
> It has its own rigor, although that rigor is different from the  
> rigor of conventional note-centric musical analysis.
> I have also found that my kind of analysis is not popular in the  
> mainstream of musical academicians.
>
> So, the author's approach to discussing opera (via experience rather  
> than notes) seems a natural approach.
> I look forward to reading their book!
>
> [The negative comments I have seen in this thread just seem to  
> express resistance to something that I think is new and good]
>
>
> Isaac Malitz, Ph.D.
> www.OMSModel.com
> imalitz at rdic.com
>
>