This study presents the sketch of a theory of musical listening based on historical considerations of the role of music in Western culture. A universal element of musical listening might lie in the notion that all music is the product of a fundamental human capacity to hear, harnessed in countless ways by diverse cultures. Secondly, there is the type of music, covering very broad historical and cultural boundaries, that presupposes attentive listening or even a participating audience; this is perhaps the simplest and most familiar category, at least in the West. Finally, there is the range of music that might contain an ‘implied listener’, something which I suggest is much more elusive, with specific historical and cultural boundaries within Western modernity. While this sense of the implied listener – someone developing the sense of a consistent and unitary self over time – is understandable today and might well still be employed in a broad range of new music, I would suggest that it now reflects only one way of being human among an alarmingly broad array of choices.

This response highlights the cultural specificity of the ‘work-concept’ and questions the tripartite scheme of listening proposed by John Butt. It offers an alternative set of listening categories, and makes reference to the issues of early-modern class structures and the role of music in religious devotions. The argument is supported by critiques of historical vignettes that include the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's transcription of Gregorio Allegri's Miserere and Jean Joseph Marie Amiot's demonstration of French music to a Chinese audience in the mid-eighteenth century.

The purpose of this paper is to describe some aspects of the agenda of listening in the Western tradition. Ancient and modern versions of some of the myths of listening (Orpheus, the Sirens) are compared to illustrate what might be at stake in the activity of listening. A basic contrast is drawn between ancient rhetorical ideas of the power of music to affect the listener and the demand of instrumental music, from the late eighteenth century on, that we understand what the music wants of us. The paper continues with a discussion of some ancient ideas about philosophical listening, which precludes talking and is directed both inwards and outwards, and it ends with some suggestions about themes that a history of listening might pursue.

This response considers whether it is possible to think of listening as a non-coercive alternative to ‘the gaze’. An attention to the work of ancient and modern thinkers provides a starting point for conceptualizing musical ‘possession’ in a way that is not bound to asymmetrical, subject–object relations.

Early recordings raise fundamental questions about our response to music. Why do these performances seem so strange to us? How could they ever have made musical sense to listeners? How might we make sense of them now, in our very different music-cultural environment? This paper looks at some of the ways in which musical sounds model other processes involving change over time. A mechanism is proposed that may underlie the cross-domain mappings generating musical meaning. Music is seen to be exceptionally adaptable to the modelling of other experiences, able to offer many potential likenesses, among which those with most relevance to what an individual brain already knows and believes are favoured by conscious perception. Performance and perception styles change over time as certain kinds of potential meaning are selected for their relevance to other aspects of contemporary experience. The model helps to explain how subjectivity is constructed and how it changes.

This response to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's paper questions whether the (explanatory) movement between culture, nature, biology and music is as seamless as his argument suggests.

This paper presents a view of musical listening as an active, dynamic and interactive process. After briefly considering the historical valorization of listening as critical act within Western musical culture, the paper describes the cognitive processes of schematization that are involved in musical listening. The central role of active engagement with the auditory environment in eliciting emotional responses to music is then sketched out, and the scope and limits of the attentional and motoric processes involved in processes of entrainment – focal in the experience of musical time – are outlined. Neuroscientific evidence that suggests that music is best conceived in terms of a perception–action cycle is reviewed, and the paper concludes by proposing that music is best conceptualized – from a biological perspective – as a communicative medium that is optimal for the management of situations of social uncertainty.

This paper outlines an approach to listening drawn from the anthropology and sociology of music, arguing that there is a pressing need for comparative empirical studies of listening. I suggest that the terms of the discussion should shift from listening to the broader category of musical experience, in this way allowing questions of the encultured, affective, corporeal and located nature of musical experience to arise in a stronger way than hitherto. I propose a focus on the relations between musical object and listening subject, where this entails analysis of the social and historical conditions that bear on listening, and of the changing types of subjectivity brought to music. The point is that neither these conditions, nor the forms of music's mediation, nor the relations between musical object and subject can be fully known in advance. I sketch three perspectives from anthropology and sociology that indicate the kinds of insight offered by empirical research which takes listening-as-musical-experience, and the situated, relational analysis of musical subjects and objects, as its focus.

This paper aims to demonstrate that listening is not only a highly complex sensory-perceptive phenomenon, but also an activity that invites considerations of its moral, political and religious dimensions. Drawing from the perspective of an early monastic tradition that understood theology as a sounding practice rather than a primarily cognitive one, the author draws attention to the fact that the biblical tradition itself prioritized hearing over seeing in its portrayal of the human being as ‘all ear’ when communicating with and responding to a God that addresses her from the first. Analyses of Martin Luther's account of the new creation in Christ as one that will be awakened to hearing afresh, thus becoming attentive to the ‘address of creation through creation’, and of his theology of the psalter, in which the reformer presents an excitingly different hermeneutics of scriptural interpretation based on the sensory perception of hearing/chanting the text, prepare for concluding remarks on the inevitably communicative and quasi-sacramental character of listening.

This response aims to widen the implications suggested by Bernd Wannenwetsch by exploring how music may promote a listening that breaks out of a monad-like subject.

Contributions to the discussions following the papers presented at the Royal Musical Association conference ‘Listening: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ held at King's College, Cambridge, on 24–25 November 2006 were particularly animated. This paper attempts to capture in outline the main exchanges of the question-and-answer sessions, while at the same time doing justice to the broad interdisciplinary spirit that characterized the event.