S&W OTD, Part the Second

Today's workspace is our apartment, namely the ambiguous zone where the second couch cushion becomes the third couch cushion, and the right two-thirds of the coffee table, where I worked from 8 to 1 on my final composition project for Modal Counterpoint class, and am now working on my Notation term paper. This space is also where I very recently learned that it is entirely possible, even likely, that I do not know how to spell the word "cushion."

Your Sentence of Zen today was mostly not written by me, but rather by David Lewin, one of the more famous contemporary music theorists, and a figure whom I am addressing in not one but TWO of my term papers this semester. In one, I assess his disciplinary contributions; in the other, I attempt to put some of them into practice in new ways. Either way, his voluminous writings have left a lot of really big ideas for music theorists to think about. What follows is just one, but it's a good one. Bracketed by my interpretation, this passage is a shot across the bow of music theory circa 1986, a celebration of the complexity of music and musical experience, and a launching pad for the ideas (even careers) of dozens of theorists that have followed Lewin.

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Under a Cartesian, intervallic methodology (as exemplified by Lewin’s GIS methodology and, by implication, most other music-theoretical discourse), there is a division between the analyst (res cogitans) and the objects of musical analysis (res extensa), which are arrayed before him as detached, visually-apprehended entities in some conceptual space. To borrow one of Lewin’s locutions from another one of his essays, “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,” such an attitude

arise[s] from a tradition in studies of perception…that there is something X that perceives, and something Y that is perceived … Classical European philosophy and Indo-European sentence structure suggest to us that we call X a “subject” and Y an “object,” mentally supplying a verb that describes a relationship in which X is doing something to Y-that-is-not-X; X is “observing” Y or “perceiving” Y, or something of that sort.[1]

Under the influence of this received Cartesianism, music theorists attempt to describe musical phenomena in terms of “this acoustic signal here as I listen to it over this time span, that is impinging upon me (but is not me).[2]

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[1] Lewin, “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,” in Studies in Music With Text (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 93.

[2] Lewin, “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,” 94 (emphasis added).