[Musical Knowledge]

What do we mean when we talk about knowing a work, or getting familiar with a work as a prerequisite for understanding art? Does it mean that we heard it, saw it, or read it? We cannot say that we know a work just because we heard it, even if we have heard it many times. In what way is the effect of a work enhanced if we hear it more than once—towards knowing the whole, or towards knowing the details, the technical elements, or the construction of the work? And even if we “know” a work, on what basis do we deliver a “judgment” of it? “Knowledge” of a work is limited only to the conductor, who needs to know it as a whole. But we—the listeners— only know those elements that take root in our memory and of course a certain “effect,” or sensation, which is not always the same for each hearing. What is more, we cannot change a work through our opinion, because a work is a given once and for all. Finally, our opinion of a work changes over time and we accept it as such. There is not any criticism that will now change Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which will live on forever with all its “mistakes.”

Thus our musical knowledge is very relative. It results from the way we abstract certain elements from certain eras that developed under circumstances with which we are unfamiliar but arrange into an order in our psychology, according to certain labels, according to certain works composed at that time, and according to certain theoretical rules that usually come afterwards and not before. In short, we arrange the work according to a “cliché” for which we have little evidence. We have, for example, the definitive form of the sonata, which, as we contend, developed “by the laws of nature.” But on the basis of which laws? On the basis of our logical probability, our understanding of space and time, our understanding of geometric laws, or on the basis of our instinctive human feeling, which is dependent on all of the above?