Phenomenology of Music

Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology; From Phenomenology to Critical Theory
(London: Bloomsbury, 2022)

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/g%C3%BCnther-anders-philosophy-of-technology-9781350228580/?fbclid=IwAR3eNUw90xrdaJ44UC1MTKYnSvegjeyBgFbIsY4viZrJdmdlqgYNpHjMPlI

This essay is about a phenomenon that, paradoxically, both disrupts mind wandering and accounts for its spontaneity: distraction. It is more about one of the mechanisms underlying mind wandering than its phenomenological content. However, following acknowledgements that mind wandering has positive and negative consequences for task fulfilment (Mooneyham & Schooler, 2013), this essay attempts to recuperate distraction, configuring it in terms of ‘drag’ in order to analyse it as more than merely bad or failed listening. Dragging the listener back onto her body, distraction emphasises an indeterminacy that, although covered over by the traction generated by regular and consistent listening, is always already embodied within the materiality of musical sound. This essay is about the impact of distraction upon the listener in the audience and the extent to which distraction forces her to recalibrate her activity as a hybrid of ‘listening despite distraction’ and ‘distracted listening’; a separate essay would be required to consider the quite different ways in which performers deal with distraction.

I saggi raccolti in questo volume discutono alcuni temi della filosofia della musica nel Novecento : dalla presenza del mito di Beethoven nella cultura centroeuropea, all’interpretazione delle rapide metamorfosi dei materiali sonori posteriori alla crisi del sistema tonale, al proposito di individuare nella musica una peculiare esperienza della temporalità. L’esame critico coinvolge i criteri d’interpretazione dell’opera musicale fondati su paradigmi quali la fenomenologia, l’ermeneutica, il pensiero dialettico, la teoria della ricezione.

Studying the application of the metaphor the primary objective of this seminar is to enhance AIA member's practical day-to-day work to the more ideal aspects of architecture and architectural design. This seminar will provide members the opportunity to discuss architectural ideas and their meanings.

Sergiu Celibidache was one of the greatest conductors of the XX century and also a figure who studied music from the point of view of a philosopher, mathematician and a performer. His understanding of the sound properties and its relations within the human conscience makes of him a capital figure in the history of conducting. In his relation with Spain, through friends, orchestras, students and general public, he shaped the aspect and the way we understand the orchestral technique in Spain.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), an outstanding writer and existentialist philosopher, was closely concerned with the issues of art. For music it is mainly his early philosophical work that is relevant with its themes of emotional experiencing and imaginative consciousness, but also through views anticipating Sartre’s central philosophical system drawn in the substantial work, Being and Nothingness (1943). The paper outlines the nature and transformations of Sartre’s views on music and meanings it has, mainly with respect to its potential of outer-musical references. Besides philosophical concepts it also takes into consideration Sartre’s own experiences with art.

Il presente lavoro nasce con l'intenzione di avviare un percorso filosofico nel merito del problema dell'esperienza musicale e della costituzione dei suoi oggetti, chiarendo alcune tematiche fondamentali in vista della possibilità di una descrizione fenomenologica dell'esperienza musicale. Il lavoro si articola in tre momenti distinti. Il primo momento consta di una digressione storico-critica volta a far emergere le necessità teoretiche che guidano lo sviluppo dei successivi due. Il secondo momento si raccorda al primo attraverso un focus sul fenomeno dell'espressività musicale, tema che dall'inizio del secolo scorso si è affermato come portante in buona parte del dibattito filosofico contemporaneo. Tale fenomeno viene messo in luce come gradiente qualitativo nel determinare il confine tra ciò che è musica e ciò che che non siamo disposti a riconoscere come tale. La sua indagine permette una prima delineazione della costituzione ontologica degli oggetti cui  si riferisce l'esperienza musicale. Il terzo ed ultimo momento interroga infine la pratica musicale in quanto sfera originaria. All'interno di essa hanno origine e spazio di sviluppo una nozione socialmente condivisa di “musica” e un sistema normativo in grado di presiederne a priori le realizzazioni concrete, vale a dire gli oggetti musicali stessi.

Based on the understanding of hearing as a means of survival in an natural environment and the fundamental notion that music creates time, a theory of listening dimensions underlying the experience of music is proposed. See also the critical comments in The Musical Timespace. A Concise version 2012.

This article deals with the philosophical idea of worldmaking pursued through techné, meaning the fusion of the technical means of artistic creation, theorizing, and analysis, but specifically occurring in a feedback loop involving introspection and computation (cybernetic phenomenology). The discussion ranges over a wide variety of topics, including (1) the history of music theory from Ancient Greece to the present (including a rebuttal to Daniel Chua’s (2001) account of music history); (2) emergent properties in music arising from self-organization (explored through the Ancient Chinese abstract strategy board game go); (3) the ontology of musical qualities (properties) and categories (including their relation to visual, tactile, and olfactory qualities and categories). 
Various repertoires, artists, and philosophies are referenced. The essay analyzes aspects of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, Carter’s String Quartet No. 5, and Lachenmann’s Kinderspiel.  Connections to the author’s own previous analytical and theoretical work are also discussed in relation to his interactive algorithmic audio-visual works (such as Fluxations and FluxNOISations). The techné of these is discussed in terms of logistics as well as aesthetic influences, including Wagner, Liszt, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Crawford, Babbitt, Carter, Xenakis, Parker, Reich, Ligeti, Truax, Oliveros, Kandinsky, Miro, Pollock, Pollock, Hofmann, Rothko, Louis, Frankenthaler, Moholy-Nagy, Newman, Richter, and Brakhage.  The essay touches on philosophical ideas of Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, Harman, and Bogost, and more fully engages the philosophies of Nelson Goodman and Hannah Arendt in connection with artistic creation as relating to the theorizing and analysis of artistic works.     

Contact the author at [email protected]
Download the article through JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.54.1.0005
or http://tinyurl.com/zdvkllr

In recent musicology, scholars have identified the sun—and its light—as a topic of musical discourse. Despite these latest albeit brief mentions, no scholar has expounded or populated the topic beyond a few isolated cases, let alone offered speculation as to how the compelling analogy between light and sonorous expression might operate, either in the hands of the composer or in the mind of the listener. Unlike most other musical topoi, light and its modulations exist as conspicuously visual phenomena, and this raises an important question about how depictive topoi are perceived when listening to music: what does it mean to hear a sunrise? And, why might composers develop similar strategies concerning orchestral timbre and form in order to convey an experience devoid of sound?
The dissertation examines orchestral depictions of sunrise and sunset from an interdisciplinary vantage point, by first proposing similarities and continuities between the ancient literary theory (rhetorical device or exercise) of ekphrasis on the one hand, and the evolution of the modern philosophical and psychological term ‘apperception’ on the other hand. Taken together, I argue that these seemingly unrelated modes of thought suggest the possibility for a theory of enargeia (vivacity) in music. Moreover, by considering recent developments in the perceptual study of timbre and orchestration, I propose several apperceptive features of orchestral sunrises and sunsets that demonstrate the enargic (vivid) capacity of orchestral sonority within such depictive contexts. The final chapter comprises analyses of exemplary orchestral works by Bartók, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Schoenberg.

Im 20. Jahrhundert wird vor dem Hintergrund der ästhetischen Moderne eine umfassende "Emanzipation" von Klang und Zeit in der Musik projektiert. Dabei ist deutlich, dass eine "Befreiung" des Klangs von etablierten Klangbeziehungen bzw. von jeglicher metaphorischer Kausalität eng verbunden ist mit einer "Befreiung" der Zeit von "chronometrisch" organisierten oder dramaturgisch ausgestalteten Zeit-Konzepten. Bernd Alois Zimmermann hat mit seinen Überlegungen und Werkkonzepten eine Spielart dieser Tendenz hervorgebracht. Das im Spätwerk Zimmermanns in diesem Zusammenhang entwickelte Konzept der "Zeitdehnung" wird in einen breiteren Kontext gestellt mit anderen kompositorischen Ausprägungen von "Präsenzästhetik" in der Musik nach 1945. Dabei wird das Modell eines "Präsenzhörens" einer Prüfung unterzogen. Analytische Grundlage ist dabei ein vom Autor entwickeltes morphosyntaktisches Analysekonzept, das von psychologischen und ideengeschichtlichen Schichten der Musikwahrnehmung ausgeht und dabei auf Zusammenhänge zwischen temporalisierten Klangstrukturen und meraphorsicher Bedeutung zielt.

Mikhail Arkadiev "The Structures of Time in the New European Music. An essay of the phenomenological study, "

The book  introduce the phenomenological differentiation of two modes of realization of musical sense in the process of becoming (or formation). The modes in question are termed “sounding” and “non-sounding”.  I deal especially with the latter one which seems to be a relatively new phenomenon for musicology. It is important to pay attention to the following: in the sphere of our inner hearing we can — at least in principle — reproduce the whole structure of musical process. And if we have succeeded in doing this, there remains nothing physically sounding in the field of our hearing; in other words, thanks to the effort of our consciousness and memory everything is transformed into the “non-sounding”, purely “psychological” form. Yet it is always possible for us to discern what can sound physically from what cannot be realized acoustically in principle, being at the same time an indispensable and real element of musical tissue. To put the same differently: if we imagine the structure of the musical whole as an “iceberg”, the non-sounding groundwork represents its submarine part, as it were. As a result, we discover the fundamental phenomenon of “non-sounding” pulsating continuousness of musical process; the phenomenon in question accomplishes the carrying function in the formation of musical whole.
This expressive continuousness can be defined as musical time in a special sense or time-energy. It must be differentiated from musical time in broad sense coinciding with the musical process as such, in its entirety.
Phenomenologically, the musical time in special sense is divided into a number of structural levels: (1) expressive continuousness; (2) irreversibility; (3) pulsation; (4) capacity to metrical rubato; (5) gravitation; (6) conflicting interaction with the “sounding” tissue. The three main forms of such an interaction are: (a) syncope; (b) non-metrical accentuation; (c) irregular accentuation in the case when some element of the “sounding” structure (i. e., a motif) is displaced in relation to the pulsating continuum which possesses its autonomous gravitational and dynamic structure.
All the structural levels of the “non-sounding” continuum are to be conceived as related to energies and processes, to the principle of creativeness. In other words, they are unimaginable in the absence of an intentional creative effort.
The phenomenon of “non-sounding”, fundamentally continuous musical time had reached its full development by the turn of the 16th century. This was the epoch of real revolution which changed the whole picture of musical culture. Music became a wholly independent self-conscious expressive art; moreover, by the end of the 18th century it had grown into the central art expressing the very essence of the existential world of the man of Modern Age.
The type of musical time peculiar to the epoch of baroque (Bach) is characterized by a high degree of expressiveness and tenseness. The pulsation is given in the form of a “small” pulse (axial pulsation). The polyphonic tissue is in constant intense struggle against the axial pulsation. The more intense the linear energy of the melodic drive, the more powerful the resistance of the pulsating “milieu” of time. The time becomes as if “deformed”, curved, like the baroque space. The more refined the melodic ornamentation, the more powerful the expressive “deformation” of the flow of time.
The Viennese classical type (Mozart, Beethoven) of musical time is more balanced and rarefied, as it were. The pulse and the sounding tissue usually show the same distribution of accents. The dialectics of the process of formation has a rather extensive character — in contrast to the highly intensive dialectics which is peculiar to the baroque. The general architectonic clarity of this musical style is associated with the classicism in other arts.
Finally, the romantic type of musical time represents a peculiar synthesis of both previous types. The prevalently “square” bar structure remaining from the classical style now combines with the increased role of the linear energy of melodic drive. The “non-sounding” groundwork reveals high resistibility and plasticity. This style has reached its heights in the music of Wagner and Brahms where the linearity and the tenseness of melodic drive are comparable to the same qualities in Bach, whereas the system of pulsating continuum is inherited from the Viennese classical style (and, in particular, from Beethoven).
Книга посвящена проблеме времени и ритма как фундаментальных
основ музыкальной речи западноевропейской культуры ХVII-XIХ вв.
Впервые в отечественной литературе явно вводится феноменологический метод в его аналитически-прикладном применении. Динамическая
структура музыкальной ткани описывается как принципиальное
взаимодействие двух основ, условно названных "звучащая" и "незвучащая". Последняя и является тем новым феноменом, который предлагается в качестве возможного и относительно самостоятельного объекта исследования. Вводится ряд новых понятий, таких как «время-энергия», «хроноартикуляционный процесс», «гравитационная ритмика», «осевая пульсация», «парадоксальная лига» и др

Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, die von Edmund Husserl verarbeitet wurde, nimmt eine ehrenvolle Stelle in der philosophischen Literatur ein. Sie versucht die grosse Veränderlichkeit der Erlebnisse, die die Umwelt in uns erweckt, zu ordnen. Die Reaktion, die in der Literatur über Musik als einer Zeitkunst erzielt wurde, ist völlig verständlich (trotzdem aber noch nicht genügend). Meine Studie bemüht sich die Konzeptionen der musikalischen Zeit, die in der musikphänomenologischen Literatur zu Grundbeiträgen wurden, zu beurteilen. Die Theorien von Alfred Schütz, David Lewin und Juda Lochhead führen diese Akzente aus – eine organische Anknüpfung an Husserl und Festlegungen der Zeitspezifität, eine detailierte Beschreibung der Wahrnehmungsmusikqualitäten in ihrer komplizierten Verknüpfung, Zeitausprägung von umfangreichen Musikflächen und eine mehrdimensionale Einstellung. Alle diese Theorien vervollständigen sich in Erfassung der subjektiv empfindenden Zeit und weisen auf Begrenzungen des phänomenologischen Diskurses über die Musikzeit hin.

Tämän kirjoituskokoelman aiheena on musiikin ja luonnon suhde. Aihe on laaja, sillä musiikin ja luonnon yhteyksistä löytyy loputtomasti esimerkkejä. Luonto tai luontokokemus lienee rakkauden ja uskonnollisten teemojen ohella musiikin tavallisin aihe niin historiassa kuin nykypäivässä (esim. Toliver 2011). Koska rakkautta ja uskonnollisia teemoja käsitellään musiikissa usein juuri luontoon liittyvien vertauskuvien avulla, näyttäytyy luonto musiikin itsestään selväksi peruskuvastoksi.

Institut catholique de Toulouse, octobre 2015 « La réussite virtuose est une chance, et cette chance inouïe est elle--même relative à la misère et à la déréliction fondamentales de l'homme ». Dans ces mots de Vladimir Jankélévitch, rédigés dans son ouvrage Liszt et la rhapsodie.

The field of interactive music systems (IMSs), beginning in the 1980s, is still relatively young and fast moving. The field of music theory-analysis, during the same period (since 1980), has undergone a major transformation in terms of technological innovations, flexibility, and breadth. The two fields have not really caught up with each other. It will be interesting to see what arises as they do — especially as both fields have become more concerned with the role of the body and embodied cognition. Framed in terms of contrasting epistemological orientations, this essay considers some relevant developments in IMSs, music cognition, and music theory and analysis, leading up to the present.  The most popular approaches to music cognition and to IMS design are rationalist (Ashby 2010), exploiting the ‘correct’ embodiments of music (Godøy 2004, Leman 2007, Paine 2009) based on affordances (Gibson 1977, Kelso 1998). This essay, however, advocates a pragmatist (Ashby 2010) approach inspired by music analysis and exploiting the potential of kinesthetic learning (associative learning). Prompted by a progressive approach to music analysis, theory, perception, and cognition (Dubiel 1999, Mailman 2007), interactive music technology can also be constructive, flexible, and progressive, by exploiting kinesthetic learning from immersion in new and unusual motion-to-sound mappings derived from dynamic formal processes in analysed music. In this way, immersive interactive systems offer an opportunity systematically to learn new associations based on principles theorised in response to analysis. Experience of these systems essentially ‘rewires the brain’, thereby exemplifying what Korsyn (2004) has attributed to Lewin’s (1986, 1987) approach to music perception: the ironist approach, as formulated by Rorty (1989). Thus a pragmatist ironist experimental (PIE) approach is articulated. Rather than committing to any particular ways music is already embodied, this approach acknowledges the flexible nature of embodied musical experience. It forges and uses interactive music technologies continually to redescribe and therefore reform how music is embodied, thereby disembodying to re-embody music, expanding how music is heard, contemplated and experienced.

The present research studies music as an art of anxiety from the points of view of both  Martin  Heidegger’s  thought  and  phenomenological  philosophy  in  general. In the Heideggerian perspective, anxiety is understood as a fundamental mode of being (Grundbefindlichkeit) in human existence. Taken as an existential-ontological concept, anxiety is conceived philosophically and not psychologically. The central research  questions  are:  what  is  the  relationship  between  music  and  existential-ontological anxiety? In what way can music be considered as an art of anxiety? In thinking of music as a channel and manifestation of anxiety, what makes it a special case? What are the possible applications of phenomenology and Heideggerian thought in musicology?

The main aim of the research is to develop a theory of music as an art of existential-ontological  anxiety  and  to  apply  this  theory  to  musicologically  relevant phenomena. Furthermore, the research will contribute to contemporary musicological debates and research as it aims to outline the phenomenological study of music as a field of its own; the development of a specific methodology is implicit in these aims.

The  main  subject  of  the  study,  a  theory  of  music  as  an  art  of  anxiety,  integrates Heideggerian and phenomenological philosophies with critical and cultural
theories concerning violence, social sacrifice, and mimetic desire (René Girard), music, noise and society (Jacques Attali), and the affect-based “charme” of music (Vladimir  Jankélévitch). Thus,  in  addition  to  the  subjective  mood  (Stimmung)  of emptiness and meaninglessness, the philosophical concept of anxiety also refers to a state of disorder and chaos in general; for instance, to noise in the realm of sound and total (social) violence at the level of society.

In this study, music is approached as conveying the existentially crucial human compulsion for signifying – i.e., organizing – chaos. In music, this happens primarily at the immediate level of experience, i.e. in affectivity, and also in relation to all of the aforementioned dimensions (sound, society, consciousness, and so on). Thus, music’s existential-ontological meaning in human existence, Dasein, is in its ability to reveal different orders of existence as such. Indeed, this makes music the art of anxiety: more precisely, music can be existentially significant at the level of moods.

The  study  proceeds  from  outlining  the  relevance  of  phenomenology  and Heidegger’s philosophy in musicology to the philosophical development of a theory  of  music  as  the  art  of  anxiety. The  theory  is  developed  further  through  the study of three selected specific musical phenomena: the concept of a musical work, guitar smashing in the performance tradition of rock music, and Erik Bergman’s orchestral work Colori ed improvvisazioni. The first example illustrates the level of individual  human-subject  in  music  as  the  art  of  anxiety,  as  a  means  of  signifying chaos, while the second example focuses on the collective need to socio-culturally channel  violence. The  third  example,  being  music-analytical,  studies  contemporary  music’s  ability  to  mirror  the  structures  of  anxiety  at  the  level  of  a  specific musical text. The selected examples illustrate that, in addition to the philosophical orientation, the research also contributes to music analysis, popular music studies, and the cultural-critical study of music.

Alfred Schutz veut faire état d’une expressivité anté-symbolique de la musique fondée sur la syntonie temporelle d’un « nous » qui est la condition même de sa communicabilité. L’expérience réceptive de la musique serait primordialement un appariement, par la médiation du cours de la musique, avec le « courant de pensée musicale » du compositeur. Il s’agit ici  plus particulièrement de parfaire et de corriger l’ébauche d’analyse de Schutz sur les modalités de signification de la notation musicale et sur l’expressivité de la fluence musicale. Cette contribution est orientée par un idéal de la description phénoménologique ordonnant et articulant une accumulation en principe infinie de propositions susceptibles d’affiner la compréhension intuitive des phénomènes.

El ejercicio de describir los elementos salientes de una experiencia musical como la escucha, la creación, la interpretación o la improvisación es una herramienta reveladora. Este artículo presenta algunos beneficios que se obtienen de aplicar ciertos métodos descriptivos en el estudio de las tareas musicales, en particular la creativa. El trabajo forma parte de un proyecto que intenta dirimir algunas suposiciones con las que diversas ramas disciplinarias interpretan los fenómenos de la música. Primero, aparece el ejercicio básico de relatar la escucha, dado que asimilar sonidos físicos, imaginados o evocados es una condición indispensable del crear. En segundo término, se muestra un tipo de narrativa de la fantasía que funciona como detonante creativo, al ser los contenidos efímeros y volátiles de la imaginación un habilitador fundamental de la espontaneidad artística. Finalmente, el trabajo se orienta hacia un tipo de relatorías que abordan el proceso creativo de la música. Con un ejemplo propio, se proponen estructuras de la conciencia creativa mediante el uso de herramientas narratológicas en primera persona.

Phenomenology is explored as a way of helping students and educators open up to music as a creative and transformative experience. I begin by introducing a simple exercise in experimental phenomenology involving multi-stable visual phenomena that can be explored without the use of complex terminology. Here, I discuss how the ‘phenomenological attitude’ may foster a deeper appreciation of the structure consciousness, as well as the central role the body plays in how we experience and form understandings the worlds we inhabit. I then explore how the phenomenological attitude may serve as a starting point for students and teachers as they begin to reflect on their involvement with music as co-investigators. Here I draw on my teaching practice as a percussion and drum kit instructor, with a special focus on multi-stable musical phenomena. To conclude, I briefly consider how the phenomenological approach might be developed beyond the practice room to examine music’s relationship to the experience of culture, imagination and ‘self’.

In this article I demonstrate how listeners understand musical processes with their bodies, and how their gestures can be used to build analytical models. Specifically, I draw on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue that situated, active listeners project their motor intentional gestures inside music, where they reconstitute the very nature of musical space and its objects according to their own unique perspective. Rather than passively reflecting gestures of performers, these listeners use their own bodily states to create the structure and meaning of music. I illustrate how those states can be mobilized for analysis by taking quantifiable features of gestures––acceleration and temporal profiles––as models of musical structure, and using those models as a basis for analytical narratives. I focus on three pieces–– Olga Neuwirth’s Vampyrotheone, Elliott Carter’s ASKO Concerto, and Thomas Adés’s Living Toys––in which motion-capture studies revealed the different roles of listeners’ gestures in organizing musical experience.
http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.3/mto.15.21.3.kozak.html

Phenomenology of music has been a perspective trend of phenomenological aesthetics for more than a hundred years. The topic of the paper is fixation the main problems and vectors of development of phenomenology of music. The authors execute an analysis of Roman Ingarden's position in the discussions concerning the methodological and ontological problems of phenomenology of music. The paper aims at revealing succession in Roman Ingarden's solutions to the phenomenology of music problems. The other aim is reflection on the originality of Ingarden's ideas in the context of phenomenological interpretations of music in 20 th and 21 st centuries. The solution to these tasks allows the authors to fix key problems and identify the principal positions of phenomenology of music. The main sources of the comparative and historical analysis are the studies carried out by Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Clifton, and Ihde. The most important ontological problems of phenomenology of music are: spatio-temporal constitution of music, reduction of a work of music to its performance, and ontological status of a work of music. The analysis of Ingarden's position on these problems allows us to characterize it as something different from the existing versions. According to the conception, the time of music is a special type of time, that is, quasi-time. A piece of music is a purely intentional, heteronomous, and intersubjective object. There are a number of methodological specificities of Ingarden's approach: a refusal of reduction of musical theoretical data, a tendency for independence of a piece of music from conscious and mental processes, and an interpretation of a piece of music as a non-sounding phenomenon. In conclusion, the authors demonstrate how the originality and radical nature of Ingarden’s conclusions made his position defenseless against critique and simultaneously marked the tendency in
the contemporary phenomenological studies of music.

There is a special relationship between music and philosophy. A long tradition of thinkers like Adorno, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nietzsche, and in their wake, writers like Andrew Bowie, Daniel Chua, and Michael Spitzer, to name only a few men, have argued that the historical imbrication of music and philosophy symbolises or hides a deeper unity between the two modes of world-making.  Lacoue-Labarthe, for example, has probed the autobiographical operation of music, using psychoanalytical tools to unpack the ‘echo of the subject’, while Chua has used Levinas to explore possible conjunctions between Beethoven and ethics. And there are, of course, a huge number of studies examining music quite straightforwardly with the help of philosophical tools.
In this essay I bracket this type of study. I focus instead on what it is within musical sound that lends itself to the types of relationship that such writers have claimed. Put interrogatively: what is the performativity of musical sound such that it can have this kind of relationship with philosophy? Musical Performance Philosophy provides me with a case study of the special relationship between music and philosophy. I start by examining the operation of performativity within Performance Philosophy, unpacking Performance Philosophy’s “opening to [the] reciprocal (in)determination or mutual transformation”  of performance and philosophy. Considering the prospect of a specifically musical Performance Philosophy, and arguing that what characterises it is that the event is not just staged theatrically but sounded, I go on to propose that “(in)determination” is a particular type of indeterminacy related to the manner of energetic expenditure in sound events, and requires a different phenomenological approach towards the practitioner’s body both to what usually suffices for Performance alone or Philosophy alone and to what might suffice for other modes of Performance Philosophy. With respect to music as a cultural practice, music’s special relationship with philosophy comes from its empirical being-towards-death, which I constitute in terms of entropy. Despite the potentially huge scale of this claim, my aim is merely to establish the centrality of entropy to accounts of musical sound qua humanly significant practice, and to start the process of investigating how this impacts upon Performance Philosophy and its practitioner.

In the year 1900, the German philosopher Carl Stumpf made one of the earliest phonograph recordings to document an example of traditional music. The ensemble he recorded was the Siamese Court Orchestra which was performing in Germany at that time. This led to the establishment of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv and the beginning of the extensive recording of world traditional music. While written scores have begun to break traditional music away from its dependence on initiation and apprenticeship, the recording of music has had an even more powerful impact on the role of memory in traditional music. No longer is one required to attend a performance, one can simply listen to a recording. Likewise, one can use recordings and videos to learn a piece without the presence of a teacher and can learn the music of another tradition. To consider the future of traditional music, the transformations created by the externalization of memory needs to be examined. This paper hopes to take a step in this direction. It will first consider the psychology of music developed by Stumpf himself. Especially the opposition between the phenomenological reception of music and it's tempering.

The present paper explores the humanity of SP-404 and the SP-404ity of the human. To those unaccustomed to what an SP-404 or a human is, below they may find two chapters introducing their basic qualities. The final chapter reflects and questions on the parallel nature of the two species. Perhaps, one might have no interest at all on the nature of SP-404 or of the human. Their common structuration, though, is of great interest for any entity bearing similar ontological and epistemological structure. Furthermore, for developing the present analysis, we have applied cybernetic and phenomenological models of description - models considered traditionally incompatible, just like the comparison of an SP-404 to a human. Thus, the scope of this essay becomes twofold: not only the structure of SP-404ity and humanity are found to be structurally identical, but also cybernetics and phenomenology combined provide with an overlap of the first/second and third points of view.

The work begins by asking the questions of how contemporary phenomenology is concerned with music, and how phenomenological descriptions of music and musical experiences are helpful in grasping the concreteness of these experiences. I then proceed with minor findings from phenomenological authorities, who seem to somehow need music to explain their phenomenology. From Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Jean-Luc Nancy and back to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, there are musical findings to be asserted. I propose to look at phenomenological studies of the musical aspects of existence as they appear in various philosophical works bringing together different accounts of music and aesthetics and pointing towards phenomenological study as a methodology for everyday aesthetics. While there are many different areas of music phenomenology such as studies of sound and listening, studies in perception of musical works, in experience of artistic creation, in singing and playing musical instruments, and phenomenology of transcendent or religious horizons of the experience of music, it is most promising-I suggest-to look at phenom-enological studies of music from the perspective of everyday happenings and discoveries of musical aspects of life. Thus, I attempt to display the uses of phenomenology in finding musical aspects of everyday existence as well as in describing and illuminating the art of music. A look at Roman Ingarden's and Mikel Dufrenne's most intuitive and promising ideas will be broadened with a perspective from Don Ihde and Arnold Berleant.

Moritz Geiger, Edmund Husserl’s pupil, was the first phenomenologist to devote himself to the issues of aesthetics throughout all his life. Growing out of a background in psychological aesthetics, mainly the aesthetics of empathy, he was chiefly concerned with the study of aesthetic experience. The present article pays attention to Geiger’s concept of aesthetic enjoyment and especially the position in it of music, while analysing the most important assumptions of Eduard Hanslick’s music aesthetics as Geiger implemented them into his own reasoning. The paper shows that Geiger’s position was mainly rooted in the Kantian formulation of the aesthetic attitude as it was echoed in Hanslick. Both Hanslick and Geiger were helped in their thoughts about the position of music among the arts by the role of perceptual parameters. While Geiger acquired a more differentiated position in classifying aesthetic perception over Hanslick’s brusque distinction between the right (aesthetic) and inappropriate (pathological) experience of art, in the context of his seemingly puritan formalism he could also appreciate Hanslick’s cautious claim about the ideas conveyed by music because his position later shifted toward positing the existential significance of art.

In this paper, approach to the phenomenon of musical time within Vlastimir Trajković's poetics and phenomenological aesthetics of music by Thomas Clifton was comparatively considered, inspired by the composition "Arion. Le nuove musiche per chitarra ed archi" (1979), by Serbian composer Vlastimir Trajković. In it, the author is using some elements of minimalism, making the effect of "retained" time and thus encouraging the listener to question the flow of musical time. On the other hand, the same idea of extending that specific "now" in the process of listening to music is found in the aesthetical writings of Thomas Clifton. For this theoretician, an implicit feature of time is that it combines all three modes-past, present and future-concomitantly, thus making them intertwined in the process of listening. Repetition has a specific role in this process, and the idea of repeating musical information the way Trajković does seems to underline that specific characteristic of musical time and the process of listening. Starting with the assumption that what Trajković shows through his music is similar to what Clifton states in his aesthetical writings, problem of musical time was analyzed having in mind one poetical and one aesthetical approach, with accent on the significance of chosen stylistic solutions.

There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical event. This paper seeks to understand that role in terms of our habitual relationships to place. I ask how being musical somewhere can expand and transform our habituated comportment there, an inquiry sparked by the theory and practice of the late experimental music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. Grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, I argue that the site-specific improvised performances of Jen Reimer and Max Stein invite audiences into transformed relationships with places they habitually encounter. With sustained comparisons to the centrality of deep listening in Pauline Oliveros's lifetime of sonic innovation, and frequent reference to Alia Al-Saji's reception of Merleau-Ponty's account of the habit body, this paper contends that such site-specific improvised performances can elicit a sort of hesitation in our everyday style of sensory-motor conditioning, and, concomitantly, awaken a layer of sensory living amenable to radically new sonic and behavioural configurations.

Hans Mersmann (1891–1971), an outstanding German musicologist, addressed music from several points of view. While his early career started with works on pre-classical music, in the 1920s he became a prominent spokesman of New Music. In a study from 1919 2 he outlined some concepts forming a part of his later synthetic views of music: his study of the history of musical style foreshadowed his studies, which were both theoretically and historically well informed, and in which he elaborated a structural apprehension of a musical work. He formulated this approach comprehensively in Angewandte Musikästhetik in 1926, where he pronounced the tenets of the general methodological stance which should be exploited in musicology (phenomenology), and where he defi ned structural elements of music and the way they were integrated into the musical structure of the historical style periods of classical music. 3 He found the point of departure for understanding the organization of music in force and its dynamic transformations occurring within a certain context. Music encompasses two dimensions which form a background for something happening. The fi rst dimension can also be treated as horizontal and as temporality, the other as vertical and leading to spatiality. The horizontal dimension is expressed by the force which drives the musical fl ow towards its continuation in the direction of the future and towards greater power (centrifugal force). The vertical dimension bestows restrictions upon the pushing fl ow (centripetal force). If a place appears in the musical structure which divides the musical fl ow, reduces its intensity, and makes it regular (for example, cadence, metre, repeated

The oral history of music phenomenology in the United States tells us that it emerged in the early 1980s with writings by Judith Lochhead, Thomas Clifton, and, crucially, David Lewin’s oft-cited 1986 article. Seemingly lost are the late 1960s and 1970s precedents for Lochhead, Clifton, and Lewin’s work at Princeton University and published in the pages of Perspectives of New Music. This talk will uncover the style of writing, attention to listening and description, and the possibilities made available to music phenomenologists by the Princeton composer-theorists.

Recoverable from the Princeton School’s phenomenological writings is the point that through description one comes to understand how the experiencing subject changes the objects of investigation; this is a feature of Benjamin Boretz’s writings. Through analysis one creates theory, but theory as the mindset or set of ideas through which one hears a span of music, a notion articulated by Joseph Dubiel. The result is an investigation into musical experience, but also musical “cognition” and even musical time. Hearing “in the moment” requires musical time to decelerate; hence in 1976 Boretz, for one, writes his piano piece, “(‘…my chart shines where the blue milks upset…’),” in order that he may undergo the experiences he has composed, an idea noted by J. K. Randall. Phenomenological method, however, was downplayed as these musical thinkers moved away from musical discourse as a science.

As music phenomenology becomes a growing area of scholarship, a major fount of its discourse in North America requires re-examination.

Phenomenology of music has been a perspective trend of phenomenological aesthetics for more than a hundred years. The topic of the paper is fixation the main problems and vectors of development of phenomenology of music. The authors execute an analysis of Roman Ingarden’s position in the discussions concerning the methodological and ontological problems of phenomenology of music. The paper aims at revealing succession in Roman Ingarden’s solutions to the phenomenology of music problems. The other aim is reflection on the originality of Ingarden’s ideas in the context of phenomenological interpretations of music in 20th and 21st centuries. The solution to these tasks allows the authors to fix key problems and identify the principal positions of phenomenology of music. The main sources of the comparative and historical analysis are the studies carried out by Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Clifton, and Ihde. The most important ontological problems of phenomenology of music are: spatio...