Experience and Consciousness: Enhancing the Notion of Musical Understanding

Abstract

Disagreeing with Jerrold Levinson’s claim that being conscious of broad span musical form is not essential to understanding music, I will argue that our awareness of musical architecture is significant to achieve comprehension. I will show that the experiential model is not incompatible with the analytic model. My main goal is to show that these two models can be reconciled through the identification of a broader notion of understanding. After accomplishing this reconciliation by means of my new conception, I will close the paper by discussing some reasons to accept an enhancing notion of musical understanding that includes levels and degrees of understanding.