ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an attractive and commonsensical thesis that has been circulating for as long as people have talked about music. It focuses on a phenomenologically grounded aesthetic notion of distraction, with a view to its role in the judgements that listeners might make about the Bakhtinian polyphony of gestures in Aria II. Some preliminary observations can be made about the agon of voices in this single Stravinskyian gesture. Listening to popular music differs from classical music both because of the music and because of the dynamics of its media and discursive set up though pop music can obviously be listened to attentively as well. Gnawing away at the certainties of cognition, distraction works over polyphony and structural listening and loosens their useful and necessary assumptions and elective analytical discourse. Internal musical distractions are usually more subtle, encompassing events such as another segment of the same work, a different musical parameter, and sound perceived as tone.
