It seems to me of considerable instructional importance, in music
education, to develop the listener’s ability to distinguish between per-
ception and apperception. If listeners are encouraged to follow solely
the melodic structure, or the rhythmic or polyrhythdc forms, at the
same time as they listen to a work as an acoustic whole, such an
exercise can be called selective audition. Moreover, it permits the
listener not only to concentrate on one element of the musical idiom,
but to disregard another, e.g. to disregard chords whenever the poly-
phonic style aims at emphasizing something other than the vertical
cohesive forces which bear that name. The importance of this process
becomes obvious, for example, when it is desired to make a public,
previously addicted to the homophonic, familiar with the quintessence
of .the polyphonic.
A recent experiment in music education was designed to enable a group
of some 150 listeners (all non-professional adults), at evening gatherings,
to ‘pass through’ the three stages of musical understanding, which
every listener normally experiences.
The first of these stages consists in simple reception, which is passive,
non-analytical, non-critical and even less disposed to form a synthesis.
The listener makes no particular effort when hearing the music; his
attention is rather vague and haphazard, and he has no really clear idea
of what he is listening to. However, he grasps certain passages which
please or impress him, or which seem less obscure than others....
This is the attitude of 80 per cent of our amateur concert-goers. It is
natural and even inevitable.
The second stage is the opposite of the first; it is analytical, critical,
anatomical, even surgical. It is the stage at which the listener consciously
decomposes the music into its different elements, in order to consider
each of them separately-the technical, aesthetic and tectonic elements,
artificially isolated from the work as a whole.This attitude is, no less than
the first, an essential step towards musical understanding, althoughit has
its pitfalls because it involves decomposing something that is, in fact,
a composition. By splitting up the unit, by dissecting it in detail, we are
subjecting an organism, into which its creator has breathed robust life,
to treatment that is more applicable to dead and inorganic things.
Misfortune, therefore, awaits those who remain concentrated on
analysis, who rivet their attention on technical details when listening
to, or playing music.
A third stage, consequently, must be proceeded to-that in which
the various elements are recomposed so as to reconstitute the work