John Bell Young wrote responding to me responding to him:

>In the polemics at hand, however, what concerns us is what goes
>on beneath the surface of a score, and behind and between the notes.

You have correctly labeled this exchange.  Nobody wins at polemics.  One
person usually walks away.  I fear that person has to be me.  The silence
from list colleagues is deafening.  Therefore this will be my last
contribution to this thread.

>It is overwhelmingly unlikely that the untrained layman will ever develop,
>absent a great deal of study and hard work, the kind of listening apparatus
>and, at the very least, intellectual acumen that even the laziest
>professional...commands.

IMO the greatest music has been written for listeners (we seem to agree
there is a difference between hearing and listening).  To me the music of
great composers is a challenge and the effort to meet that challenge with
comprehension is what helps the listener who makes that effort rise to the
composer's level.  We seem to disagree on what kind of training, work, or
experience is needed to develop the perceptual and cognitive skills for
musical understanding at a very high level.  I maintain it's dangerous
to assume that just because one has no formal training in music, or has
studied a great deal of theory and analytical work, is limited to an
"instinctive understanding of how a musical composition works..." It may
well be that an analysis seems revelatory for no other reason than it
happens to put into words what we have already experienced by listening.

>>>trained ears can discern relationships over temporal distances that
>>>in fact, not only govern compositional strategy, but create the harmonic
>>>underpinnings of a composition, no matter how complex or how simple.
>>
>>Contrary to what Schenkerians may think, it's not at all clear that
>>anything of the sort actually happens. All we have is the anecdotal
>>evidence of people who SAY they can do that.
>
>Mr Bond [sic] may be unable to experience music in this way, but I can
>assure him that many others can, and do.

You are making assumptions again.  There should be some ways to empirically
test this ability.  I agree something of the sort happens on the local
or even regional level, but to carry it across the canvas of a Mahler
symphony, for example, is something I'm highly skeptical of.  I admit
only to not doing that, not being particularly interested in learning how
to, since I don't think it's necessary in order to understand the music.
I'm much more interested in what he does with textures, details of voice
leading, and the stylistic derivation of his melodies.  But above all I'm
interested in what new universes his music can take me to if I immerse
myself in it and try to become the music.  I set the analytical side of
me aside, it retreats far away and I treat myself to a musical experience,
which after all is what we should be doing--experiencing the ineffable.
Analysis is like an autopsy.

>[T]here are those who simply say they have perfect pitch, too - and
>I have it - but if Mr Bond [sic] does not have it, for example, it's
>overwhelmingly likely that he never will and will never be able to
>understand what it's about or what it feels like.  That hardly invalidates
>its existence or even its use value.

False analogy, at least until long-range structural hearing is testable.
Absolute pitch is an empirically testable phenomenon.  However, one's
internal experience of it is anecdotal.

>...to cultivate a refined listening apparatus requires hard work to
>penetrate, with pristine attention, the details and complexities of a
>musical text as it unfolds and develops, like a silvery emulsion coming
>into focus.  What such an apparatus encourages is an ability to think along
>with what is heard.

But what are you thinking _about_? I would suggest that this type of
meta-thought while engaging in listening is counterproductive.  Naturally
you're going to do this occasionally as you realize you've just had an
"aha" moment.  But to do it as a kind of running mental chatter, no.
Perhaps you're talking about what Hindemith called "co-constructing" the
music as heard?

>Compositional relations do indeed occur across compositional time and
>space, and the implicit prolongation of a pitch or group of pitches, for
>example, whose resolution is suspended is not some kind of magic trick,
>nor someone's arbitrary invention, but a property of the work itself.

No disagreement here.

>Nowhere is this more true than in late Scriabin, for example, where pitch
>material hovers endlessly in search of a center that never materializes...

I find it much more agreeable when you start talking sense about music, as
you do here and in what followed.  However...

>Furthermore, the complex interplay of Scriabin's harmony hemorrhages
>into the text, creating extraordinary opportunities in the household
>of articulation, and consequently, rhythm.

...you lost me on that one.

>Theory, and its models for analysis are essentially something that concern
>expanded ways of thinking and listening, so that we, as musicians, may find
>new, unchartered and significant relationships within a composition that at
>once enrich and illuminate it, and which in turn enhance our approach to
>interpretation and our ability to bring a text to a sonorous life.

I prefer to think of it as a way of explaining verbally to others (or to
amuse ourselves) what we already have discovered in the act of listening.

>As for "transcultural universals", which sounds more like a moniker tossed
>around in Haight Ashbury 30 years ago,

Well, you're just jealous because you didn't coin it!

>than it does like a point of this particular debate (which as far as I'm
>concerned remains focused on harmony, its function and interpretation) I
>have no idea what Mr. Bonds is talking about.  Does anyone else?

Is anyone else listening? You have dissed and dismissed every reference
I've made to non-Western musics as irrelevant, and the subject is in fact
relevant, because my original response to Stirling concerned whether or not
"harmony" (in any sense of the word) is "universal." I don't think it is.
The burden of proof is on those who claim otherwise, AFAIAC.  From there
things somehow got over to the relationships among analysis, understanding
and performance.

I am out of energy for continuing this.  I am an empiricist, I believe that
what we are looking for is the WAY THINGS ARE, and that there is a physical
reality and a musical reality "out there" that we as humans can confront
and study and learn about, but we do not "construct" this reality, it
becomes apparent to us with study and experience.  (Of course "musical
reality" is an entirely different thing from physical reality.) And deep
down I suspect you believe something of the sort too, or else you would not
convince us of your sensitivity to harmonic and structural events like the
ones you mention in Scriabin.  I think you allow yourself to get carried
away with unnecessarily florid speech (in the manner of some of your French
heroes) which distracts us from appreciating how valuable the music qua
music is to you.  It's like trying to run sprints with 50-pound weights
on each leg.  I doubt, however, that chiding on my part will result in
behavior modification on your part.

Chris Bonds