<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br>On 5 Apr. 09 at 22:22, Dmitri Tymoczko wrote :<br><br><blockquote type="cite">Agreed; we need to distinguish composer's and listener's perspective. It's certainly possible that composers proceed according to some sort of recursive procedure, but that this is not perceptible to listeners. (In fact, if I wanted to defend Schenkerianism, this would probably be the path I took.) On the other hand, it's also reasonable to feel that nonperceptible structure is less important aesthetically.<br></blockquote><br><br>Taken as a general statement, the last sentence above may appear suspicious. Do we have any evidence that the primary means of musical understanding and interpretation (of "hearing") is always aural perception? The relevance of audibility (perceptibility) in making aesthetic judgments belongs in the social/historical domain as much as it does in the music-theoretical (let alone cognitive) domain in the strict sense. Musical literacy, for example, enhances the appreciation of inaudible elements (say, of a deep middleground, a great motivic enlargement, an indistinct texture, or an explication of some sort). Also, to repeat a trite but enduring argument, it is often the awareness of an inaudible presence (and of the inaudibility itself) that is responsible for the overall aesthetic character of a work.<br><br>An alternative strategy for defending Schenkerism, especially at the deeper structural levels where the need for defense is most apparent, can be premised on its hermeneutic (indeed relational-semiotic) power, which in turn requires no recourse to audibility (perceptibility), at least not in principle. Recursion and the concomitant parallelisms, interactions between levels, etc. are instrumental in generating this relationality. <br><br>Ioannis Rammos<br>Doctoral Candidate<br>New York University<br></body></html>