ABSTRACT
During the five days of the summer school three females and two males from different cultural backgrounds and scholastic traditions listened attentively to Björk’s ‘Crystalline’ for the purpose of analysis. This song had been released only weeks before, so this was our first listening experience of the song. Thus, the music had not yet been connected to our everyday lives, nor did we have the opportunity to interpret it and/or to ascribe meaning to it in a social setting outside the one provided by the summer school. However, it was impossible to disassociate the listening experience from Björk’s firmly established musical persona with which the group were already familiar and which unavoidably filtered our perceptions of the song. Rather than conducting a mere formal analysis of the music, this led us to examine the emotional affects of the song and to study Björk’s performance.
