[Smt-talk] the impossibility of listening

[Nicolas Meeùs]

I used to teach that analysis is about what is not heard, but that any 
analysis is wrong that can't be heard. My students derided me for these 
contradictory statements. What I meant, however, is that analysis is 
about helping to hear what was not heard at first.

The somewhat rousseauan idea of a "virgin" listener, not yet deformed by 
previous hearings of the piece, appears to make sense. Yet, first-time 
listeners usually miss much of the music.

Besides, adding musical examples in a book about the history of opera is 
not necessarily about structural analysis. It may merely help reminding 
previous experiences of the works. The whole idea to deal in text with 
works unheard seems odd to me. But if the music already is known, 
reminding it with musical examples seems the right thing to do. 
Publishers do pretend that their readers cannot read music, but (a) I 
think that more people than that can read music; and (b) that even more 
could read if publishers accepted to include musical examples... And 
with the technical means of today, musical examples should not 
dramatically increase the price of a book.

In short, besides the interest of being more informed about a piece, I 
thing that there is the interest of being made able to use the 
information (memory) already available.

Nicolas Meeùs
Université Paris-Sorbonne



Le 2/11/2012 03:44, Matthew Heap a écrit :
> 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
>

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