The Experience of Music
Stephen Davies · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2011
I consider various aspects of the listener's experience of music: whether music conveys ineffable truths and the subtle uniqueness with which particular works express rather general emotions; whether we can experience historically distant works as the composer's contemporaries would have done (and whether it matters if we cannot); whether music's value can be explained in terms of the pleasure it provides; what we can find in a work as a result of re-hearing it many times; and how hearing and re-hearing recordings differs from hearing live performances.