This book is a philosophical study of the relations between hearing and thinking about music. The central problem it addresses is as follows: how is it possible to talk about what a listener perceives in terms that the listener does not recognize? By applying the concepts and techniques of analytic philosophy the author explores the ways in which musical hearing may be described as nonconceptual, and how such mental representation contrasts with conceptual thought. The author is both philosopher and musicologist (...) and uniquely combines the perspectives of both disciplines. Exploring the philosophical questions of mental representation in the relatively neglected, nonverbal domain of music, this study is a major contribution to the philosophical understanding of music perception and cognitive theory. (shrink)

Lerdahl and Jackendoff's Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM) is an important contribution to cognitive science. Jackendoff claims it is a computationalist theory and that the mental representations it postulates are unconscious. Thus GTTM looks to be a kind of cognitive science remote from the folk-psychological. I argue that this picture of GTTM is mistaken: GTTM is at least as much music analysis as cognitive science. Jackendoff's metatheory fails to explain how a listener can tell that a structural description corresponds (...) to the way she hears, how analytically minded listeners can communicate about their hearing, and how a reader of their book can comprehend it. I suggest an alternative construal, on which GTTM's analytical vocabulary functions as a public language and its mental representations are perceptual beliefs. Interesting philosophical problems ensue about knowledge of musical structure and knowledge about what structures one hears. There is a paradox: one wants an analysis to be true to a hearing, yet to be illuminating. Though analysis and hearing coincide in content at an abstract level, they do not coincide in conceptual content. What sort of knowledge then underlies the inference from perceptual to music-analytical representation? I argue that such knowledge is a priori. (shrink)

What does it mean to say that music perception is nonconceptual? As the passages from Meyer and Budd illustrate, one frequently encounters claims of this kind: it is often suggested that there is a level of perceptual contact with, or understanding or enjoyment of, music—one in which listeners typically engage—that does not require conceptualization. But just what does a claim of this sort amount to, and what arguments may be adduced for it? And is all musical hearing nonconceptual, or are (...) there ways of enjoying fugues and sonatas that do involve conceptualizing cadences and contrapuntal devices? If the latter, how are we to conceive of the relationship between conceptual and nonconceptual ways of hearing? (shrink)

Not long ago, I was perusing a commentary on Verdi’s Aida, and came across the following observation: the music toward the end of the Nile Scene, in which Aida and Radames resolve to flee Egypt, is the same as that of Radames’s entrance earlier.

Music analysis raises interesting problems for the theory of mental representation and meaning, and poses new challenges for epistemology. When an analysis purports to show the structure an analyst or reader hears a piece as having, what relation must thereby hold between hearing and analysis, and how does the analyst or reader know that it does? A paradox of analysis arises: if an analysis correctly captures the information content of a hearing, then it is bound to be uninformative. The solution (...) is to distinguish different levels of content, where analysis and hearing share content on one level and diverge on another. The question then arises of how an analyst or reader knows that she hears a piece in the way described by an analysis. The nature of this (apparently a priori) knowledge is an important, and heretofore unappreciated, problem for epistemology. Music analysis is, finally, a fertile ground for investigating the age-old problem of the relation between perception and concepts. (shrink)