Should the Method Define the Task (Ferrara, Ch. 2)

Summary:
Ferrara states, "Conventional methods of music analysis define their own tasks and scope of inquiry largely based on the evolution of inherent strengths and weaknesses of each method." For this reason, methods always yield success. A different way to evaluate the adequacy of a method is to examine its responsiveness to musical sound-in-time, form and relevance. Ferrara maintains that the dynamic interplay of a work's multiple levels of significance should demarcate the scope and define the nature of the tasks required of the method. For this reason, an eclectic method, where the strengths of each method are used, is needed.

Ferrara notes that "all analyses are marked by structures of pre-understanding," which means that pure listening and pure understanding is impossible. He then discusses Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophy that biases and prejudices, or tradition, provide the initial stance for any understanding of history and historical objects, including music. Ferarra summarizes one of Gadamer's points that, "Man doesn't posess understanding. Understanding is a fundamental way in which man engages and exists in the world...without prejudice, experiences would be incoherent and buoyless." He asserts that a person can only understand something from the viewpoint of his own time, location, and culture. He observes that the time and place in which an analyses is done impacts what the work can mean and states that the analyst must balance his own ontological world with that of the artist's. This doesn't restore the old world. Instead, it synthesizes the original meaning with what the work can mean now.

The eclectic analysis requires the listener to hear music as an aesthetic object rather than an art object. Ferarra discusses this idea in conjunction with the philosophy that an abject becomes an aesthetic object when an aesthetic attitude is directed toward it. He gives the example of a millionaire viewing a Rembrandt as a beautiful painting (aesthetic attitude) as opposed to viewing it as a financial investment. He then presents the two phenomenologies used in the eclectic analysis. Husserl's descriptive phenomenology (known in the book as "phenomenology") is based on the image of a monadic, private consciousness that is cut off from the world. Heideggar's interpretive phenomenology (or "hermeneutic") attempts to uncover referential meaning in the work. Gadamer believes that phenomenological and hermeneutic analysis can reverse the subject-object relationship because the music become the subject and poses questions to the analyst, who becomes the object and responds to the work.

Ferarra concludes that "to be objective is to save the object from dominance." Traditional methods don't do this becuase they are a vehicle for the subject's dominance. Real objectivity is not possible because of the nature of the data that conventional systems seek. Conventional analysis is therefore necessarily subjective. He states that the most attainable degree of objectivity "occurs when analytical tasks support freedom of music to show itself multi-dimensionally."

Reaction:
My favorite concept in this chapter is that "Man doesn't posses understanding. Understanding is a fundamental way in which man engages and exists in the world." I spent a while thinking about that and interpreted it to essentially mean that understanding is just one of the tools we can use as humans to interact with the world around us. Other tools could include just noticing the world around us, or using materials from the world. It's a very organic concept, and I think that even contemplating it takes a person a lot closer to understanding many things about the world. It in effect brings a person into the world which they are trying to understand, whereas the traditional view that humans posses understanding closes man off from the world. Rather than man using understanding as a knife to cut the world open, this concept suggests that understanding is more of a game the world and man plays together. When we search for it in the correct ways, the world reveals itself to us.