ABSTRACT
Musikerleben is a common experience, but a German term which is perhaps impossible to translate into English. It can be defined as the sum of psychic processes which accompany the experience of music in situations when music is in the focus of interest: When a person is not only hearing, but listening to and appreciating music. The nearest English equivalent would be “music appreciation”, but with its “awareness of salient characteristics” 1 the definition of this term seems to be more restricted than Musikerleben. In comparison with Musikerleben, music appreciation tends to be a more intellectual approach to music based on knowledge that can be acquired in college classes. By using this knowledge the listener is able to trace the structure of the music and recognise its salient characteristics. Music appreciation in this sense corresponds to the idea of “strukturelles Hören”, a concept of the ideal listening style Adorno (1968/ 1976) developed in his writings on music aesthetics. Neither is Musikerleben identical with musical experience, which is a much broader concept (including activities such as playing an instrument, singing, remembering or reading about music). Musikerleben has nothing to do with taste or preferences, but a positive attitude towards music is certainly a precondition. Furthermore, Musikerleben is also part of aesthetic experience, but it is not necessarily an “intense subjective and personal experience”, as this term is described by the American colleagues of the SRIG (Price, 1986). On the contrary, in a perceptual world determined by the omnipresence of various audio and audiovisual media, Musikerleben must be thought of as varying in intensity on different levels of attention. “Strong experiences with music” as discussed by Gabrielsson and Lindstrom (1994) have their counterpart in “diffuse listening”, when music receives almost no attention, reducing Musikerleben to a minimum.
