Music, aesthetics of

5. Musical understanding

What does the listener’s understanding of music consist in? It is arguably a species of knowing-how, or experiential knowing, as opposed to knowing-that, or propositional knowing. Reflection suggests that understanding music is basically a matter of hearing the music in a certain way, of registering or responding to certain aspects of the music. The understanding of music, in other words, is continuous with perception of music; it is not a matter of technical analysis, causal explanation or discursive construal, but of a certain sort of listening experience (see Art, understanding of §5).

This is not to deny that there are kinds and levels of musical understanding, some of which may essentially involve propositional knowledge, that understanding at any level may be shallow or deep, and that different sorts of music may call for different kinds of understanding. But the ability to describe music in articulate terms is not a sine qua non of core musical understanding, even if ability to describe music is requisite for the kind or level of musical understanding appropriate to a teacher or critic.

Still, there is a question of the extent to which the listener’s understanding of music is informed by concepts of various sorts, in what manner and with what degree of recoverability by the subject. There is also the issue of how similar the understanding of music is to the understanding of language, and of how the understanding of music relates to the appreciation and evaluation of it.