Framing Listening Experiences in Selected Works of Corelli

Abstract

No two listening experiences are exactly the same. Each experience relies not only on musical material, but also on details about listeners, their environment, and their situation in time. Because of this, a number of listeners hearing the same performance will have different experiences, and one listener listening to a recording more than once will experience it differently at different points in time. In these cases, music seems to change—not due to the score or performance, but due to listeners. Most traditional analysis focuses on events that happen within a piece or ways that a piece can act on listeners. What I propose is a shift in analytical perspective to include listeners as an active, necessary component in the musical process. I apply Gibsonian affordances to analytical situations to emphasize the necessity of listeners. In Gibson’s visual world, affordances depend on both the properties of an object and the needs of a perceiver. Because of this relationship, affordances can lend insight into the interaction between object and perceiver. I argue that in the musical world, affordances similarly exist in the interaction between piece and listener. When affordances are used to shape the conversation around musical experience, listeners become mandatory participants as they mediate their experiences in various ways. To further explore the importance and intrigue of subjective experiences, I track multiple listening paths through musical passages and, through comparison of affordances in various interpretations, explain how these different listeners actively mediate their own experiences. Chapter 1 begins by advocating a greater acknowledgement of personal, subjective listening experiences in analytical accounts. It explains how principles from Gibsonian affordances can be applied to music in order to facilitate this shift, namely the focus of musical affordances on listeners and the variant properties they bear. Chapter 2 examines potential issues analysts may encounter when working with subjective musical experiences and suggests solutions to such problems, including the concept of passive listening, questions about the ontology of music, language used to refer to listeners, and standards of academic rigor in such discussions. The analyses in Chapters 3 and 4 use musical affordances and mediation to highlight the interaction between piece and listener, explaining possible listener-centric causes for experiential differences. By providing multiple readings of relatively short examples by Corelli, they explore how listeners’ attention and expectations can mediate musical affordances and therefore musical experience. By tracking my experiences with op. 3 and op. 6/8, Chapter 5 explores the implications of analysis of experience as an enhancement of traditional analytical methods. Chapter 6 concludes by applying both experiential analysis and traditional formal analysis to Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, op. 24, I. Allegro, in order to demonstrate the potential for these analytical ideas to be used more broadly beyond Corelli’s works.