ABSTRACT
These lists of musical likings and dislikings, compiled from my Answerers’ separate Dossiers should bear out my contention that what I may call the central aesthetic phenomena is a combination into which enter two equally necessary factors: the individual work of art and the individual mind (of “Listener,” “Hearer,” Beholder, Reader) which perceives it. This individual perceiving mind is different, having different capacities, habits, expectations and needs; it is therefore bound to respond to different appeals potential in the work of art, as my analysis of various Answerers should have shown. Hence frequent differences and even glaring contradictions in the responses to one and the same style or composer: to begin with, the main difference between “Listeners” and “Hearers,” between Answerers who are concentrated on the music for itself, and Answerers who add other interests from their individual emotional and imaginative stores. So much for the difference of taste. But there are also and to a far greater extent, similarities. The individual “Listener” or “Hearer” is, after all, a human being with a mental and bodily constitution far more like than unlike that of his fellows. Also, having been subjected to the same influences, he has come to share their habits and expectations. His aesthetic sensibilities, even his primary musical perceptions (e.g. what, according to country and century, he perceives as consonant and dissonant, as one scale-sequence or two independent modes) have been educated by the music he has habitually heard, for if an art is influenced by its audience, that audience has been moulded by the art. 544Moreover, his individual responses have been accentuated, positively or negatively, by those of his entourage, as one can see in the case of members of the same family (Bessie and Isabella) or even of a group of people frequently hearing the same performers or using the same gramophone records. All of which influences in common tend to narrow down the types into which preferences are gathered by the, so to speak, innate musical or emotional or imaginative constitution of the Answerers; and to account for the great similarity within each class of Answerer.
