[Smt-talk] the impossibility of listening

[Nicolas Meeùs]

The recent exchanges on this topic notwithstanding, I do believe that 
STRUCTURAL analysis properly speaking indeed cannot be extracted from 
listening of attending. Should one conclude that structural analysis is 
unneeded, or pointless, or at least unnecessary? I don't think so: such 
analysis, performed reading the score, can have a tremendous effect on 
one's listening.

Matthew Heap described the "ideal listener" as "one who is hearing the 
piece for the first time". But that is an utopy. The competent hearer is 
competent precisely because she is not hearing the piece for the first 
time. And she is more competent if she read it, and all the more 
competent if she analyzed the score.

While listening to an opera, one extracts a lot of information from 
one's memory of the piece -- and possibly of analyses performed before. 
Jacques Derrida's /Grammatologie/ is about the overevaluation of oral 
language and the devaluation of writing. I think, as odd as it may seem, 
that the aural aspect of (Western) music often is overevaluated and its 
written existence unduly devaluated.

Nicolas Meeùs
Université Paris-Sorbonne




Le 31/10/2012 21:04, Richard Cohn a écrit :
> I just received a copy of A History of Opera, a new book co-authored 
> by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker. In their preface, they write that 
> "at a very early stage... we we decided that this history would 
> contain no musical examples...we wanted to write a book without 
> reference to musical scores." After the usual justification about not 
> wanting to swamp readers with anything that might be challenging to 
> their technical facility, they write the following: "Readers will look 
> in vain for abstract structural analyses of music, or extended 
> descriptions of notes interacting with each other: that kind of 
> information, although relatively easy --- with training --- to extract 
> from a score, is virtually impossible to extract from listening to or 
> attending an opera."
>
> Without further comment on my part, I thought this was a sufficiently 
> provocative set of claims that I would just pass it on to the 
> community for savoring, in advance our congregation in New Orleans.
>
> --Rick Cohn
>
>
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