Regarding Music and Apperception: Locating »Sound« in Tonal and Post-Tonal Contexts

Sound and its apperception are essential to music. But »sound« and »perception« can have different denotations in empirical studies of aural perception and music analysis. To me, musical sound is fundamentally situated: a sound becomes musical when heard not as an isolated aural stimulus, but as an event that serves as the focal point for a complex apperception in which multiple musical events and various human perceptual and cognitive faculties participate. In his essay Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Music Perception, David Lewin probes the sound of a single G-minor chord through an exegesis of various contexts in which it might be heard. After some background on Lewin’s work, I develop a way of thinking about musical sound around two ideas: (1) musical sound is qualitative; and (2) it is context-dependent in a deep way – context penetrates, saturates, is embedded in, and creates musical sound. This idea leads to three others: musical sound is multivalent, distributed, and dynamic. Whereas Lewin explores the formative influence musical contexts exert on sound in a tonal setting (Schubert’s Morgengruß), I consider how this sort of thinking might apply to music outside the bounds of common-practice tonality. With its massive scale, intricate and diverse compositional design, prominent use of varied repetition, and mix of elements of tonality with Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition and atonal materials, Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (1944) is an apt environment in which to consider the possibilities