Musical knowledge - Keith Swanwick

Understanding and responding to music involves several layers of knowledge and

insight: processes in which education has a crucial part to play.
The central concern of Musical Knowledge is the relationship between intuition and
analysis as we engage with music.

To be candid, I myself, for example, have never said in my life a word to my pupils
about the ‘meaning’ of music; if there is one, it does not need my explanations. On the
other hand I have always made a great point of having my pupils count their eighths and
sixteenths nicely. Whatever you become, teacher, scholar, or musician, have respect for
the ‘meaning’, but do not imagine that it can be taught.
(Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 1943, 1972:116)

You may not like this music at first, but that is only because you need to acquire a taste
for it, like a taste for dry sherry.
(A student teacher about to play Beethoven to a class of 11–12-year-old
children in a tough inner London school).

In curiously different ways, both of these statements carry the same message:
we only get to understand and like music by rubbing up against it.

From the outset we ought to notice that drawing attention to certain features of music is
inevitably a form of analysis. Analysis is by no means a dull or trivial occupation,
diverting us from whole-hearted attention to music—though it can become so. It is
simply a way of picking out patterns from anoverall impression, for instance by
focusing on such things as melodic development, harmony or instrumentation.
These analytical patterns or crosssections may (or may not) deepen our understanding
of the work and they certainly have limitations. My own analysis above has the tone of
voice and manner of a kind of narrative; it is a subjective impression, a description of
the forward velocity and sonorous impact of the composition and is as valid in
analytical terms as listing harmonic changes or modulations of key.

But analysis does invite us to see the work from the inside.
As Bernard Shaw says through the character of Undershaft in his play Major Barbara,
‘You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.’
Thus, we lose and gain by knowing more—by being confronted with a different
perspective. Analysis not only reinforces what is already intuitively known but can also
challenge the security that lies in existing knowledge, disturbing the comfort of the
familiar, inviting us to reconstitute our perception.

Imagine a young pianist struggling to play the Sarabande from the Bach D Minor suite
in the Anna Magdalena book. As teachers we are obviously trying to impart more than
just propositional knowledge, perhaps telling the student what a Sarabande is or on
which instrument the piece might originally have been played. Such knowledge could
indeed have an effect on the way the piece is played, perhaps helping to determine the
speed that is chosen or whether or not to use the sustaining pedal or not, even
suggesting levels of touch. If this were indeed so we could regard this as musically
useful knowledge, in the sense that it informs our interpretation of the music.
Notice though, that knowledge about things can so easily be acquired in non-musical
ways. We could find out what a Sarabande is simply by being given a definition or by
reading about it in a book and never actually play or listen to one, thus acquiring
knowledge that may have some kind of historical value but is musically inert: second-
hand knowledge. For this reason musicians and teachers have to be especially careful to
relate factual or prepositional knowledge—knowing ‘that’—with other strands of
musical knowledge. It is possible to have a precise knowledge about music but this is
not the kind of knowledge that musicians and music lovers see as being crucially
important. Edward Elgar once heard someone describe a phrase of Wagner’s in terms of
the chord of the supertonic. He responded with ‘What is the supertonic? I never heard of
it’ (Shaw in Laurence 1981 III: 725).
This is not to say that Elgar—though largely self-taught—was ignorant of the use and
harmonic effect of supertonic chords, only that it had not been important for him to talk
about them or label them in this particular propositional way.
He already knew supertonic chords perfectly well as aural phenomena in the context of
his own and other pieces.
This is an important distinction to which I shall return: the difference between indirect
propositional knowledge by description and that which is acquired and associated
directly through musical experience. If the reader is unfamiliar with In the South, then
my description is an inadequate substitute for the overture; if this work is already
known then my account becomes an attempt to share and compare by analysis. In
neither case can the music be replaced by the verbal description.

FIRST-HAND KNOWLEDGE
We might notice that our young pianist is intent on deciphering the notation: sorting out
the chords, organising fingers. The ability to decode notation (or to write it) is certainly
a musical skill which is of importance in some musical traditions, though by no means
in all. There are also essential aural judgements to be made, deciding whether or not hat
is being played matches the notation, the ability to sort out, match, identify and classify
the sound materials that are the basis of music. And most obvious to other people, there
is also the facility to manage the instrument, to coordinate muscles and articulate keys
in a dependable controlled way. I would put these various ‘knowings’ in this order of
importance; aural discriminations, manipulative control and notational proficiency.
Together they form a strand or layer of knowledge we can call ‘knowing how’, coming
to grips with the materials of music.
‘Knowing how’ is a type of knowledge that we display in action every day. It is
necessary for us to know how to do things, to operate a lathe, to spell a word, to
translate a passage, to ride a bike or drive a car, to use a computer.
Unlike prepositional or factual knowledge, most knowing ‘how’ cannot be learned or
displayed verbally, though workshop conversations and sensitive technical analysis can
be helpful. Skills allow us to find our way into music but they can also divert us from
further musical understanding if they become ends in themselves. We soon tire of
empty ‘virtuoso’ performances. There are other important ingredients for musical
nourishment.
To summarise: I have intuitively reflected upon musical knowing without much in the
way of recourse to what may be called the scholarly literature.
From this naive enquiry, musical knowledge appears to be either propositional or direct,
by acquaintance. Acquaintance knowledge is prime, for there is no other way of
accessing music, and it is complex, having several layers. These I categorise as
materials (knowing how), expression and form (knowing this) and value (knowing
what’s what). Of these it is valuing that characterises the deepest levels of musical
experience.
It is these strands that education in music may be supposed to develop and that process
will involve analysis. Propositional knowledge—factual knowledge by itself—is very
different from musical analysis, which is an activity starting and ending with direct
musical experience, thus having the potential to enrich insights and enlarge musical
response. But a great deal depends upon our conception of the relationship between
analysis and intuitive ways of knowing.

THE ROLE OF ANALYSIS

Intuitive knowledge is not dependable. Like a spring or river it sometimes gets silted up,
requiring conscious attention, dredging, clearing the way for it to flow again, perhaps in
a new direction. I take this to be the essential procedure of Freud and many
psychotherapists, to attempt to bring to mind what lies out of sight, perhaps festering or
at least disturbing, through the process of analysis. The necessity of going beyond the
intuitive is evident in the development of symbolic forms.