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Mark DeBellis. Music and Conceptualization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. viii, 163 pp. ISBN 0-521-40331-6 (hardcover). Mark DeBellis's new book, Music and Conceptualization, offers a formal philosophical analysis of the following thesis: "a trained music listeners hear music differently from Ordinary listeners.'" DeBellis begins with an assumption: a trained [music] listener's perceptual concepts are typically integrated with theories of music and analytic frameworks. ... [A]n ordinary listener's musical hearing [is typically not integrated this way and therefore] is strongly nonconceptual" (p. 7, italics mine). So, for DeBellis, "training" is the listener's ability to apply music-theoretic concepts to what s/he hears perceptually: "the semantic properties of 'hears ... as a dominant' depend on those of 'is a dominant,' and our understanding of what it is for someone to hear a pitch as a dominant depends on a prior understanding of what it is for a pitch to be a dominant" (p. 20). The distinction between levels of musical competence, perceptually at least, is that "hearing and thought are related by epistemic (i.e., conceptual) equivalence for the trained listener, but not for the ordinary listener" (p. 28). Right from the start DeBellis assumes that there are differences in what is heard between music listeners of varying abilities, where "abilities" are carefully marked as training in music theory. (He adds that some of this ability may be intuitive, but he does not pursue this possibility very far.) This assumption leads DeBellis to his "null hypothesis: ... that musical hearing is perceptual belief and hearing ascriptions are ascriptions of perceptual belief (p. 26). In short, DeBellis assumes that music is a composer- or performer-structured event (more on this later). Further, that some listeners perceive these structures by means of acquired music-theoretic concepts (where a "concept" is "a certain psychological capacity ... in which one grasps a particular mode of presentation" [p. 32]- e.g., "dominant"), and that other listeners (those who are untrained in music-theoretic concepts) do not perceive these structures. Music-theoretic concepts perceived by a trained listener result in musical beliefs, where a "belief is equivalent to holding a particular music-theoretic concept. Since, therefore (and somewhat tautologically), "trained" listeners must hold different beliefs from "untrained" listeners (who, from this viewpoint, may even hold no beliefs or at least not a belief that is unified by a single music-theoretic concept) about what they hear, "trained" listeners hear music differently from "untrained" listeners. Indeed, for DeBellis the latter group is perceptually deficient (p. 40 n. 43). Contemporary research in music cognition is largely about pattern representation, discrimination, and concomitant beliefs as they pertain thereof. But DeBellis, in order to facilitate his argument, contends that certain kinds of musical representations are not beliefs; they are instead "strongly non-conceptual representations." DeBellis explains: On the given model, a listener (of a certain kind), upon hearing a musical passage (of a certain kind in certain circumstances), will represent certain events in the same way. But the [ordinary] listener has no ability to discriminate those events and others; nor is he disposed to judge that those events, and only those events, are similar in any salient respect. The said representations of those events are not, in short, unified for that listener under the same concept or mode of presentation. Therefore, that kind of presentation cannot (qua type) be a perceptual belief. (pp. 61-62, italics mine) DeBellis offers an example: "An ordinary, untrained listener ... cannot reliably tell, in general, when two pitches of [a] melody are the same-as on the italicized words in 'Oh-oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light' [opening phrase of the American National Anthem]-and when they are different. …