Concatenationism and Anti-architectonicism in Musical Understanding

Abstract

This article discusses Jerrold Levinson's theory of concatenationism, which emphasizes the moment-by-moment character of musical listeners’ basic musical understanding, and the related project of anti-architectonicism, which denies the influence of large-scale music-structural information on basic musical understanding. A reconstruction of Levinson's position reveals him to embrace a qualified architectonicism himself and shows that his remaining anti-architectonicism is afflicted with several problems. While the conceptual distinction Levinson draws between a piece of music and its structure as well as his three “intuitions for concatenationism” all point toward important features of musical understanding, it is argued that none of them supports the anti-architectonicist thesis in the intended manner. Furthermore, the way Levinson relates both musical understanding and musical value to a notion of aural cogency renders it difficult to see how one could understand music that one does not value or value music that one cannot understand. It is argued that the anti-architectonicist focus of Levinson's project, together with the ensuing argumentative problems, follows from methodological commitments that might be overcome within disciplinary frameworks beyond philosophy. Suggestions are given for developing a positive concatenationism both in musicology and in philosophical aesthetics.