Who Listens?: Experience, Cognition, and Musical Meaning

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Janet Bourne (Assistant Professor of Music Theory, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, University of California, Santa Barbara)

Who Listens?

Experience, Cognition, and Musical Meaning

Janet Bourne (Assistant Professor of Music Theory, Assistant Professor of Music Theory, University of California, Santa Barbara)

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English

Oxford University Press Inc
30 September 2025

Other performing arts; Theory of music & musicology; Music: styles & genres

Series: Oxford Studies in Music Theory

Imagine someone who attended a Beethoven Symphony in 1805. Now imagine a listener attending the same symphony today. Both create meanings by relying on previous experiences, but no one assumes they leave their concerts with the same experience. Yet, when analyzing music, we often rely on ""ideal listeners,"" presuming all have the same experience. Who Listens? Experience, Cognition, and Musical Meaning is a fascinating look into the importance of who is listening and how. Author Janet Bourne presents a new set of cognitively-based tools for analyzing music from the perspective of the listener.

This book shows how listening is an active and creative act, and that many people make sense of music largely by drawing on their previous experiences, particularly experiences with music. According to research in cognitive science, listeners use a musical form of analogy and categorization to relate what they previously heard to what they hear in the moment. To demonstrate that listeners draw on this experience to perceive meaning when listening, Bourne combines music analytic tools, empirical psychological methods, and reception history. Drawing on analogy and categorization, Bourne has designed cognitively-based tools for analyzing music from the perspective of the listener to create different interpretations for different listeners. While Part 1 outlines the analytical tools, Part 2 analyzes pieces by Beethoven from the perspective of three groups of listeners: Beethoven's early 19th-century contemporaries; late 20th- and 21st-century musicians and music scholars; and 21st-century film-goers. In so doing, this book illuminates how musical meanings change when considering different listeners' backgrounds and ways of listening, giving voice to overlooked reception histories and musical meanings.

By: Janet Bourne (Assistant Professor of Music Theory Assistant Professor of Music Theory University of California Santa Barbara)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 232mm, Width: 160mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 463g
ISBN: 9780197797174
ISBN 10: 0197797172
Series: Oxford Studies in Music Theory
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 30 September 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Janet Bourne is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara and founder of the UC Santa Barbara Music Cognition Lab. Her research interests include analogy, metaphor and music, cognition behind listening, modes of listening, topic theory, schema theory, narrative and associations, music theory pedagogy and representations of gender and race in film music. She has publications in Music Theory Online, Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening, Music Analysis and Film: Studying the Score, Norton Guide to Teaching Music Theory, Frontiers in Neuroscience, among others. She lives in Orcutt, CA with her husband and son.