[Smt-talk] the impossibility of listening

[Matthew Heap]

Just a quick word on the "ideal listener" idea - I fully acknowledge that no such person exists (perhaps it would be more accurate to write "the idealized listener"...) but I find it a useful construct to help me organize material into two compartments: analysis that can be heard, and analysis that can't.  To use the same example, this "idealized listener" could theoretically hear the individual registral openings in the Berio.  They could not hear the way that Berio takes this idea and elongates it on several levels throughout the movement, simply because it happens over such a long period of time in what can be a fairly dense piece.  Both of these analytical aspects are interesting and deserve space in a theory paper, but I think it might help a non-theorist reader to separate them so that they know what they can actually listen for, and what they can't but may (hopefully) find interesting anyway as a way of looking into the compositional process.

I mostly agree with Nicolas - the more informed you are about the piece, the better your listening experience will be.  On the other hand, I think that a more experiential analysis can tell us a lot about what is really communicated...as I said, I'm not sure that this is an either/or situation.

Matthew Heap
American University

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 1, 2012, at 5:03 PM, Nicolas Meeùs <nicolas.meeus at paris-sorbonne.fr> wrote:

> 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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