1. Over Christmas (2007) I spent many of my morning hours reading and contemplating a seemingly rather obscure topic: what does musical understanding consist in? What is it to ‘get’ a piece of music and what is it to fail. Does it even make sense to ask this question? Must we retreat to the weak multi-culti view that everyone has their own understanding of music and that’s just fine. Philosophers of music – that rare breed – has taken this as one of their central questions over the past twenty years and some progress has been made, but the answers remain inchoate. It is not my purpose here to fill that lacuna – that I’m trying to do in a longer work, which I may share here later – but to ask some of the recurring questions and outline central areas of discourse. These are notes, thoughts, and, ultimately, a request for input.
2. Understanding music is equivalent to getting its meaning. In understanding music we understand its meaning. Thus what understanding consists in is based on a conception of musical meaning. Ethnomusicologists have, in my opinion, the most interesting things to say on this topic as their view of the subject is necessarily so catholic. The historical musicologists and philosophers of music alike seem unaware of music outside the western European art tradition (except for a small cabal young enough to deal with rock music) and this myopia severely limits the scope of their thinking. Musical practices (musics, as many ethnomusicologist prefer) are each so very distinct that any inductive reasoning from such a small sample inevitably gives rise to dubious results. If we restrict ourselves to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms then coming to grips with a form of universal human practice will be as difficult as surmising the basics of human taste by visiting McDonalds, Wendy’s, and Burger King.
The simplest and most reliable entry to this question is dictated by Ludwig Wittgenstein – one of the 20th century’s most significant philosophers – in his statement, Don’t think, but look! Musics are always practices; they are collections of sounds, actions, bodies, habits, instruments, dances, behaviors, and beliefs all mixed together into a multivalent happening and doing that we can see, hear, and experience for ourselves. To withdraw to the study and contemplate the meaning of music is to mistake meaning for thought. Meaning is in the world and so it is there that we must seek it. Now ethnomusicologists may not phrase their thinking quite this way, but their actions speak quite clearly. Still today, after more than two decades of sustained critique of the traditional ethnographic method as colonialist, imperialist, and just plain exploitative, no one has found away around the necessity of living among a musical practice in order to learn its ways. Thus, most scholars spend at least one full year in “the field” observing music making, learning to play an instrument themselves, noting the wider cultural, social, religious, economic, and gender practices, and boning up on the people’s history. The result of this is a fluency with a musical practice – albeit often rather rudimentary – that can be likened to basic fluency with a language. Understanding a music is like being fluent in a language.
3. Much has been made over the years of the similarities and differences between music and languages and I have no desire to repeat them here. It will suffice to say that anyone who thinks for more than 60 seconds about the platitude, “Music is the universal language,” can spot a leak or three. But however weak the similarities concerning how music means, the similarity of fluency seems to hold up. The philosopher Jerrold Levinson, to name but one person who comes to mind, has called this musical literacy. That is to say a piece of music doesn’t exist in isolation. Even when I sit down to listen to it by itself it is always heard in relation to other hearings of other pieces from the same tradition or in contrast to other, distinct traditions. But in the former, more usual case, it is by learning what to listen for, how to listen that I can knowingly, understandingly listen.
Think of listening’s first steps. Like those of the first words in a new language, they are awkward, one is unsure what is important, what should be attended to, what is considered a move, what a resolution. Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “Hearing something new is embarrassing and difficult for the ear; foreign music we do not hear well.” And here we are really at the root of the matter. Music, as a human practice, is largely arbitrary – in the sense that it could be otherwise – and largely learned – in that knowledge must be gained through socialization and experience. Thus, to understanding a music one must have spent a sufficient amount of time in the world of that music. One must learn to feel at home, to dwell, to know the way about to understand what a music is.
