Abstract

What is the possible relationship between musical structure---the emergence of wholes from the succession of instantaneous parts---and musical experience? This exploration starts with a discussion of the notion of listener, and traverses questions about the metaphorical use of linguistics to describe music. It focuses on the performative aspect of language---such as rhetoric---and their application to music. Aesthetic questions are approached with a primary focus on the music experience: should we use structure as an aesthetic category? And which structure allows a description and/or explanation of the musical experience? ;This rapprochement between cognitive research , neuroscience, psychology of perception and the theories of attention, offers a useful matrix for the understanding of the musical experience. The proposed perspective is to view the musical experience as a moment-to-moment handling of a stream of information, some of it sensory, some of it mental. This large number of different types and categories of information will compete all for our attention on an equal footing. ;I argue that timbre is a more central category than usually acknowledged; that our perception of rhythm is not necessarily hierarchical; and that there is an open-endedness in our cognitive potential to grasp vast amounts of timbrally and rhythmically rich sound moments. ;Rhetoric, an inquiry of persuasion, seems to fit very closely with the attentional, cognitive, and neuroscientific theory of the theater models of consciousness, and a limited flow and unlimited access view of attention . ;This approach to the musical experience sees long-term form as falling into the category of rhetorical, often non-structured, and heuristic actions we use in making the unfolding music coherent. The fact that long-term memory seems to fit a limited scope/vast access model integrates it well with the consciousness model and can lead to an effective interpretive approach of multi-referential aesthetics, such as postmodern music.