What is required for a listener to understand a piece of music?
Does aural understanding depend upon reflective awareness of
musical architecture or large-scale musical structure? Jerrold
Levinson thinks not. In contrast to what is commonly assumed,
Levinson argues that basic understanding of music only requires
properly grounded, present-focused attention, and that virtually
everything in the comprehension of extended pieces of music that
suggests explicit architectonic awareness can be explained without
positing conscious grasp of relationships across broad spans.
Levinson rejects the notion that keeping music's large-scale
form before the mind is somehow essential to fundamental
understanding of it. As evidence, he describes in detail the
experience of listening to a wide range of music. He defends, with
some qualifications, the views of nineteenth-century musician and
psychologist Edmund Gurney, author of The Power of Sound, who
argued that musical comprehension requires only attention to the
evolution of music from moment to moment.
Music theory standardly misapprehends the experience and mindset
of most who know and love classical music, concludes Levinson. His
book is a defense of the passionate and attentive, though
architectonically unconcerned, music listener.
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