ABSTRACT
What happens, in general terms, when we listen to a Mozart piano sonata, for instance the first movement of the B flat Sonata K.281 (1775)? I start from the premise that listening to a work such as this considers itself as an activity that involves an aural encounter with an object; that is, the piece of music is objectified in order to be the substance with which an encounter takes place. That involves a degree of philosophical context. What, for instance, is the nature of the thing so objectified? Is it, for instance, substantial material ‘out there’, external to the perception? Or is it an object constructed by the perceiver? If the object were wholly external its form would also be quite difficult to comprehend. Clearly Mozart wrote this sonata at a particular time and in a particular place. Moreover, he recorded the sonata in notated, reproducible form, and when a listener encounters the piece in a performance, what is happening is that a performer is enacting a physical encounter with the notated score in order to convert it into sound which the listener perceives. To that extent, the stimulus for the listener is external both in the sense that a composed piece of music is what is being attended to and in the sense that this particular encounter is a particular physical reproduction of a notated score. Nevertheless, it is impossible to exclude both the interpretation of the performer and that of the listener. That of the performer remains external to the listener, of course. But in the sense that that interpretation is interposed between the composition and the listener in any specific performance, then that external musical object experienced by the listener is no longer directly the work itself, but something mediated. Indeed, in such a situation, it is difficult to quantify what the work itself might consist of: rather, the listener’s encounter is with an object not fixed, but fluid in kind. And what the listener perceives in any case is then interpreted personally in accordance with whatever paraphernalia and experiences are brought to a particular listening situation, perhaps subtly tailored to the appreciation of a particular musical style, perhaps not. In any event, it is difficult to see how the particular form that the object of the listening encounter takes in the listener’s mind can be independent of the listener’s concepts of, for instance, structure, whether on the level of movement form, phrase construction, cadence construction, motivic construction or any other parameter – any or all of which may indirectly have been built up in the listener’s mind over time as a result of either listening to music or reading about its form in textbooks or both. Perhaps what is listened to, then, is not purely an encounter with an external musical object, but a continually shifting internal dialogue between what is heard on the particular occasion and structures for musical understanding stored in the listener’s memory. All of this makes listening to Mozart’s music quite a complicated activity.
