What does it mean to understand music?

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Aesthetics and Philosophy of Music

Assignment 2

BMus 2

What does it mean to understand music?  Is understanding important to musical experience or can one experience and enjoy music without understanding it?  Or do you imagine, hope or suspect music to be inherently beyond understanding?  And how would one know that?

To understand, as defined by the Collins English Dictionary, is:

to know and comprehend the nature or meaning of; to realise or grasp (something); to assume, infer or believe; to know how to translate or read; to accept as a condition or proviso; or to be sympathetic to or compatible with “

I believe that this definition of what it is to understand in general will be a useful starting point from which to begin our discussion of understanding in connection with music.  From the above definition it can easily be deduced that to understand music must mean to know and comprehend the nature or meaning of music, to realise or grasp it, to know how to read (translate) printed music and to be sympathetic towards music.  However, such a definition of the understanding of music raises many questions when we try to comprehend what this elucidation of the understanding of music implies. What does it mean to be able to “know and comprehend the nature or meaning of music”, or “realise and grasp music”?  And indeed how is one to know if they truly know and comprehend the nature, much less the meaning, of music?  

It is easy enough for someone to say that they can understand music in terms of being able to make sense of the notes on the page well enough to offer some interpretation of them, being capable of ‘translating’ the notation to sound, but I would be reluctant to describe this type of understanding of music as any more than an understanding of a transcription of the music, not necessarily an understanding of the music itself.  If someone can analyse a piece of music, describe the harmonic structure, the form, development etc. it would definitely be fair to say that they have a greater understanding of the piece than the person who simply ‘translates’ the score without knowing how what they are playing is put together, the significance of it being put together in such a way, or how each part relates to the other.  Therefore it can be concluded that “understanding comes in degrees and in various modes.  Understanding is not at all ‘black and white, that is, the person who understands and the one who does not.  Rather it is a continuous spectrum of greys, ranging from the person with no understanding to the expert in the subject with the greatest understanding.  So if someone can have a partial understanding of something when then can one say that they have understood?  The question we are now faced with is how much understanding of a piece of music, or anything for that matter is required before one can claim to have understood it?  

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The music analyst understands the construction of a piece of music, and “according to a common view of musical understanding, to know how a piece is put together is to advance a long way towards understanding it.  In analysing music, deconstructing it into its component parts and giving different qualities or attributes of the piece names, that is, attaching terms to them or fitting the particular under a universal, it seems that the analyst can come to know and comprehend the nature of the music, but as Roger Scruton states: “The ability to think about music in this way is ...

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