Hearing Musicians Making Music: A Critique of Roger Scruton on Acousmatic Experience
Rob van Gerwen · Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism · 2012
In concert with his remark in The Aesthetics of Music that “the history of music illustrates the attempt to find ways of describing, notating, and therefore identifying sounds, without specifying a cause for them,” Roger Scruton views music as a “secondary object,” consisting of sounds (secondary qualities) experienced “acousmatically”as tones, in a space metaphysically separate from the acoustic place where particular events caused these sounds.1 Listening to music acousmatically means listening to the ways in which tones hang together structurally, which involves melody, harmony, rhythm, and other such properties. I submit that this view ignores the performance of music that, in contrast, is central to music appreciation thickly conceived. Since aesthetic appreciation is to be regarded as a perceptual experience (and I see no reason why Scruton would disagree), ignoring how the music (tones in acousmatic space, that is, sounds without their causes) is brought about may be seen as impoverishing it. In this article, I do not argue against the viability of Scruton's (thin) approach to hearing generally or to music appreciation, as I agree that both are possible ways of experiencing sounds or music. Instead, I make a case for the richer, thick views of appreciation and of hearing and argue that Scruton's views are incapable of accommodating thick appreciation. A thick view of music takes music to be the outcome of performances by human beings playing musical instruments. Such a view allows for a similarly thick appreciation in listeners that treats performances as pivotal to a piece's aesthetic merit. Thick appreciation, further, presupposes thick concepts of art and perception. Art is conceived thickly when it is viewed as a human endeavor whose human character is perceivable as such in a work.2 These thick notions of art and art appreciation in general (and music and its appreciation in particular) assume that art audiences are capable of perceiving properties of works as realizing artists’ manipulations of materials (or, respectively, instruments). Such thick notions, in short, require a thick notion of perception—for example, such as that involved (in normal everyday perception) when, taking a bath, one hears the water splash against one's legs, and one does not confuse that sound with others occurring at the same time, like rain dripping from the roof outside, an airplane flying over, cars passing by, or doors being shut. That is, one does not hear an unstructured amalgam of sounds on the basis of which one then infers that such and such events may have caused them. We directly hear events, and their sounds are not metaphysically distinct from the objects of sight. The thick conception of perception insists that the senses of hearing and sight are integral to one's perception of the world and merely provide different routes to it. We cannot hear such everyday sounds acousmatically, because what keeps them together is the events heard. Any effort to hear them acousmatically would require one to abstract from the spatial relations between the splashing of water on one's legs, the rain dripping from the roof, the airplane, the cars outside, and so on, for only then might one succeed in treating the sounds as tones building a secondary object. Rather than sounds, one hears events happening to objects. This concept of perception is thick in virtue of the fact that it centrally involves the embodied person of the perceiver as well as as much reality as is normally required for a person to move about in the world. For these reasons, it is richer than Scruton's thin analysis of the ontology of sound, which allows him to exclude the causes of sounds from acousmatic auditory perception. To conceive of thick appreciation we also need a thick alternative for Scruton's thin approach to hearing. I propose such an alternative in Section II. In Section III, I propose a way to combine this thick view of perception with the idea of thick appreciation by taking the ideal instantiation of music to be acoustic: that is, as performed. Music appreciation involves the judgment of a piece's artistic merit: that is to say, it judges the playing on the basis of how it either realizes, or matches, or brings about that merit. I return below to the relationship of performance and score (as it is appreciated thickly).3 When appreciating music thickly, a listener may distinguish two ways in which a performer's playing might be heard: first, prematurely, as when the performer perhaps unintentionally expresses her effort or frustration, thus adding inappropriate expression to the music, and second, when the performer presents the expression that is “in” the music and thus brings it to life. Premature expression is evident to the listener when the musician's personal efforts somehow blot out the music's expressivity. Here I explore the second, artistically meaningful type of hearing, where the musician's playing brings the expression in the music to life, and explain its psychological reality—the manner in which that playing is based in the musician's efforts and considerations (this is where the thick conception of art comes into play). Such ways of hearing a musician's making music are not, however, to be taken as easily separable or as temporally successive. Therein resides the very problem under discussion, a problem that must be discussed against a background that identifies thickly how sounds are perceived and how music is aesthetically appreciated. In The Aesthetics of Music, Scruton conceives of music as an acousmatic object with its own spatial logic, in which none of the following plays any role: the acoustic space where sounds bounce off objects, the musicians who produce the music, or the listeners for whom the music carries its meaning. The distinction between the acousmatic and the acoustic clarifies a certain type of appreciative experience that, in the context of listening to CD recordings, for example, makes good sense, because in such contexts the musicians are not normally in the listener's presence. Scruton's thesis of the representational poverty of music reflects the insight that sounds do not easily combine into an auditory experience of complicated events—unlike a constellation of colors in a painting that can make one see a basket filled with apples on a table—and that, therefore, the meaning of music should not be sought in the world as represented, but must somehow be in the music, which, therefore, can be regarded as standing on its own (as acousmatic).4 I agree that sounds do not, on their own, build up auditory “pictures” of cohering events; not all sounds combine meaningfully in all contexts. If one is lying on the beach, for example, the sounds of waves and children playing fit the situation, even though from the sound of it we might not easily, if at all, make out exactly what their playing consists in. But the sound of a jackhammer would require interpretation. No set of sounds represents a situation in the way a picture might, but the “fit” of a set of sounds with a particular situation perhaps provides an auditory analogue of representation in pictures. We should have no trouble combining the sight of a group of children with the sounds we heard. I also agree with Scruton that we can listen to music acousmatically. Ignoring the causes of sounds allows one to think of their combination in the music as a structure intended by the composer. In addition, one can listen to CD recordings without thinking about the performers.5 Yet, I fail to see why this should be the primary way, rather than just one possible way, of listening to music, especially since it thwarts thick appreciation and requires the listener to add in a measure of abstraction to his hearing. Musicians, when seeking to discover what the composer may have had in mind, will perform passages from the score in order to hear what “sounds best” (assuming, perhaps, that that is what the composer intended). In doing so, they are predominantly concerned with how to make the music sound this way or that. What else transforms an acoustic space into an acousmatic space, except a given bit of intentional human behavior? Sounds that we hear in the streets cannot possibly be heard acousmatically because they lack the relevant type of coherence that could set them off from their acoustic origins. Instead, we hear street sounds acoustically, as caused by events that we perceive around us. We hear the events.6 Scruton may agree with this and argue that that is exactly what sets acousmatic experience off from the rest of auditory experience. He might also argue that what is sacrificed in the process is the transparency to what caused the sounds, which are now heard as tones playing music‐internal roles. But this response would beg the question: it merely privileges a certain type of music appreciation without further argument. Scruton supports his position by arguing that it is possible to imagine being in a space depicted in a painting but not in the acousmatic space of the music; this too seems right.7 Yet, the appreciation of a painting may also involve another moment of imaginative participation: we can imagine tracing the painter's movements while painting the canvas.8 The fact that there is no response to music analogous to imagining being in the represented space—imagining moving in the acousmatic space presented by a piece of music, let alone in a space referred to by the music—does not preclude our capacity to perceptually (in this case, auditorily) trace a musician's manipulations of strings or keys.9 Imaginary engagement with the represented belongs to our concept of representation, but imaginary engagement with the artist's effort belongs to a thick concept of art that applies across the board (with possible exceptions, such as installation art). I agree with Scruton that music's representational poverty generally inhibits imaginings of the representational type. But an imaginary engagement with the artist's effort could be integral to the appreciative experience of music, just as it can be integral to that of most other art forms. Scruton understands that the phenomenology of listening to music presupposes, in one way or another, the phenomenology of hearing sounds, but his analysis of the latter is, I think, flawed. Scruton claims that “we are not part of the world of sound, as we are part of the visual world. … [The] world of sound contains events and processes only, and no persons or other substances. … The sound world … is metaphysically apart from us.”10 My disagreement with Scruton hinges on this phenomenology of auditory perception—that is, as I prefer to call it, the phenomenology of hearing the world. So I first address the nature of auditory perception before concluding, about the aesthetics of music appreciation, that hearing the musician making the music belongs to a thick concept of music as an art. Scruton argues that music is a “secondary object,” like a rainbow, consisting of secondary qualities that are in no particular place—even though rainbows can be seen only when the viewer is in a particular place in relation to the sun, that is, with the sun behind her.11 This comparison of rainbows and music as secondary objects helps us to appreciate the nature of acousmatic hearing, but cannot be treated as an adequate metaphysics of the phenomenology of perception. The latter should not be based on extraordinary circumstances, like seeing rainbows, but on a conception of embodied perception as delivering an immediate recognition of its objects so as to allow embodied perceivers to move about in the world.12 The senses, in synchronous cooperation with one another, allow one to perceive one's environment. Hearing the world helps one to situate one's body in it, as much as seeing the world does—as blind will This is what a conception of perception should a distinction between properties that to objects, such as and such as sounds, that do not certain events does not provide the events involve processes objects, to think that are and are caused in different ways by different of secondary is to make a on a roof produce sound waves that are by the and cause our to but the the in the of our perceiving that it is In a we do not hear sounds that we then make out to be the sound of dripping What we hear is water involves not just that but also or of and and the of that with these sounds or which the is the of the roof it, even the of water reflects the fact that we hear what to an rather than how it or The poverty of when we to the properties of one that is, without to of the other The with sounds of is what I referred to when I that the senses provide as much reality as is required for one's body to move about in the world. perception provides one with a world one can in The fact that no alone provides a perception of reality does not that the one any in abstraction from the of perception can metaphysically be from the reality they These normally add to a perception of which means that they (in we to hear a sound acousmatically because we are not what to make of it. our to a that is the in the of the We then that what we are hearing is not the sound of a in the street about to the We now hear the sound in a way that makes of the world at that hearing a however, not as one might since it the causes of the not acousmatic the it make us hear an not with that it To think that hearing a of that is metaphysically separate from and for the of to perception. When we hear we are to and the heard. This is a that from based in and with the world Sounds is, events as provide about of and events that and be Such is not but the of thickly and of the meaning of to The acousmatic requires listeners to abstract from We are capable of doing listening acousmatically also of music in which we are aesthetically Scruton the idea of tones as secondary objects to argue that the of sounds, the playing of the is to an acousmatic experience of music. This however, the way with other and with the world. In the that music takes to in its acousmatic space, we may just as well hear the musician not just the sounds that are Scruton the of sound and we another that our response to what we I but I think that, to his thin ontology of sound and his thin view of music as a secondary object in an acousmatic space, Scruton cannot explain whose “we or just how that is by our listening experience. For lack of the capacity to hear the sounds of music as caused the to seems The in the music on than on is rather than what us is how listening to the music makes us another is with a composer to for the of his of but a thick notion of music appreciation the of the music structure rather than its score because it the expression as well as the structure the sounds alternative could be that this whose “we is a musical as that somehow the piece of music and provides the coherence of its but that may involve too much on of the listener to fit Scruton's The thick view of embodied perception also us to a thick conception of expression analogous to everyday of where other in of a thick notion of artistic expression involves to such where one that expression an to it in that may be to the listener's capacity to perceptually trace the artist's expression is, of different from everyday in part because what is in a life, cannot be to its because the is not a the expression in the music is not a of the the musicians are Yet, in music appreciation, one the same distinction between that a of music is example, because it is in a on the one and by its where the distinction is to be a in of artistic on the In as much as in life, there is an of the psychological reality of both the expression and one's What art if it is to be in a thick sense, are ways of into its I is where the performer comes in. The views of perception and expression allow the view that thick music appreciation presents the listener with the for a This view allows for the of music making as well as for the for the structure of the music. with the of performances of music, with listening to as well as with the of return to this also the thick concept of art as the of the human of artistic however, two ways in which a performer's might be heard in the is where listeners hear the musician's effort to the music to sound though to that The other is when the music is aesthetically and the musician brings its to life. In the latter case, the expression in the music is heard the performance of the music. In the case, it is heard in the and expresses the musician expression not into art. 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