With and Without Words: Listening with Understanding
Two

I. Unschooled Perception

Variants of the same joke about music are attributed to several public figures, but it may have originated with Abraham Lincoln. Some years after the fact, Henry Pearson recalled an 1860 speaking engagement by Lincoln. The evening’s other attractions included songs from a vocal quartet. When the music concluded, Lincoln put his arm around the shoulders of the quartet leader and said, “Young man, I wish I could sing as well as you. Unfortunately, I know only two tunes. One is ‘Old Hundred,’ and the other isn’t.” The obvious point of the joke is self-deprecation. Lincoln used humor as one of several techniques to make a personal connection to voters as he launched his presidential run.

Taken literally, the joke’s wording raises many issues. Is it possible to appreciate music if you really know so little about it? What are you experiencing if you can only name one tune? And yet there are many people who think that knowledge about music interferes with the purity of the experience. Within the philosophical tradition popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Arthur Schopenhauer, the joke isn’t a joke. It’s advice. Culture perverts rather than enhances the production and reception of music. In the early twentieth century, art critic Clive Bell defended artistic autonomy and recommended that “to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs.” On Bell’s model of response, valid appreciation of the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 requires perception of “the rightness of its forms.” But this perception requires no training. Taken seriously, this know-nothing, “nothing from life” position holds that the imposition of ideas interferes with aesthetic response. Knowing what a musical suite is, and that J.S. Bach’s cello suites originated in the eighteenth century, are irrelevant to perception of the music’s formal coherence and value. Or worse—such knowledge detracts from appreciation.

Against the view that it is best to come to art without any preconceptions and without imposing any classifying categories, I argue that there is always more to music than meets the ear. There is wisdom in William Nye’s jest that Richard Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. The line is often attributed to Mark Twain, who popularized it in his autobiography. Twain quotes Nye in order to underscore the important point that there is such a thing as inappropriate or unjustified boredom. A listener may be incapable of being mistaken about being bored. However, it does not follow that the music is boring. To determine that, one must grasp what is salient, and what is not. In Chapter 1, I offered an analogy between listening to the Bach Prelude and viewing film of a Lamborghini Murciélago sports car. My point was to demonstrate the superficiality of uninformed responses to human designs. Musical style embeds every piece of music in a dense web of historical forces and individual compositional choices. Performance practice adds another layer of choice. Therefore, awareness of stylistic and other historical influences is often required in order to be aware of valuable features of the human designs that we perceive.

Additional background knowledge can be required when music is combined with other art media. Suppose that the student who dismisses the Bach cello music as sawing on a big fiddle encounters the same music again when watching the 2002 film The Pianist. The student is in no position to ask why this music from the early eighteenth century is given such prominence in the middle of a film about the Second World War, nor to ask why the remainder of the music is that of Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. The student literally cannot formulate the relevant questions about history and culture explored in the film. (For example, does the presence of Bach signal a shared European culture that informs the actions of both the Poles and the Germans? Or is it a reminder of the gap between human behavior and the ideals embodied in Bach’s music?) Yet historical and cultural features are objective, real features of things. Someone who cannot think about the cultural location of the Prelude from Cello Suite No. 1 cannot appreciate The Pianist as the film that it is.

These examples invite reflection on why anyone should gain a richer appreciation of art, and why there is a tendency to think less of people who are indifferent to good music. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Caesar warns Antony that he must not trust Cassius (Act 1, Scene 2). To make his point, Caesar uses the simple report that “he hears no music.” In context, Caesar is saying that Cassius does not appreciate the arts. But is this really a reason to be suspicious of anyone? Because of a lack of appreciation of music? That seems unfair. Like so many human capacities, different people are born with different attunements towards music. Some people are preoccupied with it. At the other extreme, some people suffer from congenital amusia—they simply cannot recognize the musicality of musical sound. There is nothing wrong with their hearing; amusia is found in people with perfect hearing. Yet where others perceive beautiful melodies, amusiacs hear annoying, unpatterned noise. In a case study collected by Oliver Sacks, a woman describes her perception of music as, “If you were in my kitchen and threw all the pots and pans on the floor, that’s what I hear.” Opera sopranos sound “like screaming.” Obviously, the problem is not in the ears but rather in the music processing that takes place in the brain. The consequence is a congenital perceptual failure. Perhaps Cassius had amusia. In that case, his lack of interest in music cannot be interpreted as indifference to culture.

Because this book is a philosophical investigation and not a study in the neurophysiology of perception, I call attention to amusia in the spirit of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s advice: “The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.” My particular purpose is to present a reminder that, whatever else it is, listeners do not hear music as the music that it is unless they perceive it with understanding. I suspect that no music lover wishes to develop amusia. But if not, why do so many music lovers endorse a partial amusia? For that is the result when listening is not informed by appropriate descriptions and concepts.

II. Purism

The issue of what and how much listeners ought to know is historically connected to the ideal of pure instrumental music. A lot of Bach’s instrumental music, such as the Prelude from the Cello Suite No. 1, is categorized as pure music. Anyone reading this book is likely to recognize that modern culture places an extremely high value on such music. Furthermore, sophisticated music lovers are expected to appreciate pure music and to prefer it to other music. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call someone who think this way a “purist.”

Purity contrasts with heterogeneity, mixture, contamination, and pollution. Purism makes no sense unless we can say what contaminates music and makes it impure. The answer might seem obvious: it is impure if we add anything that isn’t music. For example, suppose I decide to listen to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, and I play it while viewing the media software program on my computer. The software includes a visualization program. When it plays sounds without associated video, the media program “interprets” the tempo and intensity of the music with a kaleidoscope of colored geometric patterns. In an earlier era, the Disney film Fantasia provided frolicking fawns and centaurs to illustrate Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony, but used abstract geometric figures in motion to accompany Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. As explained by music critic Deems Taylor in a book published to coincide with the film’s release, Bach’s keyboard music is inherently different from Beethoven’s sixth symphony. Beethoven provided a descriptive program linking each symphonic movement to an event, so that the fourth movement is to be understood as a musical presentation of a thunderstorm. In contrast, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue “bore no title . . . evoked no definite action, told no story.” It was, therefore, “abstract music” that called for “abstract representation.” Whether we call it “pure” or “abstract” or “absolute,” music like Bach’s Toccata and Fugue is supposed to contrast with music that tells a story or represents a definite action. More generally, music is regarded as impure whenever it represents or symbolizes anything outside itself. In short, music is impure whenever the listening experience has a program—a text providing directions for narrative interpretation—or some other means of conveying definite extra-musical ideas. Except for the few songs that restrict the vocalizing to nonsense syllables and scatting, songs are therefore impure. Opera, too. For similar reasons, ballet and other music-accompanied dance is impure art.

Given this outlook, the rise of purism in nineteenth-century Europe elevated some music at the expense of most music. For purists, Wagner was completely wrong to promote music’s supporting role in a Gesamtkunstwerk, a mixed-media work. The Wagnerian ideal is merely a composer-sanctioned, high-class version of the fawns and centaurs in the Fantasia treatment of Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” The geometric shapes attached to Bach’s music in Fantasia are no better. The visualization program bundled into my computer’s media software merely automates the process. They all contaminate the purity of the experience by providing extra-musical reference.

Judging by patterns of radio programming and sales figures in the music industry—and, today, we must add patterns of downloading of recorded music—purism is an ideal with few practitioners. Instrumental music is not popular compared with music with lyrics. The most popular instrumental music is movie soundtrack music, which listeners associate with specific stories, characters, and actions. Yet even here, the all-time most popular soundtrack recording, Titanic, sold twelve copies for every copy of the most popular instrumental soundtrack, Star Wars. Sales of Titanic were driven by the presence of a theme song, with lyrics sung by Céline Dion. Turning to classical music, one of the biggest sellers of the past twenty years is the London Sinfonietta’s recording of Henryk Górecki’s third symphony, a work for orchestra and soprano vocalist. However, its sales are less than half of those of Star Wars. Norman Lebrecht estimates that a single pop group, the Beatles, outsold all classical recordings produced in the history of recorded music. These patterns confirm Frank Zappa’s cynical advice to would-be composers: “we live in a society where instrumental music is irrelevant—so if a guy expects to earn a living by providing musical entertainment for folks in the USA, he’d better figure out how to do something with a human voice plopped on it.” Zappa recognizes that there is limited appreciation of pure music.

At the risk of caricature, the purist looks at these patterns of musical taste and concludes that most people do not appreciate music as music. Most people have the listening skills of the uninformed student who regards the Bach Prelude as nothing but sawing on a big fiddle.

Without being hasty in taking sides for or against purism, its core idea generates an interesting puzzle. And it is not an issue restricted to a subset of classical music. If the musical purity of Mstislav Rostropovich’s performance of Bach’s Prelude is violated by interpreting it visually, as many Bach lovers feel about Yo-Yo Ma’s film The Music Garden (2005), then the objection is no less valid about imposing Fantasia-style animation on Jaco Pastorius’s version of “Donna Lee.” However, if a purist objects to visual interpretation, then it seems equally objectionable to provide verbal descriptions of the music. Descriptions and labels can be as “polluting” as pictures. But then how can we endorse listening that is informed by descriptive language, such as “Baroque prelude” and “an electric bass arrangement of a bebop piece for alto saxophone”? Don’t they also constitute impure intrusions into the experience of the music? Consider Jacques Barzun’s claim that a piece of instrumental music follows a program as soon as the composer thinks of it as an overture, or as a fantasia or fantasy, as in a Symphonie fantastique. Even if it is unclear whether the music is “about” something non-musical, its composition is controlled by ideas supplied by language use, and appreciative listening is language-dependent.

In response to these points, purists divide into two camps. Some art lovers defend the extreme view that the pure arts of abstract painting and absolute music are best appreciated with maximum receptivity. For them, pure responses are incompatible with educated responses. Viewing and listening are spoiled by the imposition of technical vocabulary, classifications, and descriptions that interfere with the purity of their perceptual response. However, there is an opposing position that I’ll call sophisticated purism. Sophisticated purists do not endorse ignorance. Genuine appreciation of Bach’s Prelude responds to it abstractly and not representationally, but appreciation is enhanced by the information that it is Baroque music and that the prelude is a kind of fantasia with a free rhythm (and not, by way of contrast, a rondo-form gavotte with a fixed dance rhythm). It might also be important to think about the fact that it is one of the earliest solo works written for the cello, just as I suggested of Pastorius’s version of “Donna Lee” that it is important to understand that it is an electric bass arrangement of a bebop piece for the alto saxophone.

So we face a dilemma. On the one hand, there is a case to be made that a commitment to the importance of pure music is inconsistent with our practice of encouraging the acquisition of a technical vocabulary to talk about it. On the other hand, if classificatory and descriptive language is permissible, where do we draw the line? If the point of the technical talk is to guide perception of the music, why isn’t it equally valid to use lyrics and visual cues to guide listening? Whether my visit to the symphony is informed by talk of toccatas and fugues, by a printed musical score, or by a visual story about centaurs, something non-musical is guiding my understanding and altering the experience. So we should applaud Yo-Yo Ma’s attempt to make Bach more accessible by commissioning films that illustrate the Bach Cello Suites. To be plausible, sophisticated purism must provide reasonable criteria for distinguishing between guidance that facilitates listening and intrusions that detract from it. As a step in that direction, we must explore the issue of how language guides thought and perception.

III. The Intersection of Language and Thought

As in Chapter 1, I think it helps to begin with a topic other than music. Consider the students who study at Harvard University. How good are they? Reflecting on his career as a professional philosopher, Robert Paul Wolff challenges the myth that Harvard and other top-ranked colleges are highly selective, with a student body comprised of the best of the best. Wolff observes,

Wolff was not teaching English. He was teaching philosophy. However, in order to succeed in philosophy, students must be sensitive to subtleties of language structure. To consider a simple case, consider the difference that arises by switching the word order of “my mother’s cousin’s husband” to “my cousin’s mother’s husband.” These two phrases mention the same three relationships, yet they usually refer to completely different people. It is unlikely that anyone could even conceive of this difference in the absence of words to describe them. Wolff is interested in logical relationships and he is making the parallel point that there are logical distinctions and relationships that cannot be understood by someone who is insensitive to linguistic subtleties. In short, some concepts and some cognition are not available in the absence of the possession of language use.

As an example of Wolff’s point, consider the following sentences, which are very similar. Yet they make radically different commitments about the upcoming evening.

• I will go to tonight’s symphony concert if they are playing Beethoven and Glinka.
• I won’t go to the symphony tonight unless they are playing Beethoven or Glinka.

In the first sentence, the presence of both composers in the concert program is sufficient for attending. It leaves it open whether the speaker will be equally willing to go upon learning that the concert program includes some of Frank Zappa’s chamber music. The second sentence says that presence of at least one of the two is necessary. However, unlike the first, it does not commit the speaker to going to the concert if Mikhail Glinka’s Spanish Overture No. 1 is being performed. It merely says that the speaker won’t attend without music by one of those two composers. Zappa won’t be enough.

I want to be very clear about the point of this example. Someone who does not grasp the difference between “unless” and “if” is doomed to confusion concerning the logical difference between necessity and sufficiency when relating one set of circumstances to another. More importantly, neither of these logical relationships can even be thought by someone who does not have language in which to express them. (Obviously, I do not mean that a language lacking the specific word “if” is incapable of expressing the sufficiency relationship. Different languages have different expressions for this relationship and some languages, English included, have multiple expressions for it.)

With music, the parallel issue is whether there are any musical relationships that become evident only for listeners who employ appropriate vocabulary. To put it another way, does my lack of a descriptive vocabulary ever demonstrate that I do not adequately comprehend the music that I hear? Are there important musical features and relationships that cannot be heard by those who cannot describe them? I think so, and I propose that some of them are surprisingly basic to our engagement with music.

Let’s begin with a simple example that supports the necessity of acquiring some descriptive language. Consider the terms “tuning” and “playing.” As verbs, they classify actions. But classifying actions involves more than describing what can be directly perceived in a situation. As a college instructor, I watch for hand motions from students that signal a desire to speak. Sometimes when I turn to a student who is waving her hand and call on her to speak, she will decline and will explain that she was merely stretching her arm. In other cases, the same motion is a request to speak. Although the visible behavior is identical, the actions of stretching and signaling are very different actions. Similarly, audiences who arrive at a concert before it begins will sometimes hear the musicians tuning their instruments. This action is not to be confused with playing music. It is an action taken in preparation for playing music, so that none of the musicians will be out of tune. Yet there are times when some members of some audiences cannot tell the difference. There is more to the difference than meets the ears.

For proof that the difference is not self-evident, locate either the audio or film recording of The Concert for Bangladesh, a charity concert staged by former-Beatle George Harrison in 1971. Listen to the concert’s opening music ensemble, a sitar and sarod duet by Indian musicians Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. After Shankar asks the American crowd to listen respectfully, the three stringed instruments produce a short passage of sound. When they stop, much of the crowd applauds. “Thank you,” Shankar says. “If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you’ll enjoy the playing more.” The quartet then plays the featured piece of music, “Bangla Dhun,” a lengthy improvisation based on a Bengali folk tune. (I return to the topic of high culture poaching folk melodies a bit later in this chapter.)

Was Shankar’s joke a prepared response to Western audiences who misapplied the concept of playing music to the situation of tuning music? Given the laughter it incites in his ensemble, the joke was probably spontaneous. Either way, the joke presupposes that the audience understands the distinction between tuning and playing. Yet the concept of tuning is a complex complement to the idea of playing. To possess a concept of tuning, one must understand the need to tune some instruments together, which requires prior understanding of how ensembles can be in tune and out of tune, together with the idea that some instruments do not hold their tuning. Furthermore, tuning is a preparatory action. In tuning, the sounds are not produced for the audience. In playing, they are. Someone who does not grasp how tuning relates to playing does not know which sounds matter in the relationship between musician and audience. And someone who does not know this is not really hearing music when it is played. There is such a thing as getting it wrong when presented with music, and it is safe to say that not understanding whether the music has even started counts as getting it wrong.

Returning explicitly to the issue about language acquisition, the point is not about the actual word “tuning.” Some musicians might tune without using that word. They might “harmonize” or “get it together” or even “get ready.” The point is that the language picks out a highly specialized action that exists only in relation to other actions, and that it is not possible for us to attain this level of conceptual specificity without language. Tuning and playing are a mere starting point. Most musical cultures make a further distinction between practicing and performing, and so on with many subtle distinctions. With respect to language, then, musical understanding is very much like philosophical understanding.

To borrow from Wittgenstein again, suppose a dog hears a sound at the door. The dog believes that his owner has come home. But, Wittgenstein wonders, “can he also believe his master will come the day after tomorrow?” No, the dog cannot think this thought, because the dog cannot encode a thought with that level of complexity. And the dog cannot formulate that thought because it cannot combine symbols in a language. If Wittgenstein’s point is not persuasive, change “the day after tomorrow” to “the second Wednesday of July” and tell me that dogs can form the thought expressed by that phrase. We cannot pinpoint a particular day in the future without the complex clauses that language encodes. The same holds, I have argued, for any informed response to a musical ensemble’s activity of tuning. Our musical lives contain many kinds of musical activity, and it is often the case that audible musicality is insufficient to guide the kind of attention demanded by a particular situation. A simple word can rely on complex systems of relationships. As “Wednesday” refers to a location within a seven-day week and “July” refers to a month in a cyclical calendar, “tuning” and “playing” refer to different actions within a culture of music performance.

My emphasis on the words “tuning” and “playing” and their corresponding concepts is unusual. The topic of language’s role in music perception is more commonly approached by focusing on terminology for musical structures and relationships. This terminology might seem to be the real issue on the grounds that it describes the music rather than the musicians and their activity, as I have done. However, the same point emerges when we examine musical structure. For example, the concept of the dominant seventh chord of the C major scale is a technical, language-dependent relationship that only arises within a particular musical practice. A chord that combines a dominant triad with the requisite fourth note— the seventh above the root—is employed by musicians in many musical cultures. However, this combination of notes exemplifies the specific relationship described as “the dominant seventh chord of the C major scale” only if the musical culture employs diatonic harmony. Better yet, this chord can be conceptualized as a major/minor seventh chord only if the culture has adopted the modern European system of equal temperament. (By analogy, the act of grabbing someone’s arm is only assault and battery in the context of a legal culture that recognizes the appropriate language-dependent concepts.) Lacking the appropriate classificatory concepts that make sense of a system of well-tempered scales, there is no major/minor seventh chord in medieval church music or Hindustani classical music.

My suspicion is that language describing musical activity is more important than technical description of musical structures. For example, if Wagner is correct in the following claim about Beethoven’s ninth symphony, then its appreciation requires conceptual specificity, which in turn seems to require quite a lot of technical vocabulary. But, as Stephen Davies wonders, is it really all that technical? Wagner writes,

How much of this language applies only to music? “Melody” does, in its central meaning, but what of “motives,” “Adagio,” and “Allegro”? But this last pair is merely foreign, not technical. They are merely the Italian for “slow” and “fast,” respectively. If the musical experience requires a language-dependent classification of tempo, then we require extra-musical vocabulary extended to music. Similarly, “motive” is general in its application—so much so that my Oxford Dictionary of Music contains no entry for it. Still, I suppose there are those who might need to be clued in that it means a distinctive phrase. Wagner is saying that the important musical phrases in the fast sections of Beethoven’s multi-section works are variations of melodies from that work’s slow section. Wagner is directing us to listen for an underlying, uniting structure. That is an interesting empirical hypothesis, but it’s certainly not an idea that is technical in being music-specific. Wagner is appealing to a general principle of unity of artistic form. I can teach you the relevant concept by examining poetry or by showing you a movie that has two scenes that share parallel editing. It’s a point about the way that repetitions of local structures provide unity to complex works of human imagination, and not a technical point about music.

My argument comes down to this. There might be some highly specialized situations in which an appropriate response to music requires technical terminology that picks out features unique to music. However, there is no situation in which this terminology is sufficient, because the specialized terminology does not get a foothold unless we also have terms like “tuning,” “practicing,” and “playing,” which are not unique to music. Socrates had it right when he asked how anyone could believe in flute playing while denying the existence of flute players. In the absence of terms and concepts about music making, the experience of musicality is less than an experience of music.

IV. Knowing-That and Knowing-How

In this section I will clarify the proposal that appreciation requires more than technical knowledge of the kind exemplified by the concept of the dominant seventh chord of the C major scale. I am arguing that additional language-based concepts are required. However, I am not saying that language acquisition is sufficient. For reasons explained earlier, I think that appreciative listening depends on a pre-existing ability to grasp the musicality of sound. After all, individuals with congenital amusia do not overcome the condition by acquiring new language skills. The opposite is the case: the amusia prevents them from acquiring that language and thus knowing the music.

The issue, then, is the relationship between two modes of knowing: conceptual knowing-that and practical knowing-how. When I know that something is the case, I have a fact at my disposal. For example, I know that some runners can go a mile in less than four minutes. I also know that Roger Bannister was the first human to do so in a timed run. However, I do not myself know how to accomplish a four-minute mile. In theory, I know how—one simply runs fast. But that is merely a re-description of my initial case of knowing-that: I know that it can be done, and I know how fast one must run in order to accomplish it. However, genuine knowing-how is a matter of being able to do something at will. I cannot run a four-minute mile. In short, knowing-that does not guarantee knowing-how. An individual with congenital amusia might memorize the fact that a melody is a distinctive sequence of pitched sounds, and that Beethoven used variants of the same melody in three different works—in the song “Gegenliebe,” in the “Chorale Fantasy” of 1808, and as the “Ode to Joy” theme of the ninth symphony. Yet the amusia prevents the application of the knowledge. It remains merely theoretical if one cannot say, for instance, “Here it is!” at appropriate times when hearing recordings of each work. But if it remains merely theoretical, knowing numerous facts about that melody does not constitute musical understanding of that melody.

To summarize this point in the standard jargon of philosophers, possession of relevant theoretical, propositional knowledge about music is necessary but not sufficient for practical knowledge of how to hear it. Many things are insuffi cient for achieving a goal, yet required. Having tens of millions of dollars does not guarantee that I can buy a painting by Johannes Vermeer. They are few in number and it is quite possible that none of them will be on the art market. Nonetheless, having tens of millions is certainly required to buy one, should one want one. Analogously, perhaps you never intend to listen to the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 or the Shankar–Khan performance of “Bangla Dhun.” But if you do, you must know that certain things are true of the music if you are to have any chance of knowing how to listen to it.

Furthermore, the Shankar–Khan example illustrates that someone can know how to listen to music without knowing how to listen to all music. I am not talking about the etiquette of concert attendance. Knowing how to listen to Shankar’s music requires knowing that the tuning of instruments serves a particular purpose, that sitars and sarods are among them, that their tuning normally takes place on stage as a prelude to the performance, and that the sounds coming from the instruments have different purposes during tuning and playing. Appreciating music requires much more than hearing structural relationships among notes. It requires understanding when sounds are intended for an audience, and when they are not, and attending accordingly.

These judgments about human agency depend on complex judgments about time relationships. Earlier, I introduced Wittgenstein’s example of a dog’s inability to form expectations about the day after tomorrow. It illustrates that our experience of time is influenced by language. Recognition and evaluation of human agency is another place where concepts about time relationships shape our response. A human form of life is fundamentally connected to our ability to think about complex relationships among past, present, and future events. Our musical lives are no exception.

Once again, the central point is best understood by looking at something other than music. Our emotional lives are shaped by our judgments about what others are doing to us and what we think we are doing to them. Philosophers from Aristotle through the present have emphasized that our emotional states don’t simply occur, as changes that just happen to happen. We are not the passive victims of our own feelings of grief or joy. We are the agents of our emotions, because we are the sources of the judgments that inform them. Judgments about the future can be crucial. As Robert Solomon observes, “emotions include intentions for the future.” Emotions direct action. For example, anger and embarrassment dispose us toward very different patterns of action. Anger encourages violence, whereas embarrassment encourages concealment. Suppose you catch me eating the leftover cheesecake that you put in the workplace refrigerator. My embarrassment involves more than blushing and feeling a certain way. I am disposed to try to hide my inappropriate behavior. I thrust the cheesecake back into the refrigerator and hurriedly reach for my own lunch. If I think it’s too late and I’ve been caught red-handed, I stammer out an apology. But these responses are irrational unless I believe that your anger might lead you to tell people, thus disrupting my future interactions with people who know that I steal cheesecake.

I’ll delay additional discussion of connections between music and emotion until Chapter 3. For now, the point is that emotions reflect our sense of how the past and the present are linked to a possible future. Like Wittgenstein’s example of believing that an event will take place on a future date, the embarrassed thief illustrates that a seemingly automatic response can reflect the guidance of language. I can’t be embarrassed about stealing your cheesecake unless I know the language of possessive pronouns and the verb “steal” (or some equivalent) as my entry into thinking about property ownership and its violation. Furthermore, you will not be angry about my stealing from you unless your perception is informed by parallel, language-dependent thinking.

To avoid a standard misunderstanding, I will address an objection. It is often argued that emotions are universal human traits, and therefore embarrassment cannot depend on language use. But that objection misses the point, which is that language extends the innate capacity into situations that only exist in a particular, complex world of social interaction. My point is that, similarly, a huge gulf separates an infant’s innate capacity to perceive simple rhythms and melodies from the appreciation of improvisational interplay between Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan during “Bangla Dhun.” Even here, “improvisational interplay” describes human agency. The universality of emotion does not determine which episodes of eating cheesecake will produce embarrassment, and the universality of music does not provide us all that we need to appreciate music.

V. Four Dimensions of Music

Here are four very different dimensions of music.

• Local musical properties.
• Large-scale structures.
• Aesthetic properties.
• Historical relationships.

This list is not intended to be exhaustive. It merely distin guishes four kinds of properties that are important in the experience of music. For each category, we can identify cases where language acquisition informs knowing how to hear them in music. In other words, I have selected these four categories because each one illustrates that language acquisition can be a necessary condition for experiencing the music with basic understanding.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying every aspect of musical understanding is influenced by language. If that were the case, then informed listeners would never experience musical ineffability. Yet ineffability is common, a point that is explored in Chapter 4. Furthermore, it is obvious that a great deal of musical perception operates independently from language acquisition. After all, most pre-linguistic children can synchronize movements to a rhythm. And let’s not forget that mockingbirds can copy the songs of other bird species. They also mimic other distinctive pitch sequences, such as car alarms. So it is clear that perceiving and remembering distinctive sonic patterns is sometimes independent of language use.

This section focuses on language and local musical properties. I will concentrate on the way that music unfolds in time. Local musical properties are local in the sense that, at any given time, we can directly perceive their presence or absence. This category includes melodies and rhythms. To perceive these, we must attend to a sequence of sounds. It must be perceived as both changing (for without change there is no difference that will support differentiation) and patterned (for without pattern the sequence is not distinctive). Yet we cannot take notice of auditory change unless we can have experiences that persist beyond the present instant of time. Rather obviously, a capacity to form short-term memories underlies perception of local musical properties such as a melody or a rhythm. We must store relevant experiences in our memory long enough to compare that memory with what comes next.

For example, perception of musical rhythm requires awareness of re-occurring stresses within a pattern of sound. It therefore requires awareness of more than whatever is simultaneously before us at just one moment. To hear a rhythm one must experience a change, remember it, recognize that it is repeated, and then anticipate its continuation. (Psychologists debate the precise length of the fraction of a second that is experienced as an immediate moment in which change is perceived, but the answer to that question should not impact the philosophical point I’m advancing.) To borrow a point from Jerrold Levinson, the experience of music requires a capacity for quasi-hearing, which is the capacity “of seeming to hear a span of music” by knowing how to attend to a connected series of moment-to-moment changes. Quasi-hearing is the capacity of knowing how to “aurally synthesize . . . music surrounding any present instant” within the musical sequence.

Quasi-hearing is important because it generates the experience of a connected flow of coherent sound. Without quasi-hearing, we would hear moment-to-moment sonic changes but we would never hear melodies. We would not hear beginnings, endings, and transitions. For example, one of the most memorable moments in Mikhail Glinka’s Spanish Overture No. 1 is the entrance of castanets in triple time around the three-minute mark. Someone with amusia can hear a change at this point—after all, an additional, distinctive noise enters the mix of sound. Someone who hears music hears something more. She hears a pause that signals a transitional moment, followed by a tempo increase and the entrance of rapid percussion with a distinctive rhythm. Since the same sound waves reach both listeners, the experiential difference depends on what the second listener knows how to do, which is how to group the sounds and to anticipate further sounds as a result.

However, it appears that listening requires the guidance of descriptive language as soon as the music takes on any degree of complexity, employing structures and relationships that take us beyond very simple cases of quasi-hearing. To borrow from Stephen Davies, most music that’s worth hearing calls upon our ability to discriminate among musical properties with “a higher order of complexity: themes, developments, modulations, harmonic resolutions, and so on.” For example, there is a huge difference between being aware that music is returning to a familiar melody and being aware that the music has arrived at the recapitulation in a first-movement sonata form. The latter awareness involves expectations and understanding that the former lacks. Yet it seems to me that someone who is literally unable to articulate the concept of the arrival of the recapitulation has about as much chance of forming the mental expectations appropriate to that event as my dog has of forming the thought that I will return home from my next conference trip on the second Sunday of the month. Again, it is not a matter of specific words and phrases. Someone who does not know the phrase “the arrival of the recapitulation” might have a different, equally appropriate description.

This last point extends to awareness of many local musical properties. If a melodic gestalt is a local property, then so are many of the standard means of providing a development of it. Many heavy metal guitarists have sufficient training to talk about their reliance on inversions and retrograde variations in their music solos. Granted, few metal fans know those words. However, Davies notes, the level of discrimination required to perceive thematic retrograde and inversion requires some ability to label the difference. Davies does not use the example of heavy metal, but even here we have an audience full of people who hear the difference between a coherent guitar solo and a random spewing of notes. An appreciative fan might talk about places where the tune goes backwards and then upside down, or employ some other equally apt description. However, without some words to describe it, the fans are not going to possess the foundational concept of a sequence that retains its internal relationship despite radical perceptual change. Without this sort of practiced, linguistically guided understanding, listening to most instrumental music must involve extraordinarily superficial perception. Such listening might permit someone to recognize that the “Ode to Joy” theme isn’t the same as “The Star Spangled Banner,” but there will be little or no awareness of the specifics that make them different. The listener’s experience will be as uninformed and unjustified as that of concert-goers who applaud the tuning of a sitar.

VI. History, Style, and Aesthetic Properties

Listening becomes more complex when we consider historical and aesthetic properties and their interconnections.

Historical properties are essentially bound up with the time and place of an object’s origination. Authorship is a prime example. It is an important historical property of musical works. Earlier, I mentioned Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Some scholars suspect that Bach was not the composer. Among other clues, the structure and harmonies are much too simple. Or, if by Bach, it was a violin piece that someone else transcribed for organ. Cases like these remind us that an artwork’s historical properties are not immediately apparent. In contrast, aesthetic properties are elements of the experience and so they directly affect the quality of an experience. Beauty and ugliness are central examples. There is also the stately quality of the Toccata and Fugue, the gracefulness of so much of W.A. Mozart’s music, or the concision of the Ramones’ song “Teenage Lobotomy.” Because the stateliness and concision are perceivable, one might conclude that aesthetic properties differ from historical ones in being experientially self-evident. However, as with historical properties, it’s possible to overlook or misperceive aesthetic properties.

Kendall Walton offers the example of piano music. Some piano music is aesthetically delicate. Examples include the piano compositions of Claude Debussy that he described as “hammerless.” There is also the early piano music of Erik Satie. However, pianos are tuned percussion instruments. They produce sound because pressure on the keys drives hammers against taught strings. To someone with congenital amusia, there is nothing delicate about any piano music. It all sounds pretty much the way it sounds to me when the cat walks across the keyboard. Nonetheless, Satie’s three Gymnopédies are frequently described as delicate. The delicacy of piano music is relative to the medium. This delicacy is an aesthetic property that is apparent only through comparative listening, through contrast with other piano music. Although the playing of New Orleans legend James Booker is a marvel, it has never been described as delicate. (I recommend lending an ear to Booker’s romp though Chopin’s “Minute Waltz.”) Again, the point is not whether one uses the actual term “delicate.” It is that language use is a prerequisite for the conceptual fine-tuning that underlies the appropriate, complex comparative judgments that inform the aesthetic experience of delicate piano music.

Returning to my claim that historical authorship has aesthetic relevance, consider these facts. Some of Dmitri Shostakovich’s music contains the progression D, E flat, C, B natural. In German musical notation, the sequence is D, Es, C, H, which can be read as “D. Sch.” Because Shostakovich was a Soviet composer, the motif is recognized as one of many means by which he inserted slyly subversive elements into music that was expected to communicate social harmony and progress to the culturally illiterate masses. Appearances of the motif in Shostakovich’s tenth symphony and first cello concerto invite knowledgeable listeners to interpret these passages as denoting the composer and as evidence that he is saying something about his own life. The motif gives his music an aesthetic expressiveness it would otherwise lack. Thus, historical location shapes meanings, which in turn generate aesthetic properties, such as expressive properties that would otherwise not arise.

Generalizing, many aesthetic properties are only perceived by listeners who know about a musical work’s history. Getting an aesthetic property right is frequently a matter of being aware of the music’s real history. It can be a matter of knowing who wrote it, and when, and which musical resources were available in that time and place. This information often conflicts with relationships suggested by the sound of the music. Peter Van der Merwe cites the old joke—which he remarks is “not entirely a joke”—that most Spanish music is composed beyond the borders of Spain. Musical styles do not stay put in their place of origin.

With this in mind, consider a case in which musical originality or novelty is one of a work’s aesthetic virtues. All music is derivative in some way from other music, and thus any music’s degree of originality is as much a matter of aesthetic as of historical judgment. However, ignorance about history can create a false impression of novelty or its close cousins, incoherence and weirdness. Here, aesthetic properties are shaped by historical ones. How much novelty is there in Glinka’s Spanish Overture No. 1? If you’ve never heard Spanish music, the entrance of castanets must seem extremely novel. Similarly, ignorance of the melodic origins of the music’s main theme will make it seem novel, too. However, it is the jota aragonesa, a Spanish tune that Glinka transposed from guitar strings to plucked orchestral strings. These elements of Glinka’s composition are appropriations that place it in the category of the exotic. Granted, there is an element of novelty in his decision to orchestrate Spanish folk music and thus bring it into the mainstream of Western music. In this respect, there is far less originality in Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier’s España of 1883, for it exhibits the influence of Glinka’s overture of 1845. To turn it around and to hear it as Glinka borrowing from Chabrier would result in an underestimation of Glinka’s degree of originality. Chabrier may have heard peasants playing the jota aragonesa during his 1882 visit to Spain, but one does not hear España correctly if one praises Chabrier’s originality in transplanting the folk tune and rhythm into an orchestral work. The error would be something like watching the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? because you’re a George Clooney fan, and then praising Ethan and Joel Coen for their originality in making a film about an escape from a Mississippi chain gang. Better-informed viewers understand that the film reflects a tradition of earlier movies, most notably I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Preston Sturges’s film Sullivan’s Travels (1941). While a superficial viewing of O Brother is not worthless, it will be a very partial response to the aesthetic complexity that actually emerges from the cultural interplay of several historically embedded artworks.

Awareness of a complex chain of causality—Spanish folk music to Chabrier by way of Glinka—is literally unthinkable in the absence of appropriate linguistic resources. For example, in English we convey the proper relationships with prepositions. Furthermore, one ought to possess the concepts of folk music and of musical orchestration, and have some sense of the cultural divide at play in that distinction. A listener’s ignorance of influence will result in aesthetic error. Thus Van der Merwe makes the point that William Byrd’s “The Bagpipe and the Drone” from The Battle sounds like Spanish music, but isn’t. It is simply old enough to employ musical cadences that subsequently fell out of favor everywhere except Spain.

Here is a different example of how an aesthetic property can emerge from historical origins. Glinka’s Spanish Overture No. 1 merges two regional styles. Its sonata form stems from his formal training in “classical” style as regularized by composers of Joseph Haydn’s generation. The tunes, the jota rhythm, and the percussion of castanets are adopted from music that Glinka heard in Spain in 1845. Although many classical music lovers will see nothing special about this poaching from “folk” culture, there was no cultural inevitability at work here. The overture inspired a long tradition of “Spanish” caprices. If Glinka had not gone to Spain, many works by later composers might not exist. To consider a parallel example from popular music, one of Johnny Cash’s biggest hits was “Ring of Fire.” As recorded by Cash, the song’s structure, rhythm, and core instrumentation are standard country and western. But the opening moments of Cash’s 1963 recording are stylistically surprising. It begins with a trumpet fanfare in the style of Mexican mariachi music. A short fanfare reappears three times. Expanded, it replaces Cash’s voice when he should deliver the second verse. So the arrangement is a bizarre juxtaposition of the music of Memphis and Guadalajara. Within its historical context, this merger of styles is as daring as Glinka’s overture. However, it can be very difficult to experience their novelty. What is novel in its originating context is hard to hear with fresh “ears” a decade, generation, or century later. Either way, fresh or dated, a musical innovation is only experienced as original and inventive against a background of conceptually informed expectations.

Although such examples are all around us, there is resistance to the idea that background knowledge is needed to appreciate the aesthetic delicacy of Satie’s three Gymnopédies. However, if such knowledge is irrelevant, then it must also be wrong to admire a musical performer’s virtuosity. Without reference to causality, there is no aesthetic relevance to the difference between a sequence of sounds that is difficult to perform and a sequence that sounds as if it is difficult to execute. Listen to the fluid, rapid harpsichord solo that begins a minute and a half into the Beatles’ “In My Life.” But it isn’t any such thing. It’s an electronic manipulation of music performed at half speed and an octave lower on a Steinway piano. “In My Life” displays musical virtuosity, but not keyboard virtuosity. I defy anyone to form the thoughts required to grasp and appreciate the studio virtuosity displayed in “In My Life” and the rest of Rubber Soul if the aesthetic response is restricted to the concepts available to a pre-verbal toddler.

VII. Music Is Art, Revisited

Purists, I have observed, are of two sorts. First, some purists endorse Bell’s thesis that pure appreciation requires ignorance or, somehow, a withholding of all acquired concepts. Second, some purists endorse the necessity of acquiring music-specific language and concepts as a condition for listening to pure music with basic understanding. This second, more sophisticated purism requires a distinction between musical and non-musical concepts and terminology. Some music is pure music and can be understood—indeed, is properly understood—without attaching descriptions or concepts that give it extra-musical significance. We might point to Beethoven’s variation number 32 in Opus 120, a set entitled 33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli. Because listeners ought to think about it and to respond to it as a fugal treatment of a theme that another composer supplied, an appropriate response to these two and a half minutes of music demands a relatively complex cluster of concepts. Although the sophisticated purist challenges the hardcore purist by observing that a basic understanding of the variation number 32 requires guidance from language, music remains pure because it is not about anything except other music. There is no program and nothing like the animation that Fantasia imposes on Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

However, absolute music is a highly specialized category. Above all, we should resist thinking of it as the default category that is present until a composer adds extra-musical content to music. As I noted earlier, the vast majority of people don’t care much for “pure” music. That’s not surprising. Most people don’t care for abstract visual art, either. To appreciate it, we must learn to suspend cognitive processes and expectations that enrich our experiences of most art. But to do that, the response has to be guided by knowledge that some artists expect the audience to respond in this specialized (some would say impoverished) way. Eric Siblin describes the Prelude of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 as exhibiting “courtly purpose . . . blasted through with rapture.” Did Bach want us to think this way about his music? Or are we engaging in Romantic anachronism? The rub is that we cannot decide unless we make a judgment about Bach’s intentions. But to ask this question is to leave the realm of musical sound and to talk about the gestures of the people behind it. I cannot tell whether the music makes an extra-musical reference unless I think about human agency.

Here is another formulation of this point. Some pages back, I mentioned that Beethoven used variants of the same melody in three different works—in the song “Gegenliebe,” in the “Chorale Fantasy” of 1808, and as the “Ode to Joy” theme of the ninth symphony. However, these aren’t variations in the way that Opus 120 contains variations, for they are not intended to be heard as variations. But this claim relies upon my judgment about what Beethoven was doing, something that cannot be settled if we withhold extra-musical knowledge. Now consider the fourth movement of the first symphony of Johannes Brahms (Opus 68) and its incorporation of music that sounds like a fourth variation on the same theme. Is this music an astounding coincidence? Or is it plagiarism? Is it a variation, in the way that Diabelli variations are variations but the use of the theme in the “Chorale Fantasy” of 1808 is not? This is not a trivial matter. It affects the degree of originality present in Brahms’s first symphony. In order to decide that it is a variation—and no one thinks otherwise, which is why Brahms said “Every jackass hears that!” when a listener mentioned the similarity to Brahms—we must interpret it as an intentional acknowledgement of Beethoven, the historical individual. In referring to Beethoven, the music makes an extra-musical reference. Therefore a minimally adequate understanding of this symphonic, pure music is guided by concepts that are not unique to musical practice. If the presence of this reference disqualifies this symphony from the category of pure music, the category is rapidly emptying out.

What is ultimately at stake here, Graham McFee notes, is the question of whether pure music should be judged and appreciated as art. Where there is utter musical purity, there is no need to decide which concepts are culturally appropriate to it. That seems to leave us with music that can be understood by pre-linguistic children and some non-human animals. However, it excludes most of the experience of music that gives it significance for most listeners. Because we need to acquire language and cultural understanding in order to operate with the conceptual framework that culturally situates it, such as the difference between practicing music and performing music, then humans and non-human animals employ different cognitive processes in producing and interpreting musical sounds. Music, as we understand it, exists only in the human realm. We have a difference in kind, rather than a difference in degree of musicality. As such, attributing music to birds and whales is an informative anthropomorphism, as a way of thinking about important continuities with other animal species. Kathleen Higgins is particularly insightful about the benefits of admitting that we are not the only species to make music; it can bring home the realization that we “share the world” with them. So the issue of whether mockingbirds and pre-linguistic children perceive music is not a trivial question. They certainly hear some of what is musical in music. But that is not quite the same thing. Mockingbirds can mimic the songs of other birds, proving that they perceive sound structures—and in some sense understand them—in the absence of understanding those structures by virtue of acquiring a technical vocabulary. However, I wager that mockingbirds cannot hear that Satie’s piano music is more delicate than Booker’s version of the minute waltz.