Giulia Lorenzi

The idea that musical professionals with extended musical knowledge, training and exposure to musical pieces, can perceive music differently than other listeners - I call this the Difference Thesis - seems both appealing and problematic. After showing the flaws of previous accounts that attempted to explain it, in this paper, I show how the Difference Thesis can be explained by introducing the idea that listening is a mental action. I argue that the variety of phenomenologies of music emerges from distinct ways of interacting with musical sounds in the action of listening. I support my claim analysing three scenarios in which perceiving a piece of music is part of day-to-day musical practices, highlighting what musical professionals do and perceive in those contexts.

Traditionally, philosophers of perception have focused their attention nearly exclusively on vision. Recently, however, the scientific and philosophical interest in studying other sensory modalities and their interaction has grown. Auditory perception has become an important field of research (O’Callaghan 2007, Nudds & O’Callaghan 2009). In this context, listening to music is usually presented as one variety of auditory perception (O’Callaghan 2021). Nevertheless, at the moment, there is no satisfactory explanation for this classification. The aim of my thesis is to explain the distinctiveness of perceiving music as music. Starting from the analysis of the distinctiveness in a general sense and in a more specific knowledge-related sense, I formulate two possible hypotheses: 1) the distinctiveness comes from the objects of perception, 2) the distinctiveness comes from the type of experience, namely from how we engage with music. I show how the first hypothesis brings us to an unsatisfactory, partial reply and how the second puts us in the right direction. I then suggest that we need to rethink the nature of perception to be able to grasp the distinctiveness of the perception of music. Following O’Shaughnessy (2000) and Crowther’s (2009) works, I introduce the distinction between listening and hearing, and I identify the solution to the case in the idea that listening is a mental action. I show how considering listening an action allows me to find a place for knowledge that emerges as a relevant factor in perceiving music as music in the analysis of cases of perceivers familiar with musical traditions and pieces. I explain how I consider the distinctiveness of the perception of music as music to come from the exercise in listening of a set of abilities which I identify with familiarity with a musical piece or tradition. I finally analyse the experience of musical professionals listening to music.

This article aims to connect issues in the epistemology of modality with issues in the philosophy of music, exploring how modalizing takes place in the context of musical performance. On the basis of studies of jazz improvisation and of classical music, it is shown that considerations about what is sonically, musically, and agentively possible play an important role for performers in the Western tonal tradition. We give a more systematic sketch of how a modal epistemology for musical performance could be constructed. We argue that it is necessary to adopt a pluralist approach toward the modal epistemology of music.