It does grab me, because I've had the same thoughts, and my post was almost a reproach to my own tendency towards essentialism. — jamalrob
This might be an unwelcome spanner in the works, but I feel like asking, why is this about listening? The complete appreciation or absorption in a piece of music is just as often represented by dancing. Thinking of it like that puts a different light on the question, I think. Unless we want to restrict the discussion to art music.
Then it might seem like the whole idea of the "entire piece" is a historical artifact of the development of music alongside visual art since the Renaissance: the work of art as a neatly delimited thing of special value. Maybe a great piece of music can be a living, changing thing, hardly just a thing at all.
EDIT: RIP McCoy Tyner
I did get drawn into your thread, but on reflection, it seems rather a contrivance to me now. Why should the word 'listening' actually have meaning at all if we interrupt a piece of music to do something seeming more important at the time? — ernestm
You know YouTube has the audacity to intersperse ads into long orchestral recordings? Heathens, I tell you. — Moliere
I'm not sure I'm following here. I mean I might have to go do something else but everything I was doing before having to do something else was still what I was doing, regardless. The verb still has meaning. — Moliere
Let's go along with this. The identity of a musical artwork is a set or class of sound-events identified through notation, recording, or both. — Moliere
So we could say, in the above that we heard the entire piece, at least. — Moliere
I like how you [@TheMadFool] point out that when we push pause we're introducing something to our experience which the composer also uses in the artwork. That would be why the visual division served as analogue -- because the artist uses space in the case of paintings. — Moliere
Still, I think I'm being won over by the identity theory posited by bongo fury, for now at least. — Moliere
Whereas pausing it does introduce a significant difference to the work of art, — Moliere
the identity of the work of art is unchanged by my pausing it and starting it back up again. — Moliere
Hang on, though... not to be ungrateful but, is "the above" the OP? So you are agreeing after all with the suggestion that an instance of an artwork can be served up in two halves and still be an instance of the same artwork? :grimace: — bongo fury
Still?? Despite the preceding? But I'm totally on board with you and the TheMadFool for that preceding paragraph. So, what's coming?... — bongo fury
Well, in the sense that the artwork is still either the set of continuous plays of the recording or the set of complete realisations of the score, whether or not you facilitated one of those plays or realisations on this occasion, yes. But in the sense that you got both halves and therefore all of one of the continuous plays or realisations that multiply instantiate the artwork, no. — bongo fury
In a sense, yes you listened to the whole piece. However, you did not listen to it in the way the composer designed it to be heard as. You listened to it in pieces to get to the whole instead of listening to it in one piece. Music is made in a way to absorb the whole rhythm, style,etc as a whole to see the full beauty of it. — Julia
the above is clearer. Hopefully? — Moliere
the way the composer designed it to be heard — Julia
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