Again I would question exactly what "music" is in the lecture. No definitions are given, he clearly likes Bach for example but "music" includes gagaku and the Wiggles as well. I still persist in saying that there is no such thing as "music" only things that people have variously described as music.
The common complaint that "X isn't music" is actually more than a simple canard: it touches on something that Peterson somewhat avoids stating explicitly. This is intriguing as the nomination of a sequence of sonic events as "music" is precisely a question of framing. One of the implications of the idea that perception is not simply the reception of data but a process involving framing or some other quasi-unconscious categorisation is that potentially every single person has different and incomparable ways of framing.
I sometimes get the impression that some varieties of psychology have a tendency towards universalism whilst others have the opposing tendency. My own tendency is towards a kind of radical particularity of perception, almost to the point of experiential "solipsism". What I mean by this is the idea that, as we cannot hear with another person's ears or brain, we cannot access what music sounds like to them: we can imagine it and they can imagine what we imagine but there is no third position from which to compare those two imaginaries. For some people this may be a cause for despair or surprise: to me it is the most obvious explanation for the variety of different kinds of music and in addition a reason why nearly all universalist theories of music are bound for failure from the outset. Good psychological research into music perception would pay more attention to the differences between (and within) individuals rather than coming up with yet another proof of the "universality" of the major triad when most of the music of the world does without it quite fine.
Obviously the conception of music Peterson operates from is that it is pattern-making in sound that is experienced as being meaningful in some way. This is the frame problem he discusses in the lecture: if perception implies that the same set of coloured patches on the retina or sounds can be categorised in a large number of ways then the problem is how to frame the perceptions. He speaks of the difficulties of building machines that can perceive as well as we can because our perceptual systems have been informed by a whole history of perception. We might think of "tradition" in music as the material sedimentation of that history of listening: this means that the genuinely new in music is almost unable to be perceived. A more strictly musical version of the problem is what I call the "succession problem". In listening and exploring the world of music available to us the order in which we hear works affects each one: someone who doesn't hear a single note of Schubert until after they have absorbed say the music of the post WWII period is not hearing the same work as someone who listens to Schubert only without knowing anything else (yes one of my customers at our store listened almost only to Schubert lieder, having bought the massive Hyperion set of all the lieder). Someone who has never been to a lieder recital will see the weirdness of the format and its rituals in all purity.
He comes close to arguing that because music is beyond the exercise of reason that it has survived the disenchantment of the world, lived on after the death of God. This is indeed the way that Nietzsche once saw music and the idea of a "musical religion" is attractive in some ways but also dangerous: again the question is whose music? Why does thinking of Wagner as being about "the transcendental" make sense but the idea that the Wiggles are engaged in the same pursuit seems ridiculous? I get the strong impression that Peterson is a believer in "the transcendental": it is hinted in the lecture that this could well be an effect of our perception but it's not really followed through and it would take a book to describe how this might be the case.
Ultimately the framing issue is rather like the problem of whether "private language" is possible in Wittgenstein - Peterson's position seems to be that music is a universal, non-translatable "language". Obviously I tend towards the idea that "private language" is precisely what music can become and indeed, has become once the common practice era finished in the 20th century. I don't see this at all as a problem. It is actually to be celebrated even if audiences cling to ingrained habits and framings of sound which makes the "classical music" audience possibly the most backward and tedious one. If conceiving of music as a private language gives us the variety of styles and sounds we see today I can't see any problem with giving up the pretension of universality. I think composers themselves gave up on that a long time ago, theorists should as well.
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