This week's PG WiP seminar will be led by Giulia Lorenzi (PhD).

Title: "Understanding Musical Virtuosity to Understand the Perception of Music"

Everyone welcome!

 Abstract:

In the realm of auditory perception, philosophers have considered the perception of music as a distinctive case, differentiating it from the perception of noises and everyday life sounds. In order to explain the uniqueness of perceiving music, Scruton (1997) has proposed what he called the acousmatic view, namely the idea that when we experience sounds in the musical context we do so divorcing them from their sources and circumstances of production. This clearly contrasts with the standard view of perception as the source of information about the external world which should characterise, in Scruton’s account, the perception of ordinary sounds. Hamilton (2007, 2009), however, has proposed that both the acousmatic and the non-acousmatic experience of music are aesthetically relevant, constructing as a consequence a two-fold theory which embraces both.  

In order to argue for an account that could combine both acousmatic and non-acousmatic experience tough, Hamilton has the burden of proving how the non-acousmatic experience (the one implying thoughts and awareness of the origins of sounds) can be relevant in the musical context. In order to do that, he presents four objects to Scruton’s account which consider the acousmatic experience as the only essential way to engage with musical sounds. 

In this talk, I am going to focus on Hamilton’s objection on the perception of virtuosity with the intention to support and strength is idea that a non-acousmatic experience of music is both possible and relevant for aesthetic appreciation. In order to do so, I am going to look to accounts of virtuosity present in the literature, sketch a new possible way to go and show how the nature of this aesthetic phenomenon in itself, however understood, requires a non-acousmatic experience in order to be perceived as this phenomenon.