Music in the Moment

by Jerrold Levinson

"What is required for a listener to understand a piece of music? Does aural understanding depend upon reflective awareness of musical architecture or large-scale musical structure? Jerrold Levinson thinks not. In contrast to what is commonly assumed, Levinson argues, basic understanding of music requires nothing more than properly grounded, present-focused attention; and virtually everything in the comprehension of extended pieces of music that suggests explicit architectonic awareness can be explained without the need to posit a conscious grasp of relationships across broad spans." "Levinson rejects the notion that keeping music's large-scale form before the mind is somehow essential to fundamental understanding of it. As evidence, he describes in detail the experience of listening to a wide range of music. He defends, with some qualifications, the views of the nineteenth-century musician and psychologist Edmund Gurney, author of The Power of Sound, who argued that musical comprehensi