by Nicholas Cook
Oxford University Press

I read a bunch more of the book and my frustration got fairly intense. He’s got this huge blind spot. For the most part I’m just really pleased to be reading a critical defense of the listener’s experience but there’s a real serious problem that keeps cropping up.

The main thrust of the book, like I said, is that everyday listening is not analytic, but everyday listening is where music really lives. I entirely agree with that. He says that the 20th-century distrust of popularity was a unique historical phenomenon that arose from the 19th-century cult of the artist and from 20th-century anxiety about political abuse of art, but wasn’t really philosophically defensible. I entirely agree with that, too. But in his attempt to exonerate the lay listener, the author starts saying that no amount of information can “teach” a person to like a piece of music, and that “music appreciation education” is misguided, and maybe even counterproductive. He also says a bunch of stuff about how music criticism can’t be all that relevant to music appreciation because true music appreciation is unmediated. In fact he even has the gall to give an example of how analysis doesn’t affect the underlying unmediated response: he reprints a passage from a Schumann piece that he played on the piano and he points out a canonic effect in it that, he says, he didn’t notice until long after he had learned the piece. His conclusion? The canonic effect isn’t that important to appreciating the piece; being aware of it just offers someone who already knows and likes the piece “an extra dimension of interest.”

Okay, maybe in that one case, but that’s only one relationship in the piece. What if you can’t hear half of the relationships in a piece? What if you aren’t really aware of any of them? Are they all just “extra”? What if a listener doesn’t recognize that a melody appearing in two places is the same melody? What if a listener doesn’t recognize that a melody is even occurring because it’s in the bass? What if a listener is so confused by rubato that they aren’t sure where the beat falls? Isn’t some informational music appreciation education in order? The author doesn’t allow for a listener that oblivious, just as he doesn’t allow that people might not like Beethoven. But in fact that’s who’s out there these days: oblivious, disinterested listeners.

Basically, he doesn’t seem to see the implications of the musical-style-as-language metaphor. The distinction between the “two sides of the musical fabric,” as he calls them – the production side and the reception side – is comparable to the distinction between linguistic theory and ordinary language usage. When he says that to a listener, music isn’t really made up of notes, per se, he’s saying something equivalent to the fact that to a speaker, conversation isn’t made up of words, per se. When you talk, you perceive the meaning of what you’re hearing more immediately than you perceive the individual words, though you can focus your attention on them if you like. The same goes for music and notes. I’m all for it.

But if someone reads to you in a language you don’t speak, you’re not going to easily and naturally understand the meaning. You’re going to hear neither the words nor the meaning – just the sounds. And dead musical styles are just like dead languages. A person faced with music in Latin needs to learn Latin, needs to consciously construct a listening apparatus based on the rules of Latin. This is difficult, just as difficult as learning to speak fluently in another language. And yeah, it might seem “anti-listener” to insist that a listener keep thinking about these unfamiliar rules of syntax and such, it might seem that conscious analysis is being put in the place of intuitive understanding, but that’s just because the listener isn’t fluent yet. It certainly seems unnatural and exhausting to go to a foreign country and try to speak a new language, but that’s to be expected! The author seems to be arguing that enjoying Swedish literature doesn’t necessitate studying all this Swedish syntax, because Swedes never think about that stuff.¹

The subconscious “analysis” performed by the stylistically fluent brain in the course of “unmediated” listening is the element missing from his model. The book has, mysteriously, almost no talk of brain function or of linguistic theory, both of which are obviously relevant to the subject at hand.

There’s an aesthetic mistake, too, in writing off analytical awareness as “extra.” If you read a poem, and then I point out to you that the poem has internal rhymes that you weren’t aware of, will that just be extra goodies for you, or is it in fact a serious part of what makes the experience of the poem? It’s a bizarrely limited view of art, to say that only the unmediated, primal effect is the real one. In my experience, art appreciation is all about the interplay of the mysterious, unmediated level of response and the conscious, analytic, mediated one. Some of that interplay is my choice, and some of it isn’t. But either way, that’s what makes it seem like art. It’s easy, and standard, to say that art appreciation has mostly to do with the complicated, analytical side, but this book fights so hard to have the underdog win that it forgets all the valuable ways that the two can interrelate.

¹ This actually reflects a problem on a larger scale, because people who grow up with classical music, in a real immersive environment – going to the opera all the time, etc. – are fluent in it in a way that other people aren’t. But, in general, people don’t intuitively get that different musical styles are different languages. There’s a strong tendency to think, “everyone hears the same notes so they must hear the same music!” Because the language difference isn’t about different symbols, like with spoken language – it’s really about different rules, and though we know that rules are a big part of spoken language, I think we primarily respond to the fact that different languages have different dictionaries – and a musical style doesn’t have a dictionary, so to most people I think it intuitively seems more like an acquired taste than a language. And so these people who really do speak the language of classical music, who have always lived with it, have a really stubborn way of talking about people who don’t respond to it. It’s like they think that the only possible explanation for the general disinterest in classical music is general bad taste. One of my music professors in college, a really distinguished performer as well as a scholar, actually said once that waning interest in classical music was a result of the coarseness of so much of our culture, of a taste for vulgarity. I tried to say something about how I thought that there was a basic comprehension problem, but I don’t think I made the distinction clear enough. Or what’s even more likely is he didn’t really care what I thought.

I don’t really love the metaphor of music as language, honestly, because it’s only true in certain ways, and I don’t think the broadest form of the metaphor does any real service to understanding music. What I’m talking about here is just the idea that musical comprehension is predicated on an intuitive fluency in the standard gestures and structures of a style. Or, a better way of saying it: to really understand music as a listener, you need to be in pretty close agreement with the composer/performer about what reasonable expectations are, which is the same as saying that you need to have a common understanding of a style. Otherwise you’re just hearing the notes but not what relations they bear to one another. So in this respect a style is like a language. That’s Meyer’s big theory and I buy it.