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    Understanding Humor and Understanding MusicAuthor(s): Kendall L. WaltonReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Winter, 1993), pp. 32-44Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/764150 .

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    Understanding Humor andUnderstanding Music*

    KENDALL L. WALTONAll of a sudden I wonder why I have to tell this, but ifone begins to wonder why he does all he does do ...why when someone has told us a goodjokeimmediatelythere startsup something like a tickling

    in the stomach and we are not at peace until we'vegone into the office across the hall and told thejokeover again; then it feels good immediately,one is fine, happy, and can get back to work.JulioCortizar, Blow-up"

    Anthony is an anthropologist doing fieldwork on Mars. He notices that Martians laugh on occasion. They emitfrom time to time, out of the opening in their bodies from which theyspeak, a kind of staccato melisma. (I won't inquire into how Anthonyidentifies this behavior as laughter.) Anthony doesn't understand whythey laugh when they do; he doesn't see what's funny. So he sets abouttrying to find out. He takes careful notes on the circumstances inwhich they laugh and those in which they do not. When necessary, hearranges experiments, setting up various situations to see which oneselicit amusement from the natives. Eventually, Anthony is able topredict when Martians will laugh. He knows, for instance, that ifMartha, or any other mature Martian from the upper socio-economicclass, sees a yellow square shape moving horizontally from left to rightacross a movie screen, and if she has not seen such a phenomenonpreviously, she will break out in peals of hysterical laughter. For thesake of argument, let us make the enormously unrealistic assumptionthat Anthony's predictions are perfect.

    Volume XI * Number 1 * Winter 1993The Journal of Musicology ? 1993 by Kendall L. Walton. Reprinted by permission.* I am indebted to Marion Guck for many helpfulsuggestions. This essay appeared in TheInterpretationof Music,ed. Michael Krausz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),pp. 259-69.

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    Not only does Anthony predict successfully when Martians willlaugh, he knows what makes them laugh. He knows, for instance, thatpart of what makes Martha laugh is the fact that the movement of thesquare is from left to right; he has experimented with squares movingfrom right to left and observed that they elicit nothing but boredstares from Martians like Martha. And he knows that the size of thesquares does not matter, because he has observed that varying theirsize does not change Martians' responses.But there is a sense in which Anthony still doesn't understandwhyMartha laughs. It is a mystery to him why she should find a yellowsquare moving from left to right amusing. So Anthony renews hisgrant and goes back to work. Perhaps he investigates Martian physi-ology or neurology, or the architecture of their logic boards. Heknows what changes the moving squares produce in Martians' sensoryreceptors, and can trace the electrical and chemical effects of thesechanges in other parts of their bodies, and he knows how all of thisleads finally to the up and down bouncing of their laughter. Or per-haps Anthony comes up with a psychological explanation of a more orless mechanistic sort. He discovers somehow or other, after painstak-ing research, that it is because members of the upper classes have aslight sense of guilt about their position in society, along with feelingsof superiority, that they laugh at yellow, right-moving squares-theywouldn't laugh if they didn't feel the guilt or the superiority-andthat the experience of observing the squares relieves or lessens theirguilt. Or maybe he discovers that their amusement depends on theirrealization that Mars is smaller than Venus. Now Anthony can explainin much more detail why Martha laughs when she does. But he stilldoesn't understand. He doesn't see what is funny about the yellowsquares, even to her. It is still a mystery to him why she laughs.

    The point is not that Anthony is not amused himself, that hedoesn't laugh. One need not laugh oneself in order to understand, inthe sense in which Anthony does not, why others laugh. I may not beamused, when others are, because I am in a bad mood, or tired, orbecause I have heard the joke too often previously, or because I amoffended by its racist or sexist undertones, or because I have out-grown that kind of humor. Yet I may understandperfectly well what isfunny about it, why other people find it funny.One must "get"the joke, at least, in order to understand whyothers laugh. It is possible to get a joke even if, for one reason oranother, one is not amused by it. But getting the joke, in one senseanyway, is not enough. It may consist of being aware of a pun or anobscure allusion, or in possessing a crucial piece of information. (Forexample, Duchamp's Mona Lisa: "LHOOQ".) I am supposing that

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    Anthony has all of the relevant information of this sort; he knowswhat the Martian's know. But he is still mystified by their laughter.Notice that it is possible to understand why someone laughs, inthe sense in which Anthony fails to understand why Martha does,even if one lacks experimental data of the kind Anthony has. I maynot realize that a comedian's speeding up his rate of delivery wouldruin his joke, for example, or that it plays on my repressed Oedipalfeelings, or gives me relief from guilt. I may be utterly unable to

    predict what sorts of things will cause me and others with senses ofhumor like mine to laugh. Yet when we do laugh I understand whywe do, in the sense in question. The kind of explanation Anthony isable to give of Martha's amusement is no more necessary than it issufficient for this kind of understanding.Anthony's observations and experiments are insensitive to a cru-cial distinction-the distinction between what makes Martians laugh,and what they laugh at. Anthony knows what causes Martha's amuse-ment but not which of the causes are also objects f it. What makes melaugh when a comedian tells a joke may be, in part, the timing of hisdelivery. But I don't laugh at his timing. Television producers knowthat laughter on the sound track encourages viewers to laugh, but itis not the sound track laughter that viewers find funny. It may be onlyafter I have had a beer, or only after I have successfully completed adifficult project and so am in a relaxed mood, that I laugh in a certainsituation. But it is not the beer or my completion of the project or myrelaxed mood that I am amused by or find funny. These are causesbutnot objects f my amusement. Amusement is an intensionalexperience,an experience which is of something. It is not a mere twinge or ticklein the stomach that one feels as a result of hearing a good joke.The kind of understanding Anthony is unable to achieve involvesan awareness of what it is that Martha laughs at. This is a little likeknowing a person's reasons for doing something, not just what causesher to do what she does. It may be misleading to say that Martha hasreasons for laughing, however; this may imply that her laughter isdeliberate in the way in which many of our actions are. Knowing whatMartha laughs at is more like knowing why a person is angry (orjealous, or feels guilty) in the sense of knowing what he is angry at orangry about, not just what causes him to be angry. If we call these hisreasonsfor being angry, this need not imply that his anger is deliber-ate. To understand a person's anger one must know his reasons forbeing angry in this sense. And to understand Martha's amusementAnthony must know what she is laughing at or amused by, what herreasons are, in this sense, for laughing.

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    Knowing this is not sufficient for the kind of understanding An-thony is after, however, nor is knowing what a person is angry aboutsufficient for understanding his anger. Suppose Martha is fully awareof the objects of her amusement and tells Anthony what they are, andsuppose that he knows she is not mistaken and is not lying. It may stillbe a mystery to him why she laughs at what she laughs at. Anthonyneeds to understandMartha's reasons for laughing; knowing what theyare is not enough.What Anthony lacks is a kind of understanding some have called"Verstehen," ne that involves an ability to "empathize" with Marthawhen she laughs. But what is that? I think we can say at least thismuch: Understanding what it is like to be amused as Martha is isrelated to an ability to imagine being amused oneself, to imagine theexperience of being amused in the situation in question and by what-ever it is that amuses Martha. (I do not mean simply an ability toimagine that one is amused, or to suppose that one is.) One can imag-ine being amused without actually being amused, of course. But imag-ining this does involve-and here I will have to be rather vague-exercising one's own sense of humor. To imagine being amused in theway that Martha is and thereby to understand her amusement An-thony would have to have and make use of a sense of humor that is inrelevant respects like hers. Anthony's observations and experimentsdo not provide him with this sense of humor, and they do to enablehim to engage in the relevant imagining. Nor does anything Marthamight tell him about what features of the situation are objects of heramusement explain to him how to imagine being amused by thosefeatures.

    I am sure you have guessed by now that I will beinterested in what analogies there might be between understanding ajoke and understanding a musical composition.To say that in analyzing a piece of music theorists attempt tounderstand how and why it "works" is not to say very much, but it isfair enough, I suppose, as far as it goes. This characterization ofanalysis is not entirely noncommittal. An interest in how a piece worksis an interestin how it works onorfor listeners.One doesn'tmerely tryto explain the events of the piece, how they happen to have comeabout or what they are like in themselves, as one might try to explain,for instance, the birth of a star or the formation of Yosemite valley.(Or anyway, I will not be concerned with analyses that do only that,ones that do not also seek to explain how compositions work on or forlisteners.) But to be interested in how a piece works is not to be

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    interested just in listeners' experiences, construed merely as experi-ences they have as a result of listening to the piece. Their experiencesare experiences of the music and to understand them one must under-stand what they are experiences of-the music.This, incidentally, argues against the identification of pieces ofmusic with listeners' experiences, as some have proposed.' It is in thenature of these experiences to be experiences of thepiece; the distinc-tion between the experience and the piece is given in the experienceitself. (Part of one's experience is a sense of a difference between whatone finds in the piece, and what one imposes on it or does with it.)2 Infocusing on the experience one will have to recognize the piece ofwhich it is an experience.What makes a composition work is (to quote Kerman) "what gen-eral principles and individual features assure the music's continuity,coherence, organization or teleology."3 What makes a given compo-sition work may include its key structure, inversions and retrograderelationships, melodic augmentations and diminutions, regularitiesand irregularities of meter and rhythm, relationships among pitchclass sets, qualities of timbre and texture and changes in them, and soon. It is the job of music theorists, not philosophers, to decide whatcharacteristics are important in what instances, and I will not presumeto intrude. My interest now is not in the answers to such questions butin the methods by which one might arrive at them.How does one discover what makes a composition work? Shall werun a series of experiments, altering characteristics of the piece one ata time and asking competent and experienced listeners, after eachchange, whether it still works (or whether it still works in a particularway)? Will we eventually, after many such experiments, succeed inisolating the characteristics that make it work?

    This will not be an easy task, for obvious reasons. There are anenormous number of distinct variables in even a simple piece-probably infinitely many of them; in any case more than one couldhope to check out even in a lifetime. The experimenter will have tomake a lot of guesses about which variables are worth testing. Andmany of the variables are not independent of each other. The melodicshape of the bass line cannot be changed much without altering the

    1 John Rahn, "Aspects of Musical Explanation," Perspectivesof New Music XVII/2(Spring-Summer, 1979), 205, 217, 218.2 To insist on recognizing the piece as an entity distinct from one's experience ofit is not to deny that the piece is a cultural construct of some sort, rather than somethingexisting independently of people or human institutions.3 Joseph Kerman, "Analysis, Theory and New Music," in ContemplatingMusic(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 61.

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    piece harmonically. So how will we set up an experiment to ascertainwhether it is the melody's shape or the harmony that helps to makethe piece work? This is not an unfamiliar problem in the experimentalsciences, and there are, in principle, ways of getting around it. Onewould have to devise a much more sophisticated and complex experi-mental procedure than the one I sketched, and the data would be lessdirect evidence for the conclusions. One might start by modifyingmelodies in ways that have only slight harmonic implications, in orderto establish generalizations about what kinds of effects melodies withcertain sorts of shapes tend to have. These generalizations might thenground inferences concerning what part of the effect of melodicchanges which do involve significant harmonic changes is attributableto the former.

    But is any procedure of this sort what we want, even assumingthat it can be carried out? Music theorists rarely undertake anythinglike the kind of experimentation I have described (although psychol-ogists of music do). Could it be that although this experimentalmethod would be the ideal one, it is simply not feasible; the difficultiesof carrying it out are overwhelming. So theorists work informally,sloppily, unsystematically, in effect guessing at what the results ofsuch experiments would be? I don't think so. Even if this kind ofexperimentation were feasible, it would be unsatisfying in the waythat Anthony's research on the Martians' sense of humor is unsatis-fying. It would tell us what it is about the music that makes it work,what causes it to work, but it would not, not by itself anyway, enableanyone to understand,in the way that I think most analysts want tounderstand, why or how the music works, why it moves us.4An indication of this is the fact that the experimental procedureI outlined-both the simple one and more sophisticated variants ofit-do not require the experimenter to exercise her musical intui-tions; indeed she needn't even have any. A Martian anthropologistwith no musical sense at all, or none relevant to our music, could inprinciple conduct the investigation, using native listeners as subjects,just as Anthony might investigate Martian humor in the manner Isketched earlier without engaging his own sense of humor. The Mar-ian anthropologist may be at a practical disadvantage in one respect.One would want to exercise one's musical intuitions in deciding whichhypotheses about what makes a piece work are worth testing. But

    4 Wittgenstein argues for something very much like this point, in his LecturesandConversations n Aesthetics,Psychology,and Religious Belief, edited by Cyril Barrett (Ber-keley: University of California Press, n.d.), pp. 19-21. Frank Jackson tells stories thatare in some respects like my Martian story in "Epiphenomenal Qualia," PhilosophicalQuarterly,XXXII (April 1982), 127-36.

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    maybe Martian anthropologists live for thousands of years, or theMartian anthropologist might be lucky and accidently pick the righthypotheses early on. In any case, one might in principle succeed incarrying out this investigation and learn what it has to teach withoutexercising any musical intuitions at all.This point can be obscured by the fact that the subjectsof theimagined experiments do use their musical intuitions; they have to tellthe experimenter whether a piece or a variant of it works. And theexperimenter might use herselfas a subject, even as her only subject.The experimenter may think of her task primarily as that of explain-ing what makes the piece work for her. In that case she is the obvioussubject to use. Ideally, then-if only it were possible-she will sit downat the piano and alter the piece bit by bit, asking herself at each stepwhether it still works. Eventually she comes up with a list of thefeatures that make it work for her.

    Now I do think that engaging in this process might help theappreciator to understand how the music works for her. But thisunderstanding does not consist simply in accepting the results of theexperiments, in being able to specify the relevant features. The ex-perimenter could employ subjects other than herself and, using or-dinary experimental safeguards, extrapolate the results to herselfwith at least some degree of confidence. (Compare testing the effectsof a drug on a limited population and extrapolating the results toothers.) The experimenter's own musical intuitions need play no rolein this procedure, and it is clear that she might accept the results, thelist of features which make the composition work for her, withoutachieving any particular understanding of how it works. There is stilla gap between knowing what features make the music work, andunderstanding how and why it works.

    But if the music does work on me, don't I already understandhow it does? If I find a joke funny myself don't I see what is funnyabout it? Yes, in a way. I may not know the mere causes of my expe-rience, of course, but that is not what we are usually after anyway.What we are after is an understanding of the character of the expe-rience, not how it happened to have come about. A full description ofan experience need not mention its causes, but must specify its ob-jects, its intensional content. I do not fully understand what a personis feeling if I know merely that she is angry, or jealous; I must knowwhat she is angry about or whom she is jealous of. I need not know,however, that her feeling angry or jealous is (in part) a side-effect ofa drug she is taking, or (in part) a result of a chemical imbalance in herbrain, or that it results (in part) from such and such early childhood

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    experience. The feeling itself might have been the same had it beencaused differently. But it would not have been the same feeling ifwhat the person is angry about were being passed over for a promo-tion, for example, rather than an insult from a fellow worker.When I am moved by a musical composition I, presumably, havesome sort of awareness of the content of my experience, the particularfeatures of the music that it is an experience of. But I may not be ableto specify in much detail what they are. To specify them, to articulatethem, is to achieve a betterunderstanding of how the music works forme (as well as, possibly, to make it work better for me). This, I believe,is a large part of what many music theorists do when they analyze acomposition: They spell out the intensional objects of their musicalexperiences (and of the experiences of other listeners as well, to theextent that others experience the music in similar ways-or come todo so under the influence of the analysis). The method is not theexperimental one I described, since that method does not separatemere causes from objects of the experience. And in any case thetheorist has her own vague awareness of the content of her experi-ence to start with.

    The process of articulating the content of one's musical experi-ences is not unlike that of becoming fully aware of the content ofother intensional states-coming fully to realize what exactly one isangry about or worried about or articulating for oneself why one hasqualms about pursuing a certain course of action, as when a person isable to say, "Now I know why I have always disliked him-it is hispretense of humility."5 I do not have in mind so much what a personmight do on the psychiatrist's couch, as more ordinary and every-day reflections on the content of one's intensional attitudes. (Therewould seem to be nothing corresponding to Freud's notion of repres-sion which must be overcome to achieve a realization of the contentof one's musical experiences.) We might also compare the experi-ence of having a word on the tip of one's tongue, and then trying tofigure out what it is, and, of course, the process of figuring out why welaugh when we do-not just what makes us laugh, but what exactlywe laugh at.The primary means by which one uncovers the content of one'sintensional states is "introspection." I am favorably disposed to Bo-retz' observation that "introspection is the crucial testing-ground" for

    5 Arnold Isenberg, "Critical Communication," in Aestheticsand the Theoryof Criti-cism: SelectedEssays of Arnold Isenberg,edited by William Callaghan, et al. (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 171.

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    "the kind of personally interested musical experience [his] work hasaddressed and cultivated."6 I am not taking introspective data as dataon which an empirical scientific theory is built, however (in accor-dance with Hempel's deductive-nomological model, for instance). Mypoint is rather that achieving the introspective results is itself ourobjective, or a large part of it. We seek to explain our musical expe-riences in the sense of specifying, spelling out, whattheyare like,not inthe sense of saying why they are as they are, or how they came about.(If one wants to say that explaining what something is like is actuallya kind of description,I will have no objection.)There is still room for explanations of other sorts, however. Itcertainly may be of interest to know what kinds of sound events peo-ple, or a particular person, hears in what kinds of ways-which onesprovoke experiences with what intensional content. And to discoverthis would I suppose constitute at least part of an explanation of howit happens that we hear sound events in the ways we do. If (as Iassume) objects are also causes, to discover by means of whateverempirical investigation might be relevant the causes of my musicalexperience may at least give me clues as to what the objects of theexperience might be, and may thereby contribute to the introspectivetask I just described.The result of this introspective task-the task of articulating whatI am angry about, or what my musical experience is an experienceof-is not a mere piece of information. I do not merely acquire theknowledge that what I am angry about is the subtly insulting tone ofsomeone's remark, or that what worries me about so and so's headinga certain organization is (let's say) his tendency to ignore certain kindsof advice. I could in principle acquire this information about myselfby being told by someone I trust-a psychologist or a friend I believeto be perceptive; I might take someone's word for it. Or I might readand believe a study that concludes that when people like me are angryor worried in circumstances like the one I am in, that is what they areangry or worried about. The result of my introspection is rather arecognition,an acknowledgmenthat that is indeed what I am worried orangry about. Now I see that that is so. (It is not easy to say what thismeans.) Of course, being told by a trusted friend might help me to seethis, to acknowledge it. But seeing it goes beyond merely concludingthat what the friend says it true. Recognizing, finally, what the wordon the tip of my tongue was is more than just knowing what it was.

    6 Benjamin Boretz, "The Logic of What?," TheJournal of Music TheoryXXXIII/1(1989), 113.

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    Likewise, the introspection that may attend devising an analysis ofa piece or examining someone else's analysis, leads ideally to a recog-nition or acknowledgmenthat such and such features of the music areincluded in the content of one's musical experience, a recognition oracknowledgment that goes beyond acquiring information about whatfeatures are part of the content of one's experience. I might acquirethis information about myself simply by taking the word of a theoristI admire and whose way of hearing I have reason to expect will bemuch like my own, without engaging in any introspection at all. Butupon introspection I "see" for myself that my hearing of the piececorresponds to the analysis, I come to understandmy experience asbeing an experience of the features in question.7The kind of understanding Anthony fails to achieve in his studyof the Martians' sense of humor is the understanding of acknowledg-ment or recognition. We now see that it has two aspects. One might,in the first place, "see" the humor of a situation. One does this whenone acknowledges or recognizes one's own amusement. (I am not sureone ever is amused without acknowledging that one is.) It is harder tosay what exactly one recognizes or acknowledges when one sees thejoke but is not actually amused-perhaps a blocked or inhibited orpotential reaction of amusement. But it is clear that the understand-ing does not consist simply in possessing the information that onewould laugh if one were not tired, or jaded, or offended by the joke'sracism, or whatever. The understanding consists in experiencing andacknowledging a certain response to the joke, if not one of actualamusement.

    It is a further step, beyond seeing the humor, to articulate justwhat it is about the situation that is funny, to recognize or acknowl-edge the object of one's amusement. When one does this one under-stands more deeply why the situation is funny, why those who laughat it do so (assuming of course that they laugh for the same reasons).Music theorists investigating music of their own culture usuallypossess an understanding of the first sort to start with, a recognitionor acknowledgment that the music works (not just acceptance of thefact that it does). Much of their effort, I suggest, goes to deepeningthis understanding in the way I described, recognizing or acknowl-edging, and articulating, the content of their musical experiences. Inmany cases this makes the experience itself more satisfying. (My angermay be more satisfying after I have fully articulated what I am angryabout, even if what I am angry about has not changed.)

    7 See Nicholas Cook, "Music Theory and 'Good Comparison': A Vienese Com-parison," TheJournal of Music TheoryXXXIII/1 (1989), 128.

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    My suggestions so far will help clarify the issue of whether onlywhat is or can be heardin a piece of music is musically significant, andwhether the analysis or explanation of a composition ought to berestricted to specifying features of it that listeners do or might hear.8I urge that we avoid a narrow conception of what one hears. Weare sometimes angry or jealous without being able to articulate fullywhat we are angry or jealous about. We also, even more frequentlyperhaps, laugh without being able to say in much detail what it is thatwe are laughing at. (It might be essential to our amusement, in somecases, that we not be able to specify its objects very precisely.) So thecontent of a musical experience may include features of the music theexperiencer cannot specify. There may not always be a good way ofascertaining what the content of any of these intensional states in-cludes, of acquiring the capacity to articulate them in their entirety.When possibilities are suggested, we may recognize or acknowledgethem as indeed among the objects of the experience (as having beenso all along). But failure to make such an acknowledgement cannot betaken as conclusive proof that they are not objects of the experience.Recognition does not always come easily.So analyses are probably, more often than one might havethought, specifications of what we hear. The possibility is open thateven the Schenkerian deep structure of a piece, or the fact that theforeground and middle ground are elaborations of the deep struc-ture, is in fact an unacknowledged part of the content of musicalexperiences even of ordinary listeners. Listeners' inability to specifythe tone row of a twelve-tone piece is not sufficient to establish thatthey do not hear it. An analysis of a piece may amount to a speculationabout what might be in the unacknowledged content of the analyst'sor other listeners' experiences. In arriving at such speculations, theanalyst may depend more on general impressions of what sorts ofthings are likely to be heard in what ways than on introspection of herown musical experience, even if they are speculations about the char-acter of her own actual experience.

    The objective of analysis is not always or only toexplicate how listeners in fact hear pieces, however. Many analyses aredesigned to explain and encourage new ways of hearing. The obviousway of doing this is by specifying the intensional content of the newhearing. (The information in the analysis does not by itself enable oneto hear the composition in the new way or even to understand thatkind of hearing in the sense I have been concerned with, but it may

    s See Cook, pp. 117-41.

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    help.) But the distinction between explicating a current way of hear-ing and pointing to a new one is not clearcut. Even an analysis con-sisting entirely in specifications of what a listener already hears in apiece is likely to change the way she hears it.We have already observed that coming to acknowledge the con-tent of one's musical experience makes for a change in the experi-ence. Being angry and fully aware of what one is angry about is notthe same as being angry without realizing exactly what it is that oneis angry about. The experience of hearing one melodic line as aninversion of another while being aware only of a vague similaritybetween them differs from the experience of noticing that the onemelody is the inversion of the other. (To notice something is, approx-imately, to perceive it while acknowledging one's perceiving of it.) Soan analysis which, by specifying what I hear in a piece, helps me toacknowledge what I hear in it, changes my experience at the sametime that it enhances my understanding of it.There is much more to a musical experience than hearing certainfeatures of the music and noticing some of them. Musical experiencesare multi-faceted and multi-layered complexes of many intensionalstates, including expectation, surprise, satisfaction, excitement, rec-ognition, admiration, and even humor, as well as hearing and notic-ing. (Some of the constituent intensional states take others as objects,as when, in noticing features of the music, one acknowledges the factthat one hears them.) Rather than comparing the experience of lis-tening to music to that of laughing at jokes, we will do better tocompare it to the larger experience of "appreciating" a comedian'sroutine, also a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional experience involvingnot just humor but various other intensional attitudes as well. Achiev-ing an awareness of the cause of one element of either a musicalexperience or an appreciation of a comedy routine often makes thecause part of an object of another element of it, and in this way altersthe experience.In addition to laughing at ajoke, one may come to notice how thelaugh was achieved, how the timing of the comedian's delivery, forexample, contributed to its effect. One may then admire the elegantor masterful means by which the laugh was elicited, take delight in theartistry that went into it. The manner in which the timing of thedelivery helps to induce one's laughter may surprise or impress theappreciator (or for that matter, disappoint or bore her). The timing isjust a cause, not an object of humor, but it becomes part of an objectof the larger appreciative experience.Likewise in music. A modulation may be surprising partly becauseof its "timing," because of certain rhythmic features of the passage in

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    question, even if it is just the modulation, not the rhythmic features,that listeners are surprised by. Accents or dynamic qualities may con-tribute to recognition of one passage as an elaboration of another. Ifwe come to notice either of these causal relationships, we may relishor admire the elegant manner in which the surprise or the recognitionis effected. And the relishing or admiration, as well as the surprise orrecognition, is part of the musical experience.I assume that the causes are features we heard in the music allalong but didn't notice. Once we notice them, acknowledge our hear-ing of them, we are in a position to notice how our surprise or rec-ognition depends on them, and hence to appreciate the way the sur-prise or recognition is brought about. One function of an analysisspecifying what we hear in a piece may be in this way to induceawareness of causes of certain elements of our musical experience inorder to incorporate them in the content of other elements of it. Theanalysis at one and the same time explains the listener's experienceand extends it.

    Analyzing musical compositions is not a matter of standing backfrom one's musical experiences to investigate "objectively" the com-positions or how they work on us. Analysis is continuous with appre-ciation, and explaining or understanding how it is that one hears apiece is not to be separated from the experience of hearing it. Al-though an analysis might, coldly and matter of factly, informsomeone-a musicologist from a different planet, for instance-ofcertain facts about a way of hearing a piece, analyses are usuallymeant to induce the recognition or acknowledgement that constitutesunderstandingof that way of hearing, understanding that goes beyondaccepting what the analysis explicitly says and involves exercisingone's own musical intuitions. What one comes to understand may beeither the kind of musical experience one previously enjoyed, or anew one. In either case the understanding is likely, in the ways I havedescribed, to deepen and enrich one's subsequent hearings of thepiece.

    Universityof Michigan

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