Music may never be fully understood. An important reason for this is that music, since it is art, often strives for the new, the previously unknown, the unconventional. Some musical thinkers have therefore thought that musical utterances only fulfill their aesthetic goal to the extent that they deviate from what has previously been considered as syntactically normal (e.g. Dempster 1998: 61–2). Considering, say, the twentieth-century musical avant-garde, it may be claimed that an appropriate aesthetic response to these musical phenomena calls for a certain bafflement or lack of understanding (Danuser 2004). Following Theodor Adorno (1970: 184), one may even think that all true works of art are imbued with a certain enigmatic character that will not let them be fully understood. It is not hard to find something rather persuasive in these thoughts. Perhaps the function of art precludes complete understanding after all. Artworks – including musical works – rarely seem to be made solely for the purpose of, say, communicating a definite content to the public. If no such definite content can be singled out for a musical work, why should one even strive for a once-and-for-all understanding of it? Perhaps a part of the very essence of art is to be in a certain sense indefinite and thus to resist our understanding.
Despite these thoughts, innumerable musicians and musical aficionados remain devoted to the enterprise of understanding music, in one way or another. While perhaps accepting that some aspects of music evade our understanding, they are nonetheless fascinated by the challenge of learning to apprehend it. What is more, there exist many thriving scholarly disciplines, all of which apparently have understanding music as their goal: music historians, psychologists, theorists, and sociologists, ethnomusicologists, and philosophers of music all seem to be driven by the wish to understand music better. This state of affairs suggests a certain relativity of musical understanding: music may, apparently, be understood in many ways that are sometimes even defined in opposition to each other. Furthermore, all of these disciplines – and with them, their respective views of what understanding music consists of – have changed over time, and will probably continue to do so. This alone should motivate the study of musical understanding by philosophers of music, while at the same time cautioning against normative or too universal theories of it. It is far from self-evident that all musical understandings should be commensurable in the sense that their respective “levels” might be evaluated on a single scale (cf. Huovinen 2008). Yet certain broad conceptions of understanding music tend to crop up in the literature, potentially allowing for a comparison between different views. In the following, I will discuss two basic kinds of understanding music that are often referred to, as well as interrelationships between them.
There is an important sense in which one may already speak of musical understanding when a listener perceptually grasps sounds as musically meaningful – for instance, hearing a melody instead of merely registering bursts of noise. In order to understand music in this sense, the listener need not form any explicit beliefs about the heard sounds, or otherwise be conscious of applying concepts to them (cf. DeBellis 1995). Roger Scruton (1983: 78) has called this the intentional aspect of musical hearing, explaining that instead of knowledge concerning the world of material objects, we are here concerned with appearances. Scruton writes that “[u]nderstanding music involves the active creation of an intentional world, in which inert sounds are transfigured into movements, harmonies, rhythms – metaphorical gestures in a metaphorical space” (1983: 100). Whether or not we accept Scruton’s metaphorical conception of musical hearing, it is easy to see why he would describe the intentional hearing of musical melodies, harmonies, and rhythms as a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition of musical understanding. Understanding music implies understanding its sounds as music. Perhaps this is also how we might read Hans-Georg Gadamer’s statement that “[e]ven when we hear, say, absolute music, we have to ‘understand’ it; and only if we understand it, if it is ‘clear’ to us, will it be there as an artistic construct” (1965: 87).
Some musical thinkers have concentrated on accounting for this perceptual side of musical understanding from a perspective that is informed by gestalt psychology and cognitive science. Harold Fiske (2008), for instance, equates musical understanding with the listener’s ability to mentally construct musical patterns from the sounds received. According to Fiske, as musical listeners we “identify relevant cues, piece the cues together into patterns that can be retained (in echoic memory) long enough for brain mechanisms to examine and create the sense that we can ‘look’ at music by invoking principles borrowed from vision, and then creating the impression of an auditory ‘object’” (2008: 56). Here, the implication is of a “piece” of music that may be “seen” as if it were a fixed object. However, an account of basic cognitive sense-making does not presuppose such a notion. What is material here is that any passage of music is taken to be understood only when it is somehow appropriately represented in the listener’s mind (or, as Fiske would have it, brain). I take this to be a perfectly acceptable manner of talking about musical understanding, as long as care is taken to articulate clearly what is at issue. Indeed, cases of so-called amusia can be thought of as cases in which a person is unable to understand sounds as music in this sense. The fact that a comprehensive amusia is a rather rare phenomenon implies that most people show at least some degree of perceptual musical understanding, being able to grasp heard sounds as subjectively meaningful music.
Musicians are often experts in understanding music perceptually: they may have highly developed abilities to grasp even complex sound constructions as musically meaningful. Hence, the early pioneer of computer-aided music research, Otto Laske, framed his theory of musical competence in terms of “actual music understanding systems, i.e., human musicians” (1977: 12). The implication is that musicians’ competence represents a central form of musical understanding. Such views have later been called into question by, among others, Benjamin Brinner (1995) who, in his research on Javanese musicians, reports cases which purport to demonstrate that practical musical competence represents neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for what he prefers to call musical understanding. Despite such empirical studies, there seems to be no consensus about the relationship between musical understanding and practical musical competence among philosophers of music. For instance, Jerrold Levinson has the “intuition” that the ability to musically reproduce (by playing, singing, whistling, etc.) and the ability to continue a given bit of music in an appropriate manner should be taken as “strong evidence of basic musical understanding” (1997: 26–7). Peter Kivy does not accept Levinson’s intuition (2001: 200–1). This might of course be taken to show that “Kivy fails to see how reasonable that intuition is” (Levinson 2006: 509), but it might also signal that these two philosophers’ conceptions of musical understanding are simply different – that they are talking, in part, of different matters.
Such debates bring out the old and well-known fact that practical musical competence and knowledge concerning music are at least conceptually distinct matters. Even if one should find reason to sympathize with Levinson’s view, it is important to remember the traditional tendency in Western culture to value abstract theoretical knowledge concerning music, which is often rather detached from any practical competence. For many theorists, to understand music has been simply to possess knowledge of it. To pick one example, the medieval music theorist Guido d’Arezzo wrote that
There is a great difference between musicians and singers: the latter vocalize, but the former know what music consists of. For he who makes what he does not understand is defined as a beast.
(d’Arezzo 1963: 25)
According to this epistemic view of musical understanding, real musical understanding requires explicit knowledge concerning music: knowledge articulated in conscious beliefs and possibly also mediated through language. Practical musicianship, knowing how in the world of music, is not sufficient, but perhaps also not necessary, for such epistemic understanding of music (knowing that). From our present perspective it should be kept in mind, however, that practical musicianship most probably involves the kind of perceptual understanding that was discussed above. If so, then dismissing practical musicianship as insufficient for true musical understanding also implies dismissing the perceptual grasping of music as insufficient for it.
It may be rare nowadays to completely renounce perceptual understanding in favor of an epistemic view of musical understanding. Instead, there have been attempts to argue for a substantial bias toward perceptual understanding. One example of such a theory is Jerrold Levinson’s “concatenationism” (1997), which aims at answering the following questions: “Why do we listen to music, how do we listen to music, and what is the main source of our satisfaction in listening to music?” (Levinson 2006: 505). The answer to these questions, according to Levinson, lies in the way in which music is followed, or attended to, moment by moment, bit by bit. Levinson’s chief objective is to oppose theories which take the apprehension of large formal structures of music to be an important source of musical enjoyment and understanding. In the part of his theory pertaining to understanding, Levinson states that musical understanding “centrally involves neither aural grasp of a large span of music as a whole, nor intellectual grasp of large-scale connections between parts; understanding music is centrally a matter of apprehending individual bits of music and immediate progressions from bit to bit” (1997: 13). Despite some concessions that Levinson makes to “architectonic awareness” of music, his main idea is to emphasize the awareness of small-scale musical features and progressions as central to musical understanding.
Even though his discussion is framed in terms of the distinction between small-scale bits of music and large-scale “architectonic” features, it is easy to see that Levinson’s view is also a clear statement in favor of what was above called perceptual understanding. One of the intuitions that, according to Levinson, “incline us in the direction of concatenationism” is that “what we ordinarily count as knowing a piece of music, as grasping it, or, in a more vernacular vein, as getting it” is a matter of “perceiving it as a developing process” (1997: 22–3). One might nevertheless ask what the philosophical relevance of such a theory should be, beyond the empirically testable psychological generalizations that it implies. In claiming that musical understanding centrally involves concatenationistic perception, Levinson might be taken to say that what he means by “musical understanding” is first and foremost bit-by-bit perceptual grasping. Or, he might be interpreted as suggesting that there are admittedly different types of musical understanding, but that the most interesting or valuable ones have to do with perceptually following the small-scale features of music and their progressions. Either way, it seems that he just wants to restrict the discussion to one corner of what may have traditionally been seen as instances of musical understanding. Thus, it is not easy to see the philosophical relevance of the debate between Levinson and those who would like to include more epistemic features in their account of musical understanding (e.g. Kivy 2001). Instead of arguing whether the perceptual or epistemic aspects of musical understanding are “more important,” it may be more fruitful to consider their mutual relationships within a more comprehensive account that gives credit to both. Their relative importance may, after all, be a matter of how one wants to understand music.
Discussions of musical understanding are complicated by the lack of consensus on what is meant by the verb “to understand.” According to some philosophers, to understand something is merely to have a “sense of comprehension” – a certain “feel” that one has been taught to correlate with the word “understanding” (e.g. Forrest 1991). I assume that many musical listeners are familiar with some difference between having a sense of comprehension when listening to familiar music and lacking such a sense in other cases. It should be clear, though, that one can have a sense of understanding even in cases where some independent evidence would later lead one to realize that one had not really understood the phenomenon in question properly, or even at all. Scientific explanations have notoriously been accepted on the basis of a strong sense of understanding – a sense of “feeling right” that the explanations initially elicited – even though a mere sense of understanding arguably cannot provide any guarantee of the correctness of an explanation (Trout 2002). Such considerations might provide one rationale for reading the verb “to understand” as a success verb that should only be applied to a person who has correctly apprehended the phenomenon at issue. In connection with music, too, many informal uses of the verb fall into this category, and it appears to be true that “the distinction between understanding music and misunderstanding it is highly valued in most musical cultures” (Lidov 1992). In sum, there seem to be two conflicting intuitions concerning the meaning of “to understand”: a phenomenological intuition emphasizing the subjective sense of understanding, and an epistemological intuition emphasizing the distinction between understanding and misunderstanding.
In order to do justice to both intuitions, one obviously needs a distinction between two different categories of mental states. As an illustrative example, we may consider the account of musical understanding offered by the German musicologist Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (1999). According to Eggebrecht, musical understanding comes in two stripes which may and should work in tandem. On the one hand, there is the more basic “aesthetic understanding” (Ästhe-tisches Verstehen) that is reminiscent of what I have above spoken of as perceptual understanding. On the other hand, there is another kind of understanding, Erkennendes Verstehen, which comes close to what was above called epistemic understanding. In Eggebrecht’s view, epistemic understanding is conceptual, mediated by language. As an example of the difference between the two kinds of understanding, Eggebrecht describes how aesthetic understanding allows one to recognize a progression of tones as inherently related, and to recognize reappearances of this close-knit unit; epistemic understanding would then only require the further application of terms such as “motif” or “repetition,” which immediately opens the way to conceptual reflection (1999: 118–19).
In Eggebrecht’s conception, epistemic understanding is based on and will always refer to prior, non-conceptual, aesthetic understanding. This is because the reality (Dasein) of music lies in its aesthetic complexity that “already in its simplest appearance is never fully reached by the knowing, analytically describing understanding” (Eggebrecht 1999: 120). As far as understanding musical sounds are concerned, it is hard not to agree: without some connection to the perceptually understood appearances of music, any thoughts concerning heard music would remain empty. However, Eggebrecht follows a Kantian line of thought in emphasizing that neither can the aesthetic understanding be fully realized without concepts. That is, even if a conceptual understanding of music without any perceptually understood content is empty, a mere perceptual understanding without concepts will remain blind (Kant 1966: A51/B75) or incomplete (Egg-ebrecht 1999: 120). Concepts are thus needed not only for complementing an already fully formed aesthetic understanding with distinct conceptual identifications on a different level, but also the aesthetic understanding itself needs to be informed by concepts.
Let us see how such a two-tiered account of musical understanding helps in accommodating the intuition that music may be misunderstood. Eggebrecht supposes that the more fundamental aesthetic understanding is always directed toward the inherent formal content (Formsinn) of a particular musical work, which he identifies with the work’s temporally organized pitch structure. Although Eggebrecht notes that the formal content may in some ways be ambiguous or open, he nevertheless claims that aesthetic understanding has an objectivity that is grounded in the correspondence between the formal content of the music and what the listener understands (Eggebrecht 1999: 25–8). Such correspondence implies that musical understanding, on this perceptual level, is not merely subjective but intersubjective (Bandur 2004: 68). Therefore, Eggebrecht also thinks that the musical content of a melody cannot be misunderstood (Eggebrecht 1999: 31). On the other hand, the concept-driven epistemic understanding of music will never be fully objective. Language cannot reach the perceptual complexity of music, and thus the transformation of perceptually grasped, maybe to some extent non-conceptual images into the medium of language may occur in multifarious ways, always involving an element of subjective selection by the understanding subject (Eggebrecht 2004: 19; cf. 1999: 153). Such variability on the conceptual, epistemic level allows for more and less appropriate understandings. If so, Eggebrecht’s view seems to be that the distinction between correct understanding and misunderstanding is applicable on the level of epistemic understanding, while the more basic level of aesthetic understanding, in its turn, allows for a listener’s subjective sense of understanding.
What seems problematic in Eggebrecht’s theory, however, is that it does not seem to leave room for conflicting aesthetic understandings, nor for more or less appropriate ways of perceptually understanding music. In fact, musical structures present perceptual ambiguity in so many ways that it may be impossible to draw a strict line between “correct” and “incorrect” perceptual understandings. Even so, there may appear reasons for revising our perceptual understandings in favor of more appropriate ones. Consider, for instance, the question of how Western listeners understand meter in African music: where they locate the “downbeat” and what they consider as the main pulse. Without delving too deeply, suffice it to say that such perceptual, and often largely unconscious decisions do make a difference to the qualitative feel of the perceived rhythms. Now, let us imagine that a Western listener has tended to perceptually make sense of the “standard pattern” of African rhythm (often expressed as a succession of time values 2212221) by counting in three. Then, she meets an expert arguing that a culturally appropriate perceptual understanding of basic African rhythms relies on a metrical framework that only manifests itself in how the dancers move their feet, and, given such evidence, a more appropriate understanding of the standard pattern would be to perceive it by counting in four (cf. Agawu 2006). If the listener values culturally sanctioned understandings or trusts an expert’s view more than her own perceptual understanding, she may thus come to see her perceptual understanding as defective and in need of revision. Eggebrecht may be right that, among Western listeners, musical misunderstanding typically becomes manifest on a discursive level where language is involved. However, it is wrong to suppose that perceptual misunderstandings do not occur or that such misunderstandings cannot be manifested non-conceptually. When I was invited to dance at a Bulgarian wedding, at first I indeed committed some perceptual mistakes concerning the rhythms, and also manifested them in my gestures!
In order to see what is needed for an account of musical understanding that gives credit both to a perceptual and to an epistemic way of making sense of music, while at the same time allowing for a subjective sense of understanding as well as for the possibility of misunderstanding, we might look for advice in theories of linguistic understanding. David Hunter (1998) has argued that states of linguistic understanding are informational states that belong to the same epistemic category as states of perception or memory. Like states of perception, states of understanding are conscious states that are not normally under voluntary control: in hearing speech or reading texts we simply “take in” linguistic meanings without special effort. Such states of understanding may serve as a basis for belief, but they are not in themselves states of belief or knowledge. This is simply because a person may doubt the reliability or truthfulness of her understanding of a text or speech act and therefore fail to believe what she understands it to mean. A reader may have a certain understanding of the meaning of a written sentence, but upon hearing from her more knowledgeable friend that this is not what the sentence really means, she may doubt the appropriateness of her own understanding. This may be so even if she cannot by herself come to understand the sentence in any other way than she initially did. In Hunter’s account, understanding itself is taken to be fallible and revisable, but the major point is that the sense of understanding may persist even despite the fact that the subject herself doubts its truthfulness.
Similarly, even though one’s perceptual grasp of music is revisable, even culturally incorrect ways of perceptually making sense of music may be accepted as states of musical understanding. A Western listener without theoretical knowledge of, say, Indonesian gamelan music may listen to it and learn to perceptually understand it as music, tapping along with a metrical pulse and finding the melodies comprehensible in relation to it, even if knowledge about the end-accented “colotomic” structures that lie at the bottom of gamelan performance would fundamentally call into question her ways of perceptually interpreting the sounds (see Brinner 2008). The listener may, nevertheless, be able to demonstrate behaviorally a state of understanding induced by the sounds heard, and may even proceed to explicate her understanding verbally, ostensively linking her statements to the sounds. Learning about the theory of this music’s end-accented structures will not necessarily affect her old habits of perceptually making sense of the music: although she knows that she should somehow modify her perceptual understanding, she may simply be unable to do so. Listeners may thus entertain perceptual understandings that are discordant with their beliefs about what the appropriate way to understand the music in question would be. Treating states of understanding as distinct from states of belief allows both for a sense of understanding and for the possibility of perceptual misunderstanding of music (with respect to culturally authorized perceptual understandings). Note that this distinction does not rely on any value judgments concerning the relative “importance” of perception and belief.
Construing the understanding of music in terms of perceptual states and accounting for the “epistemic understanding” of music in terms of beliefs casts some light on the common idea of music as a “universal language” – as something that retains a part of its comprehensibility across cultural boundaries. Even without relevant, culturally justified true beliefs, it may often be possible to gain some understanding of the heard sounds as music that may be enjoyed, used, and talked about. This is not always appreciated by music researchers. The popular-music scholar Allan Moore, for instance, suggests that style and genre classifications constitute an organization that is individually and socially imposed on the music, but that “it is also an organization we must impose if we are to understand the sounds as music” (2001: 441). To back up his case, Moore gives the example that understanding David Bowie’s “Fashion” is “dependent on understanding its irony, which in turn is dependent on understanding the genre conventions of up-tempo dance music” (2001: 441). It is hard to see, however, why entertaining culturally sanctioned beliefs concerning the irony in a piece by Bowie should be necessary for understanding it as music. Likewise, a listener may have all that is needed to apprehend the sounds as musically meaningful even if she has no clue of the socially accepted genre classification of the music – be it western swing, neoclassicism, or grunge. Even without such knowledge, the listener may hum along, dance to the sounds, react emotionally to chord changes that seem surprising, or manifest any other activities implying that the sounds have been understood as music.
Some theorists appear to think that all musical understanding should be directed toward true beliefs – say, toward true beliefs concerning compositional intentions (e.g. Gruhn 2004: 189). Given this, one might expect the listener’s perceptual understanding to be congruent with such beliefs in order to qualify as understanding. This would be a mistake, however, as it would ignore the possibility of a sense of understanding in cases where some serviceable ways of perceptually grasping a piece of music have little to do with the truth of the beliefs entertained. During my first year as a student, a professor played a recording of Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités and asked what its rhythmical or metrical construction might be. My immediate and confident response, based on the way that I had subjectively heard the piece, was that it was a waltz. For the rest of the lecture, despite having been taught about the pre-serial construction of the piece, I continued to hear it as a waltz. However I tried, I could not “switch off” my perceptual understanding of the piece, even given my true belief that there was really no basis for it in the composition. The point is that sometimes the only public guidelines for true beliefs about heard music – or for a correct “epistemic understanding” of it, if you will – might not make suitable guidelines for perception. In such cases it may arguably be more helpful to rely on subjective and even idiosyncratic perceptual strategies than on none at all, if one wishes to experience the sounds as subjectively meaningful. A one-sided emphasis on true beliefs as the criterion of appropriate musical understanding thus risks losing the “sense of understanding” which – according to the view adopted here – is relevant for experiencing sounds as music.
However, there is no reason to deny that some aspects of the significance of Messiaen’s composition as a cultural product may surely be understood – in the distinct epistemic sense of forming appropriate beliefs – by acquiring knowledge concerning its hidden compositional structure, despite the relative unconnectedness of such knowledge to perception. Even in the extreme case in which such beliefs remain “empty” of any perceptual musical significance, they may arguably address important issues about music as a form of cultural activity. If this is so, we might indeed accept a sense of epistemic understanding of music even without the “fusion” of theoretical beliefs and auditory perception – without the “enrichment and extension” (DeBellis 1995: 130) of the perceptual musical experience that we often hope explicit musical knowledge will provide.
Whether our beliefs are taken as a part of understanding music “as music,” will depend, then, on our answers to the question of what music is: are we trying to understand music as a human expression, as an artifact, as an experience, as a social activity, or perhaps as a cognitive process? As the multitude of research disciplines dedicated to these phenomena attests, our answers will be different depending on how we conceive of the object of understanding. Even if we follow the curiously persistent tendency of philosophers of music to concentrate solely on the understanding of notated Western musical works, our discussion will depend on our views concerning their ontology. For instance, if musical works are mental entities existing in the minds of the composer and the listener (Collingwood 1958: 139), we will be trying to understand mental entities, but if musical works are, say, conjunctions of sound-structure-and-a-structure-of-performance- means-as-indicated-by-X-at-t (Levinson 1990), the understanding of music accordingly becomes a more multidimensional enterprise.
From a given research perspective, and a concomitant conceptualization of the object of study, it may then seem warranted, say, to insist on the importance of grasping genre classifications for understanding the sounds as music, or to claim that the ultimate goal of musical understanding is knowledge concerning compositional intentions. The only problem is that by generalizing such positions we easily lose sight of other, equally valuable ways of trying to understand the many-faceted phenomenon of music. Common symptoms of such myopia are an exclusive concern for the distinction between correct and incorrect beliefs, and a concomitant neglect of the phenomenological sense of understanding. However one wishes to employ “understanding” as a technical term, there are important issues to be addressed on both the perceptual and the epistemic levels.
See also Analysis (Chapter 48), Music and language (Chapter 10), Phenomenology and music (Chapter 53), Psychology of music (Chapter 55), Rhythm, melody, and harmony (Chapter 3), and Silence, sound, noise, and music (Chapter 2).
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