Ways of Listening
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$65.00 (06)Description
What is the relationship between listening to music and grasping music's meaning? How does listening to music relate to the ways we listen to the wider auditory environment? Why do listeners often seem most immediately aware of the complex features of music? Theories of musical meaning and psychological research on music have tended to treat music as a special domain, removed from the practical realities of everyday life. Ways of Listening takes a different approach, tackling musical meaning from the perspective of perception, and treating meaning in terms of listeners' experiences and responses, rather than in abstractly philosophical terms. Using an eclectic mix of musical examples, the book discusses the relationship between music and "everyday" sounds, music and motion, music and subjectivity, and the experience of music as a virtual environment.Ways of Listening emphasizes the continuity between music and everyday reality. It starts from the premise that a significant overlap exists between our auditory experience of music and the primarily practical function of auditory perception in the lives of human beings. Framed by the ideas of ecological theory, the book emphasizes the importance of understanding perception as the relationship between perceivers and their environments, as a reciprocal relationship between perception and action, and in terms of the ways in which sounds specify events.
Sitting at the intersection of music psychology, analysis, and critical musicology, the book presents an appraisal of cognitive and ecological accounts of perception, and detailed analytical discussions of musical examples.
Reviews
"This challenging, impressive study implies new ways of thinking about music and listening. No other books cover the same territory." -- CHOICE
"This is the first book to place an ecological approach to perception at the core of music theory. The result is that many problems created by the hitherto dominant cognitive approach simply disappear: emotion and meaning emerge as primary attributes of music (as common sense might always have suggested). Clarke's highly approachable book, with its wide range of musical case studies, will prompt both musicians and psychologists to rethink some of their most basic assumptions."--Nicholas Cook, Royal Holloway, University of London
"Using a holistic approach to perception, Clarke captures the particularity and import of that unique aspect of musical sound Roland Barthes called 'the grain of the voice.' Through this, he is able to build a rich and textured account of musical meaning equally applicable to W.A. Mozart and P.J. Harvey. This important and innovative book offers a fresh perspective on music cognition that will be much discussed in the years to come."--Lawrence Zbikowski, University of Chicago Department of Music
Product Details
256 pages; 13 music examples, 5 line illus.; 5-1/2 x 8-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-515194-7ISBN10: 0-19-515194-1About the Author(s)
Eric Clarke is Professor of Music at the University of Sheffield. He received BA and MA degrees in music from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in psychology from the University of Exeter. He has published on topics including the psychology of performance, the perception and production of rhythm, the semiotics of music, the relationship between language and music, and music and ecological theory. For ten years he was a member of the improvising string quartet The Lapis String Quartet.
