Music in the Moment

"Jerrold Levinson's new book, Music in the Moment, makes a major contribution to the now flourishing field of philosophy of music. He has a daring thesis about music listening that is going to shake up the experts, and pose for them, and for us all, some very hard questions. To reuse, yet again, the old cliché, no one interested in the field, can afford not to read Levinson's book."—Peter Kivy, author of Authenticities"Jerrold Levinson is one of the world's outstanding philosophers of music. His new book, Music in the Moment, is bold, meticulous, cogent and immensely illuminating of the experience of listening to music."—Malcolm Budd, University of LondonWhat is required for a listener to understand a piece of music? Does aural understanding depend upon reflective awareness of musical architecture or large-scale musical structure? Jerrold Levinson thinks not. In contrast to what is commonly assumed, Levinson argues that basic understanding of music only requires properly grounded, present-focused attention, and that virtually everything in the comprehension of extended pieces of music that suggests explicit architectonic awareness can be explained without positing a conscious grasp of relationships across broad spans.