sense

Publications

• Between Resonance and Signification: Listening, Hearing, and Musicology

  Christian Vassilev · Journal of the Royal Musical Association · 2026-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

  The relation between listening and analysis is a central problem for musicology: analyses propose particular hearings of works, yet the experience that motivates them exceeds what analysis can signify. Drawing on Marion Guck and Jean-Luc Nancy, this article reframes that gap as phenomenological, distinguishing resonant listening, which suspends the subject–object distinction and lets musical sense arise, from hearing, which yields analytic significations. In between lie hearings and their coupled feelings: meaningful unities that emerge from resonant listening yet cannot reproduce it. Recognizing this lets us ask of any analysis whether it issues from lived resonance or from detached signification.