Platonism, Music And the Listener's Share (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

"What is a musical work? What are its identity-conditions and the standards (if any) that it sets for a competent, intelligent, and musically perceptive act of performance or audition? Can works be thought of as possessing certain attributes, structural features, or intrinsically valuable qualities that might always elude even the sharpest-eared listener?" "These are some of the questions that Christopher Norris addresses by way of a sustained critical engagement with the New Musicology and debates in recent philosophy of music. His book puts the case for a 'qualified Platonist' approach that would respect the relative autonomy of musical works as objects of more or less adequate understanding, appreciation, and evaluative judgement whilst leaving room for the 'listener's share' - or the phenomenology of musical experience - in so far as those works necessarily depend for their realization from one hearing to the next upon certain humanly salient modes of perceptual and cognitive response."--BOOK JACKET.