[Smt-talk] Beethoven's inner ear

[Dunsby, Jonathan]

I strongly recommend an authoritative, enlightening book which discusses, among many other things, the difference between heard music and imagined music: Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture, Oxford, OUP, 1990.

Jonathan

______________

Jonathan Dunsby
Chair, Music Theory Department
Professor of Music Theory
Eastman School of Music

office 585-274-1550

________________________________
From: Smt-talk [smt-talk-bounces at lists.societymusictheory.org] on behalf of Nicolas Meeùs [nicolas.meeus at scarlet.be]
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 2:01 AM
To: Eytan Agmon; smt-talk at lists.societymusictheory.org
Subject: Re: [Smt-talk] Beethoven's inner ear

Eytan,

It is most striking that you write that Beethoven's scores testify to his inner ear. Why scores, why not "Beethoven's music"? Would the inner hear be about reading scores, rather than hearing music? Is our inner ear an inner eye?
     I'm not being ironic here, this is a question that always puzzled me. To me at least, what my inner ear tells me of music seems quite closer to what I can read than to what I hear, and I have always admired those who do hear what they read, and write what their inner ear tells them – friends composers, for instance, who could write an orchestration without having to change anything after they first heard the result.
    This is why I became a theorist, and not a composer.

Nicolas

Nicolas Meeùs
Paris-Sorbonne University
http://nicolas.meeus.free.fr



Le 10/05/2014 07:33, Eytan Agmon a écrit :
Martin Braun wrote:

“What Beethoven heard via his “inner ear” has never been known to anybody.”

Trivially this is of course true. Our subjective experiences are known only to ourselves. Nevertheless, human beings have always tried to communicate these experiences to others. In Beethoven’s case, I have always assumed that the scores he produced are testimony to what he heard in his “inner ear.”

Eytan Agmon
Department of Music
Bar-Ilan University



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