A Note on the Work of Music
listening and meaning-making
In considering deeply the work of music, all points of departure are appropriate insofar as they all contribute to an overriding sense of the whole composition and this is how we experience the great works. Particular technical achievements, often interesting places to start, are inappropriate, for our purposes, if they seek to instruct the reader toward better musicality or musicianship. That this is not my aim is clear to me as I continue to be a poor student of technique. I specifically remember the pleasure in distracting my piano teacher from the lesson with off-topic questions and resented being taken off of the playground, “forgetting” that today, during lunch break, instead of monkey-bars, it was Czerny Etudes. Of course, like most, the soundtrack to my experience was earned through maturity and slowly I began to listen. For philosophical inquiry, it is reasonable to believe that the involvement is near total, music speaks by necessity, and it has claim to a proper share of that community of ontologies that offer to us possibilities.
If I looked no further into the musical world and turned myself only to what I already have heard once before, its universal character would still reveal itself continually in melodic memories and anticipations. You can always hear something new, or in a new way. I believe we always have a way to manufacture surprise. If the composition is said to be ‘fixed’, then it is our orientation and ever-renewed perspective that gives the work a new situation to express its meaning. This interiorizing, the same sounds in a new frame, would be only a small infinity and the work of music has to make good on its claim to universality in both directions. In this sense, we speak of the language of music and find it everywhere.
What I’m trying to bring about, very briefly, is the question of the work of music. Of course, this is nothing new. We might wonder about the individual differences, questions of taste, and the impact of commodity and celebrity. Music might be the soundtrack to a spiritual awakening or a parking garage elevator ride. By setting the world to music, how and where does music make its full appearance? What does the work of music model for us? Does music have a life to itself? In what sense is music made to be an object? And how might it refuse this objectivity?
As historical beings, what is behind us is an issue for us and this issue is constitutive. The existential starting point for human living is a problem. If problem seems too severe, let us at least say it is a question. It goes by the name of history. The work of music is a part of this.
The question of music captures us in an act of translation and seems to inaugurate the moods of our varied scenarios.
What must become clear is the dialectic of question and answer is never a first construction. Could there exist a moment which is uninfluenced? Does this impossibility imply corruption? Dilution? Questions ride on the back of answers, and we know how simple it is for answers to inspire questioning. So there is no “pure listening”, we are always already caught up in meaning. We come equipped with answers to questions we never had to formulate in any direct sense. This work of music, whether accompanied by poetic verse or not, is always already speaking. What it accomplishes for you depends heavily on how you listen.
The psychotherapist and musician both pay great respect to the in-between. It feels right to promote this tact and sensitivity in contrast to that common tongue which far too often talks without speaking, and hears without listening.
Talk soon,
S. Vereen