The Changeability of Musical Experience

Abstract

I greatly appreciate the honor of having been nominated to give the Distinguished Lecture at this meeting, especially because this annual series was initiated by my friend, the late Charles Seeger (1977:179-188). On that occasion, in 1976, Charles thought it appropriate to consider the making of a survey of the field of as a whole and to develop his view that, as he put it, musicology of whatever kind, is a speech study. To him, speech and music were two different modalities of mental and emotional activity. He went even further, calling speech an intruder, saying that it is obstructive and that it represents extraneous mental activity or feeling. Elsewhere he thought fit to choose a triadic title for a paper: Music, Speech, and Speech about Music. Charles Seeger was first and foremost a musician, and he could express himself very clearly from that vantage point. For instance, when a group of freshmen at Northwestern University asked him, Sir, what is music? he simply pointed a finger to his forehead and said, Music is the tune in my head. He addressed his audience at that first Distinguished Lecture (1977:185), directly, in the imperative, and spoke from the heart when he said, Try to remember what the making of music was when you were making it at your best, most concentrated, and probably most free of extraneous matter. Seeger was very careful with words; he did not speak of music but of the making of it. These matters were the perennial theme of our discussions. Of course, on the one hand there was nothing to discuss because I accepted the thesis of the linguocentric predicament. Yet, on the other hand, I could not suppress my curiosity about the nature and functions of these of whose reality I had no doubt. The question had to do not only with what these intrusions were but also with the sense in which they could be said to subtract from musical experience or, as the case might be, add to it. I could not ignore what I knew of intrusions from my own musical situation. Although I could see the validity of the argument, I found it difficult to accept the implications inherent in the predicament. For instance, it would have gone against the grain for me to put music and in an irreconcilable either-or relationship. To satisfy my curi-