Who Listens?

Abstract This book examines the oft-ignored importance of who is listening and how they are listening when analyzing music. It argues that listening is an active and creative act, and that people make sense of music largely by drawing on previous experiences, particularly experiences with music. According to cognitive science, listeners use a musical form of analogy and categorization to relate what they previously heard to what they hear in the moment. To demonstrate that listeners draw on this experience to perceive meaning when listening, the author combines music analytic tools (specifically, topic theory) and empirical psychological methods. The author designs cognitively based tools for analyzing music from the perspective of the listener, focusing specifically on listeners’ strands of experience, thus creating different interpretations. The author creates composite listeners as “stand-ins” for different groups, which allows her to create analyses, focusing primarily on how gender, time period, and musical training in particular influence listening. This book illuminates how musical meanings change when considering different listeners’ positionalities and modes of listening, giving voice to overlooked reception histories and musical meanings. The author creates an approach to music cognition and analysis that allows scholars to not only create close readings and reception histories with listeners’ experience in mind but also compare different listeners’ hearings of a piece. Because this book takes seriously the role of the listener in analysis and considers diverse listeners, it addresses a blind spot in the field of music theory, which has tended to assume an “ideal” or “experienced” listener.