Ways of listening

I'm nearly finished with Eric Clarke's book Ways of listening. Clarke adopts Gibson's ecological theories and offers some interesting perspectives on how we listen to music. Here are a few bits that I took away that I'll toss out for you to chew on:

• Clarke argues that most people don't hear pure sound, but they understand and recognize those sounds as something. For instance, most people don't hear music in terms of chord progressions, semitones, timbres, etc.; rather, they tend to hear an accumulation of those things and understand a particular collection of sounds as Beethoven's fifth (as opposed to Mozart's 40th), or as the Guarneri String Quartet (as opposed to the Julliard String Quartet).
  
• Clarke's approach requires us to take the environmental context of the music into account when we listen. We listen to music differently when we're at a concert vs. when we're exercising and listening to an iPod vs. when we're at a cocktail lounge, despite the fact that in all three cases we might be hearing the "same" piece of music (i.e., "Autumn leaves")
  
• The topical approach as developed by scholars such as Leonard Ratner, Kofi Agawu, and others need not be limited to topics that the 18th-c. listener would have been familiar with. There may be new, 21st-c. topics that have developed over the years that provide us with equally important ways of hearing the piece. (This idea ties in nicely with my third approach to theory pedagogy a week ago). One might hear in Beethoven a topic of "precursor to 20th-c. quartet," for instance.

This is a great little book, and a reasonably quick read. I definitely recommend it if you're looking for a novel approach to understanding music listening.

Click here for fellow blogger Scott Spiegelberg's review of the book (originally appeared in Empirical musicology review I/2 (April 2006)).