With the usual reservations that apply to this kind of idea, here are two
more kinds of people. It's really just the old form / content thing, but
perhaps from a slightly different angle.

One kind listens to music structure-first.  What key is this? Where's the
second subject? etc.  etc..  Listeners of this type can't grasp a piece of
music or cope with emotional content or "meaning" until they've classified
it in terms of a pre-existing catalogue of structures and forms, periods,
nationalities, styles, etc..  Often, these listeners have had a formal
musical training, but that's not a necessity.  There are analogues in the
jazz and pop / rock worlds, sometimes among people with little musical
background.

The second kind listen content-first.  If a piece of music "speaks"
to them, they may start thinking about how it works and analysing the
underlying structures.  If not, they're unlikely to pay much attention to
the building-blocks.  They don't care if a piece fits into some category
or not.  If it works and there isn't a category to fit, then we need a
new one.  If it doesn't work, then it doesn't matter.

My wife, who has an academic musical background and who is finding her way
into all my posts this week, is 90% of the first type when listening to
music at concerts, on the radio or recordings.  When working as a music
therapist, I think she is more in the second mode.

I'm definitely the second type, believing that the response is foremost
and interest in how it's achieved comes afterwards - although I can to
some extent function in the other mode if I deliberately push myself
into it.  Occasionally I get sufficiently interested in a composer I
don't much care for to study him analytically in the hope that doing so
will open up a new way of responding to his music.  That happened last
year with me and Harrison Birtwistle - with the result that although I
now understand him rather better and I can listen to some of his music
with something almost approaching pleasure, I still don't care for him
very much.

I developed an argument a few days ago that "assimilating" music is
a complex process requiring perception and some analysis of structural
components and patterns - and that suggests that, at a low level, we all
absorb and process music in the same way.  I'm now thinking about a much
higher-level process, and it was musing about how I react to Messiaen that
set this train of though going.  Maybe this points towards a resolution
of some of these never-ending arguments - at a low level we all respond
to sounds, patterned sounds and music similarly, because doing so uses
pre-programmed neural functions that are common to everyone with normally
functioning ears and brain.  But as incoming sound-patterns get "chunked"
together and processed in higher levels in ways more determined by our
different experiences, education, training etc., so the patterns of our
responses are more likely to diverge into very different paths.

It may be no co-incidence that, while I'm thinking about this idea of
"layered" responses to music, I'm also grappling with making the leap from
"monolithic" Windows to the more cleanly structured and layered world of
Linux.  A curious parallel there.

Ian Crisp
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