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       M U S I C          T H E O R Y         O N L I N E

                     A Publication of the
                   Society for Music Theory
          Copyright (c) 1998 Society for Music Theory
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Volume 4, Number 2     March, 1998    ISSN:  1067-3040    |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+

  All queries to: mto-editor@smt.ucsb.edu or to
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AUTHOR: Lochhead, Judith I.
TITLE: Retooling the Technique
KEYWORDS: analysis, technique, technology, Don Ihde

Judith I. Lochhead
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Department of Music
Stony Brook, New York 11794-5475
jlochhead@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

ABSTRACT: Recent debates about new directions in music scholarship
have sometimes focused on technical language and its use in musical
analysis.  This essay puts some perspective on that debate from the
vantage of the philosophy of technology.  Following the ideas of
Martin Heidegger and Don Ihde about the "ontological priority" of
technology with respect to science, the essay argues that the
technical language of music has a basis in "making" music and must be
"retooled" to apply to the more experiential concerns of recent
musicological and theoretical research.

[NOTE: Thanks to Sarah Fuller for her insightful and quick comments on
an earlier version of this essay.]


[1] Last spring I was chatting with a colleague from Theater Arts
before a ceremonial function at my University.  My colleague told me
how much he enjoyed socializing with musicians because "we" like to
eat good food and drink good wine, and because conversation with
musicians does not get bogged down in those critical issues that
concern people in the fine and dramatic arts.  Then he added: "The
only things one can say about music in any meaningful sense are
technical."  

[2] Our conversation ended at this point, cut short by the beginning 
of the  ceremony.  While I never pursued an opportunity to discuss 
further with my colleague just what he meant by the comment, taken 
at face value it raises a number of issues for both musicians and 
musician/scholars who deal in "technique" everyday but who also strive 
to create something distinct from technique.  While appreciating the 
praise given to my professional and social group (we are fun, I know), 
I find it both annoying and intriguing that this fellow arts educator 
thinks that we musicians can not meaningfully apply conceptual meaning 
to musical sound.  The underlying message here seems to be this:  We 
can make music and we can perform it, but we can not "say" anything 
meaningful about pieces that is not about the making.

[3] While my colleague's comment was not intended as a manifesto about
how linguistic expression can or cannot "capture" the significance of
any of the arts--theater, fine arts, dance, literature, or music--the
attitude it communicates is not in any sense new.  Put in a positive
light, his statement could mean that music "transcends" the messiness
of semantic meaning and that any attempt to conceptualize it is a
violation of something insusceptible to verbal expression.  Put in a
negative light, it could mean that music admits only and merely a
practical knowledge and cannot be accessed by linguistic
conceptuality, that human capacity which has been used to set us apart
from "less intelligent" creatures.(1) Since technique is understood
both as limitation and liberation, we might well wonder how both
attitudes arise.

===========================================
1. It is interesting to note here that "scientists" recently reported
finding a portion of monkeys's brains that is enlarged in ways similar
to an analogous enlarged portion of human brains.  The enlargement in
humans has long been attributed to language acquisition, a cognitive
capability thought to distinguish humans from other species.
Discovery of a similar enlargement would suggest that monkeys have a
similar capability for language or that there is no discernible
physical site that indicates language capability (*New York Times*,
Tuesday, January 13, 1998: F3).  If music is thought to be inaccessible
to linguistic thought, then it must be a "less intelligent" or perhaps
"primitive" form of human activity.
===========================================

[4] The philosopher Stanley Cavell, in his essay "Music Discomposed,"
articulated this "doubleness" of technique over 30 years ago.  He
wrote:

   The serious attempt to articulate a response to a piece
   of music where more than reverie, has
   characteristically stimulated mathematics or
   metaphysics--as though music has never quite become one
   of the facts of life, but shunts between an
   overwhelming directness and an overweening mystery.  Is
   this because music, as we know it, is the newest of the
   great arts and just has not had the time to learn to
   criticize itself; or because it inherently resists
   verbal transcriptions?  Whatever the cause, the absence
   of humane music criticism seems particularly striking
   against the fact that music has, among the arts, the
   most, perhaps the only, systematic and precise
   vocabulary for the description and analysis of its
   objects.  Somehow that possession must itself be a
   liability...(2)

Themes similar to those mentioned above emerge from Cavell's
thought:  music resists "verbalization," its technical language
is highly developed, and its highly developed technique is a
"liability."  "Technique" emerges in the thought of a great many
critics as a powerful tool that either allows or prevents certain
kinds of discourse or thought.(3)

===========================================
2. Stanley Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?* (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1977 [1969]), 185-6.

3. Both Joseph Kerman and Leo Treitler refer to Cavell's observation 
in subsequent articles: see Kerman, "How We Got into Analysis, 
and How to Get Out," *Critical Inquiry* 7.2 (1980): 321, and Treitler, 
"'To Worship That Celestial Sound': Motives for Analysis," *Journal
of Musicology* 1.2 (1982): 153, where he refers not only to Cavell but 
also to  another philosopher/critic, Peter Kivy, who makes much the 
same observation in *The  Corded Shell* (Princeton: Princeton University 
Press, 1980).
===========================================

[5] With regard to music, the term technique can refer to a number of
different things. Technique refers to the practical knowledge required
to produce musical sounds on instruments or with the voice and to the
practical knowledge needed for reading musical notation.  Often, but
not always, the techniques required for reading music notation are
learned in conjunction with learning to play an instrument or sing.
Another meaning of technique occurs in the context  of music theory.  
For instance, textbooks of the sort used for beginning theory courses 
often have technique in the title:  *Techniques and Materials of Tonal 
Music* or *Materials and Techniques of Twentieth-Century Music*.(4)
The pairing of "techniques" with "materials" in these two titles 
suggests that technique refers to the procedures by which basic 
materials are used in a practical sense.  The teaching of basic theory 
then shows how to use the materials of music, often through study 
of how those materials have been used compositionally by others.

===========================================
4.  Thomas Benjamin, Michael Horvit, Robert Nelson.  *Techniques
and Materials of Tonal Music:  With an Introduction to
Twentieth-century Techniques* (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
Stefan Kostka, *Materials and Techniques of Twentieth-century
Music* (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 1990).
===========================================

[6] Technique, then, is a skill referring to praxis.  If I say that the
soloist's performance of Berg's Violin Concerto was technically
unflawed, I make an assessment regarding the player's physical skill
in producing the sounds.  A "technical" description of a piece of
music indicates how the materials of music have been used, approaching
the musical object from the perspective of a system that accounts for
a musical practice.

[7] A sense of the practical pervades our thinking about music
analysis also, as Ian Bent's characterization of music analysis
suggests: "Analysis is the means of answering directly the question
'How does it work?'"(5)  Elucidation of "how a piece works" requires,
in Bent's terms, "resolution of a musical structure into...constituent
elements, and the investigation of the functions of those elements
within that structure."(6) In other words, analysis entails a
determination of the constituent "materials" and shows the techniques
by which the materials are used in a given work.  While there is an
overlap between what a "technical description" and an analysis will
demonstrate, we expect an analysis to "go beyond" the simple
description, to tell more about function and thus to delve into realms
of meaning that move beyond the particular.  But my point is that both
"technical description" and "analysis" have a basis in the practical,
in simply "what happens."

===========================================
5. Ian Bent,  *Analysis* (New York: Norton & Co., 1980): 5.  [Parts of 
this book were published first as an article in the *New Grove Dictionary 
of Music and Musicians* (London: The Macmillan Press).]

6. Bent, *Analysis*: 1.
===========================================

[8] "Technical descriptions" and technique-based analysis have been
the subject of criticism over the last 20 years for a variety of
reasons.  For instance:

     Joseph Kerman: "The vision of these analyst-critics was and is of
     a perfect, organic relation among all the analyzable parts of a 
     musical masterpiece...[A]nalysis exists for the purpose of 
     demonstrating organicism, and organicism exists for the purpose of 
     validating a certain body of works of art...The true intellectual 
     milieu of analysis is not science but ideology."(7)

     Leo Treitler: "Formalist analysis...declares [the historical context
     and the interpretive tradition built up around a piece] to be 
     irrelevant to the analysis of the work."(8)

     Susan McClary: "It has become heretical [for music theorists] to
     address the signifying practices of say Bach or Beethoven for at 
     least two interrelated reasons: first, their present day prestige 
     in the modernist academy hinges on the abstract patterns of order 
     in their music rather than on signification; second, the argument 
     that their music likewise is nothing but abstract constructs in 
     turn helps legitimize the avant-garde [here understood as composers 
     of high modernist music of mid-twentieth century]."(9)

===========================================
7. Kerman, "How We Got Into Analysis," 314-5.

8. Treitler, "'To Worship That Celestial Sound'," 162.

9. Susan McClary, "Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music,"
*Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture*, eds. David Schwarz, 
Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel (Charlottesville: University of 
Virginia Press, 1997 [1989]): 62.
===========================================

[9] In summary, the technique-based analytic approaches are
problematic because they 1) conceal the conceptual and ideological
underpinnings of their accounts of what music does, 2) take an
exclusionary approach to musical explanation, eliminating the
historical and critical context that surrounds understanding, and 3)
ignore the expressive, or "signifying," features of musical meaning.
"Technique" per se is not the subject of these criticisms.  However,
since it plays a crucial role in the practices not only of "formalist"
or "abstract" analysis but further in the teaching and learning of a
"basic" language through which we talk about music, productive
understanding of the issues facing music scholars nowadays requires
consideration of "technique."  

[10] I approach the topic of "technique" from the vantage of
philosophical thought about a related concept: technology.  The
philosopher Don Ihde has written extensively about how humans use
technology, either in an everyday setting or in science.  Building
upon the ideas of Martin Heidegger and of other, more recent authors,
such as Lewis Mumford and Lynn White Jr., he shows how technologies in
the form of tools and scientific instruments are employed by humans to
achieve a variety of tasks, from the most mundane task of chopping
wood with an ax to the more complex goal of observing the formation of
stars in distant galaxies.(10) In either case, the technology--the ax
or the telescope--is something used by humans to achieve a certain
task.

===========================================
10. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," *The 
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays*, trans. William 
Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977); Lewis Mumford, *Technics 
and Civilization* (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1936); Lynn 
White, Jr., *Medieval Technology and Social Change* (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1962).
===========================================

[11] Of particular concern to Ihde, and to Heidegger before him, is
the question of the relation between science as mode of intellectual
inquiry and the tools used to pursue that inquiry.  The standard or
"idealist" account of the relation between technology and science
"holds that science precedes and founds technology."  In this view,
science provides "insight into the laws of nature, a conceptual system
at the formal and abstract level, and the ability to apply this
knowledge to the material realm..."(11) Technology in this sense is
the practical application of knowledge gained from the conceptual
realm of science, and science is understood as both "historically and
ontologically" prior to technology.

===========================================
11. Don Ihde, *Existential Technics* (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983): 27.
===========================================

[12] Ihde develops an alternate view that considers technology
ontologically prior to science, basing his position on insights from
Martin Heidegger.  In his 1954 essay, "The Question Concerning
Technology," Heidegger considers a broader sense of technology than
might be typical in recent understandings of the term, as Ihde points
out: "Technology--more precisely the essence of technology--is a
certain way of experiencing, relating to, and organizing the way
humans relate to the natural world."(12) Such an understanding of
technology reverts to older meanings of this and other related terms.

===========================================
12. Ihde, *Existential Technics*, 29. Heidegger delivered his ideas
initially in lectures.  The first lecture presenting his ideas was 
given in 1949 under the title "Das Gestell" [translated as "Enframing"].  
Heidegger expanded the essay and delivered lectures in 1954 and 1955 
under the title "The Question Concerning Technology."  The essay was 
first published in 1954 in *Vortraege und Aufsaetze* (Pfullingen:  
Guenther Neske).
===========================================

[13] According to Ihde, Heidegger distinguishes three definitions of the
term "technology."  One is the standard or idealist definition mentioned 
earlier. The other two derive  more directly from the Greek word *techne*, 
which is the also the root of technique.  Heiddegger's second definition 
implicates a two-pronged sense of the Greek term: "techne is both a name 
for the activities and skills of a craftsman and for the arts of both mind 
and hand, but also is linked to creative making, [that is to] poiesis.."(13) 
This meaning is implicated in current uses of the term technique when
referring to the performer's or the composer's "technique."  In each of 
these modern instances of the term, practical or "craft-like" actions are 
associated with "creative" making.

===========================================
13. Ihde, *Existential Technics*, 32.
===========================================

[14] Heidegger's third and "ultimate" definition "makes of
Technology a mode of truth or revealing (aletheia).  Technology,
in essence, reveals a world in a certain way....It allows us to
see, to order, to relate to the world in a particular way...[and
as] a mode of relating to the world...becomes the dominant and
primary way in which we understand that world."(14)

===========================================
14. Ihde, *Existential Technics*, 32-33.
===========================================

[15] In such a conception, a technology or a technique may be understood 
as a "tool" that "shapes" the world in a particular way.  As a tool, a 
technology or technique is based in praxis and has the purpose of 
"revealing"  the world--but this "revealing," more than simple discovery,
is creative.  It is in this sense of "creative revealing" that 
Heidegger understands it as ontologically prior to science.

[16] While arguing for the ontological priority of technology,
Heidegger also observed an essential circularity in human
investigations of an experienced world.  In his "The Question
Concerning Technology," Heidegger demonstrates this circularity with
respect to experimental physics:

     Modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies
     apparatus to the questioning of nature.  Rather the reverse is 
     true.  Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets 
     nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable 
     in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for 
     the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself 
     when set up this way.(15)

Heidegger's observation of this essential circularity offers not
a criticism but rather an elucidation of the ramifications of
technology's ontological priority.

===========================================
15. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," 21.
===========================================

[17] These ideas about technology as a "creative revealing" illuminate
some of the recent issues surrounding musical analysis.  As suggested
earlier, two related types of technique figure in musical practice.
First, performance techniques--for instrument or voice--are the means
of projecting in audible form musical sound.  They are the practical
means by which performers create not simply sound but "music."
Second, and more central to present concerns, foundational musical
concepts such as those articulated in beginning music theory texts are
techniques by which musicians "know" a world of sound.  The basic
terms of pitch, rhythm, timbre, texture, dynamics, form, etc. are the
practical means by which musicians "shape" or "reveal" music itself,
and this revealing fundamentally "shapes" experiential engagement with
sound.  The fundamental musical terms with which we engage musical
sound are not "applied to" a free-standing experience but are the
means through which experience emerges. Furthermore, in their
revelatory function, such terms establish the conditions for "higher
level" modes of musical explanation; or in other words, these
technical terms and their related concepts are ontologically prior to
analytic interpretation.

[18] When considering the technical language that forms a basis for
thinking about music, we must take account of for whom such technical
language "reveals" the world in the senses of both poiesis (creation)
and aletheia (truth).  A brief return to philosophical issues can help
illuminate this matter.  While Heidegger's thinking about the
ontological priority of technology and its relation to scientific
practice applies primarily to Western culture, Ihde's work on these
issues has engaged differences across geographical and historical
cultures.  For instance, he has noted how Polynesian navigational
practices are "sedimented in a variant understanding of the world."
(16) Using no instruments to navigate their travels in the Pacific,
the ancient Polynesians employed "a complex system of perceptual
observations carried on through a secret tradition..."  This practice
was embedded in a belief that the ocean is a "deity" who was the
"source of nurture and support..."(17) Ihde's observation of cultural
difference provides a model for taking account of reactions to
"technical" explanations of music.

===========================================
16. Ihde, *Existential Technics*, 43.
17. Ihde, *Existential Technics*, 42-3.
===========================================

[19] For instance, consider this complaint about the use of technical
language in writing about music.  In a New York Times review of Joseph
Swain's *Musical Languages*, Douglas R.  Hofstadter argues that "the
structural language of harmony theory" does not "get...at music's
essential content." He goes further to note that the reading of
passages employing "harmony-theory terminology" leave him 
"numbed."(18) Though Hofstadter claims to have taken one semester of 
musictheory, the technical language "reveals" little or nothing of 
the music for him.

===========================================
18. Douglas R. Hofstadter, "Semantics in C Major," *New York Times Book
Review*, October 12, 1997: 28 [Reviewing Joseph Swain, *Musical 
Languages* (New York: Norton, 1997)].
===========================================

[20] Compare this example with a newspaper account of a recent scientific
discovery:  the Hubble "photographs" of colliding galaxies.  *Newsday*, a 
New York City-area newspaper, characterized the event this way:

    The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed a pair of colliding 
    galaxies...[which are] merging into one huge elliptical galaxy.... 
    The photos show the  heart-shaped core of the colliding Antennae 
    galaxies, about 63 million light years away...(19)

This press account does not use highly technical language, but our 
understanding of what "is happening" 63 million light years away 
depends on technologies with which most people in our culture 
typically have experience.  The operation of a telescope and the idea 
of a photograph are well-known and comprehensible phenomena for us.  
We have a clear experiential sense of what they can "reveal" about 
the world.

===========================================
19. *Newsday*, Wednesday, October 22, 1997: A7.
===========================================

[21] The photos enabled by the Hubble Telescope make "real" for us
something that none of us will experience directly, but the technology 
does allow us to experience "instrumentally" the colliding galaxies.(20)  
In the case of music, Swain's technology--his technical discourse--
does not allow the reviewer to experience the music through the
"instrumentality" of the language, even though it refers to a potentially 
palpable experience.  Unlike the technology of the professional scientist 
which enables an instrumentally-mediated experience  of something palpably
unexperienceable, the technology of the professional musician seems
functionally to obscure something that is a feature of most people's everyday 
experience.

===========================================
20.  Don Ihde writes about "instrumental" experience in several places 
but notably in *Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth*
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).  Ihde's work focuses on
how our knowledge and experience of the world is mediated by various
types of technologies, including instruments of various sorts:
telescopes, musical instruments, tools, and so on.  Ihde points out
that unless there is a failure in its performance or use, the
instrument will recede experientially--that is, we are not
experientially aware of its presence; however, while it recedes from
direct awareness, the instrument still has an affect on the nature of
the experience.  
===========================================

[22] The reviewer's complaints about technical language are not
unusual, and the general ease with which such complaints are made
outside a professional community of musicians suggests that the
techniques of this terminology do not operate for large segments of
contemporary U. S.  society.  While the revelatory function of a
technique depends on its intersubjective operation, such operation may
not be universal, as Ihde's remarks on Polynesian navigation suggest.
The operation or non-operation of the revelatory function of a
technique depends on 1) practical engagement with the technique itself
and 2) "sedimented" beliefs about music.

[23] First, for many listeners in the United States today who are
untrained in the praxis of making music--either instrumentally,
vocally, or compositionally and with some knowledge of musical
notation--technical accounts of music at either a low- or high-level
of explanation may seem like a "foreign language."  A technique-based
account of music will likely not have a revelatory function for such
listeners because they have no practical engagement with the
technique. Those of us who attempt the teaching of what we might think
of as mid-level concepts about music, such concepts as rhythmic or
pitch organization, without being able to teach in any serious way
musical notation or performance itself, may well recognize the
problem.  Teaching concepts such as meter and harmony without
associated practical instruction in "making" is difficult at best
because students have no low-level knowledge that will adequately
support more conceptual, and primarily verbal, types of understanding.

[24] Second, in the absence of a practice-oriented technique, many
listeners have developed strategies for experiential apprehension of
music that follow from sedimented beliefs about music as, for
instance, affect and entertainment.  For such listeners, language
related either to feelings of sentiment and bodily motion or to
enjoyment play a more direct revelatory function.

[25] The "failure" of a technique-based writing to reveal its musical
world to those 1) with no practical engagement with the technique and
2) who have developed alternate listening strategies does not mean
that a professional musician's use of technical language reveals a
musical world devoid of expressive content and beauty.  Rather, for the
professional invested in the technique, emotion and beauty are engaged
through its terms.  Within a musical community of practicing musicians
which includes performers, scholars, composers, and critics, the
technical language derives from a musical praxis of making--performing
and composing.  That language then becomes the basis for our
perceptual engagement with musical sound and for the more explanatory
modes of understanding, most notably that of music analysis.  Put
another way, the praxis at a low level enables what may be observed
and experienced at a more complex level: technology precedes science.

[26] This observation allows us to understand why a technique-based
language about music both does and doesn't have a revelatory function,
that function depending on whether a listener is trained in a musical
practice of making.  It does not explain criticisms of technique-based
analysis within a community of professional musicians (scholars,
performers, creators, composers).  When questions of the value or
drawbacks of technical language occur within this community the stakes
are much higher since technical language is so central to the
professionals's ability to make the musical object "sit still."  On
one hand, the professional community needs some sort of descriptive
language--a technical language of some sort--to be able to "say"
anything about what happens.  Whether dealing with musical symbol or
sound, discussion of music must be framed by some discourse which, no
matter whether terminological or symbolic, has conceptual content
that, to use Heidegger's terms, "reveals the musical world" in a
certain way.  On the other hand, the technical descriptive language is
often viewed as something to "go beyond," either go beyond in the
sense of achieving higher levels of theoretical understanding or go
beyond in the sense of attaining a humane interpretive understanding.
In each of these senses of "going beyond," technique breaks off from
"more conceptual" and verbally-formulated modes of understanding.
This "breaking off" recalls Heidegger's observations about the
relation of technology to science, to what Ihde has called the
"technics-theory distinction."  Heidegger's critique of this
distinction and Ihde's observations on the role of a "variant
understanding of the world" and its sedimentation in praxis shed light
on issues facing the professional community of music scholars.

[27] First, we must recognize that the highly sophisticated technique
for musical description and modes of musical explanation deriving from
it have been, as Cavell suggests, "systematic and precise" and even
further successful and productive.  As a "technology" in Heidegger's
sense, this discourse about music reveals a rich, multi-faceted world
of musical sound.  The world it discloses reflects a praxis of making
involving issues of notation, performance, and creation.  Criticism of
this discourse focuses on what it does not reveal: a "humane" critical
understanding, historical and critical contexts, and expressive
meaning.  If understood in terms of Heidegger's commentary on the
relation of technique and theory, the so-called "failure" of
technique-based discourse is not an issue of does not but rather one
of can not.  The technical language we use for descriptive purposes
has its source in the "making" of musical sound and in capturing the
musical object so as to make it sit still.  From this perspective of
making and capturing, the technical language is successful and
productive.  

[28] If the perspective itself changes, however, then the technical
language may fail.  Or in Ihde's terms, if a "variant understanding of
the world" operates, the practice of technical explanation will cease
to have a revelatory function.  Recent criticisms of the technical
language and of the higher-level analyses it has supported within the
professional community reflect such a change of perspective, a
perspective which itself is embedded in larger intellectual shifts.

[29] The twentieth century has witnessed a philosophical turning from
issues of "what the world is" to "what the world is for us," in other
words, from issues of the objective existence of things to the
apprehension of things by humans as culturally and historically
situated beings.  Charles Taylor, arguing for Heidegger's pivotal role
in this turn, puts the matter this way.  Heidegger

      struggle[d]...to recover an understanding of the agent [the
      thinking agent] as engaged, as embedded in a culture, a form 
      of life, a 'world' of involvements, ultimately to understand 
      the agent as embodied.(21)

The twentieth century's refocusing on humans as thinking "agents" in 
the world as known to them extends to ideas as diverse as Freud's 
"unconscious," Einstein's "relativity," and Heisenberg's "uncertainty" 
as well as to the philosophical positions, for instance, of Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, and 
so on.

===========================================
21. Charles Taylor, "Engaged agency and background in Heidegger," *The
Cambridge Companion to Heidegger*, ed. Charles B. Guignon (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993): 318.
===========================================

[30] Current interest in music as experienced by listeners, in
listening-oriented criticism and explanation, has fostered not only 
an interest in understanding music in terms of its historical and
critical contexts and expressive meanings but also in the nature of
musical perception and in the diverse ways that music is apprehended
by listeners from differing cultural, historical, or experiential
bases.  And, it has resulted, ironically, in both a criticism of the 
technical language for what it "does not" reveal and attempts to make 
this language reveal "musical worlds" it does not support.  If this 
turn toward the experiential domain is to delve into higher, more
conceptual explanations of musical meaning, such explanations will
need to be supported by a lower level technique that supports it.  In
other words, this "variant understanding of a world of music" requires
a retooling of the technique in order to reveal "precisely" and
"productively" this dimension of the musical phenomenon.  

[31] Retooling of the technical language requires a rethinking of the
fundamental terms, concepts, and symbols that allow us as 
professionals to make the musical object "sit still" and to "say"
anything about what happens.  Such a rethinking requires not only
development of a new descriptive terminology--a new or revitalized
technical language--that supports higher level conceptual thinking
from an experiential perspective but also investigation of the ways
that lower-level technical language currently supports experiential
associations of affect and meaning.  Like a technique deriving from
issues of creating, a musical technique retooled to meet the demands
of the experiential turn of the twentieth century has to build upon
the practical terms of experiential engagement, whether they be the
actions of making or of listening.  Retooling of the techniques of our
descriptive language about music will allow not only an appropriate
and productive response to the changing goals of musical research but,
as Heidegger puts it, will enable higher levels of understanding--the
science--within this experiential "understanding of the world."
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END OF *MTO* ITEM
