Heidegger and Music

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 New Heidegger Research

Series Editors: Gregory Fried, Professor of Philosophy,

Boston College, USA and Richard Polt, Professor of Philosophy,
Xavier University, USA

The New Heidegger Research series promotes informed and critical dialogue that breaks
new philosophical ground by taking into account the full range of Heidegger’s thought, as
well as the enduring questions raised by his work.

Titles in the Series

Heidegger and Jewish Thought, edited by Micha Brumlik and Elad Lapidot
Heidegger and the Environment, by Casey Rentmeester
Heidegger and the Global Age, edited by Antonio Cerella and Louiza Odysseos
Heidegger Becoming Phenomenological: Preferring Dilthey to Husserl, 1916–25, by
Robert C. Scharff
Heidegger in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by Jeff Love
Heidegger’s Gods: An Ecofeminist Perspective, by Susanne Claxton
Making Sense of Heidegger, by Thomas Sheehan
Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language, by Lawrence J. Hatab
Heidegger in the Islamicate World, edited by Kata Moser, Urs Gösken and
Josh Michael Hayes
Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties, by Richard Polt
Contexts of Suffering: A Heideggerian Approach to Psychopathology, by Kevin Aho
Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction, Volume I, by
David Kleinberg-Levin
Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy, edited by
Gregory Fried
Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality and Literacy: Dwelling in Speech
II, by Lawrence J. Hatab
Transcending Reason: Heidegger on Rationality, edited by Matthew Burch and
Irene McMullin
The Fate of Phenomenology: Heidegger’s Legacy, by William McNeill
Agency, Freedom, and Responsibility in the Early Heidegger, by Hans Pedersen
Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Perception: Learning to See and Hear Hermeneutically,
Volume II, by David Kleinberg-Levin
Towards a Polemical Ethics: Between Heidegger and Plato, by Gregory Fried
Thought Poems: A Translation of Heidegger’s Verse, by Martin Heidegger, translated by
Eoghan Walls
Correspondence: 1919–1973, by Martin Heidegger and Karl Löwith, translated by
J. Goesser Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen
Heidegger and the Holy, edited by Richard Copabianco
Heidegger and Music, edited by Casey Rentmeester and Jeff R. Warren

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 Heidegger and Music

Edited by
Casey Rentmeester and Jeff R. Warren

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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 Published by Rowman & Littlefield
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE

Copyright © 2022 Selection and Editorial Matter, Jeff R. Warren and Casey Rentmeester

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

<to come>
∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Music, Being, Thinking ix
Casey Rentmeester and Jeff R. Warren

PART I: MUSIC AND BEING-HUMAN 1

1 Rocking Heidegger: Musical Experience between
Technology and Ontology 3
Frederik Pio
2 Heidegger on the Slopes and Musical Mountain
Biking Multimedia 19
Jeff R. Warren and John Reid-Hresko
3 Distracted Dasein? 37
Anthony Gritten
4 Rilke and the “Tone of Death”: Music and Word in Heidegger 53
Babette Babich

PART II: MUSICAL TRADITIONS OF THE WORLD 73

5 Grand Style, Heidegger, Nietzsche: Elaborations of
a Concept 75
Erik Wallrup
6 Heidegger, Iki, and Musical Resistance to Gestell 91
J. P. E. Harper-Scott

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 vi Contents

7 The “Silent Music” in Ancient Chinese Thought and Heidegger’s

Sound of Stillness 109
Qinghua Zhu
8 Heidegger’s Musik-Sprache or Silence and Bells in the Music
of Arvo Pärt 127
Peter Trawny and Agamenon de Morais
9 We Live Therefore We Are: African Musical Aesthetics
Challenge Heidegger’s Forgetfulness 143
Eve Ruddock

PART III: MUSICAL CREATION AND PERFORMANCE 161

10 Improvising the Round Dance of Being: Reading Heidegger
from a Musical Perspective 163
Sam McAuliffe and Jeff Malpas
11 Meditative Thinking in Jazz and the Challenge of the Technical 179
Trevor Thwaites
12 Musical Performance as Poetic Thinking 195
Goetz Richter
13 Being-with in Music 213
Justin Christensen and Janeen Loehr

PART IV: THE POWER OF MUSIC 233

14 Somewhere Between Plato and Pinker: A Heideggerian
Ontology of Music 235
Casey Rentmeester
15 Touched by Music: Affective Expression as Measure-Taking 253
Roger W. H. Savage
16 Remembering Air in Schilingi’s Generative Music:
Heideggerian Reflections on Argo and Terra 271
Jill Drouillard
17 The Working of Aural Being in Electronic Music 289
Gerry Stahl

Index 309
About the Contributors 317

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 Acknowledgments

I thank the late Charles Guignon for showing me how to read Heidegger and
my parents, Handel and Diane Rentmeester, for inspiring a love of music.
Personally, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Bake for granting me the flex-
ibility in terms of my duties at Bellin College to accomplish my portion of
this volume and especially to my wife, Cassie, for taking on more than her
fair share of family responsibilities during the late stages of the editing pro-
cess. Finally, I thank Amelia, Bennett, and Cash, who are traversing their
own philosophical and musical journeys and serve as steady inspirations in
my life.
Casey Rentmeester

I acknowledge that I live, work, and play on the traditional, ancestral, and
unceded territories of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) peoples. I am grateful to
the professors, colleagues, and students who have read and re-read Heidegger
alongside me. Each of you helped me learn something new. I am also thank-
ful to the musicians I have played with who—even if they have never read
Heidegger—helped my philosophical inquiry more than they know. Thanks
to my wife Melissa for being an incredible partner, and my daughters Ella and
Ara for allowing me to learn alongside their inquisitive minds.

Jeff R. Warren

Special thanks go to Richard Polt, Gregory Fried, and Frankie Mace for their
help in editing this volume, as well as Monica Sukumar for overseeing the
production of the book.

vii

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 Introduction
Music, Being, Thinking
Casey Rentmeester and Jeff R. Warren

Perhaps the most famous quote from a philosopher on music comes from
Friedrich Nietzsche, who states, “Without music, life would be an error.”1
Martin Heidegger, it seems, didn’t exactly feel that way, as he directed very
little explicit philosophical attention to music. Thus, one might think that
those interested in both philosophy and music should look to philosophers
other than Heidegger—canonical figures like Plato or Nietzsche, perhaps—
for a philosophical analysis of music. However, even though Heidegger did
not have much to say about music proper, the breadth and richness of his
thought have inspired philosophical thinking in various fields that go beyond
the ideas that commonly garnered his attention. Indeed, the range of topics
that have been covered thus far in the New Heidegger Research series is a
testament to this, as the series has showcased highly original and creative
engagements with Heidegger’s thought in the realms of politics, ethics,
environmentalism, health, psychopathology, globalism, and others, many
of which were not explicit targets of philosophical analysis on the part of
Heidegger. This volume seeks to continue this tradition by showcasing a wide
range of thinkers from various backgrounds who think through the relation-
ship between Heidegger’s philosophy and music.
One of the great strengths in this volume lies in the variety of its con-
tributors, which comes in many forms. Regarding geographical location, the
authors stem from ten different countries and the diversity of their interpreta-
tions of Heidegger reflects this variance. In terms of intellectual background,
the authors span across disciplines including philosophy, musical perfor-
mance, music education, musicology, sociology, psychology, and informa-
tion science. Thus, it is safe to say that this volume is truly interdisciplinary
in nature. Moreover, some of the contributors are musicians and compos-
ers themselves, which adds a practical element to the volume. Finally, the

ix

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 x Introduction

chapter content is wide-ranging not only in terms of engagements with vari-

ous musical traditions of the world, musical styles, or specific musicians and
composers, but also in terms of the overarching topics covered in the volume,
including the relationship between music and what it means to be human, the
creation and performance of music, the role of hearing, and the threats that
accompany our current digital age of music, among others.
This volume was conceived by Josh Spier, a pianist and composer who
was formerly a research associate at Flinders University in Australia. Spier
found Heidegger’s philosophy to be insightful in attempting to understand
how Heidegger’s thoughts on the age of modern technology could help to
explain the changes that have occurred in the work of piano composers in
the contemporary era. He had an intuition that much could be learned from
a philosophical analysis of music from a Heideggerian lens, and thus put
together the initial workings of this volume. In editing the volume, we are
indebted to Spier’s initial work.
As editors, we have prioritized the autonomy of the authors with the hope
of generating as diverse a spectrum of perspectives as possible and have
done this for two overarching reasons. First, as noted previously, Heidegger
had very little to say directly about music, so it takes some creativity to
extrapolate Heidegger’s philosophical concepts to the realm of music. Giving
authors leeway to explore this topic broadly allowed for unique creativity to
flourish in which Heidegger’s philosophy is used as a theoretical overlay to
interpret the work of musicians as various as Arvo Pärt, an Estonian Orthodox
Christian composer, to Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, an Italian composer working
at the cutting edge of the contemporary generative and interactive musical
movement. Second, given the limited secondary literature on the topic of
Heidegger and music, we hoped that such an approach would lead to new
conceptual terrain that had previously not been traveled. We were lucky
enough to solicit chapters from intellectuals who already have written on
Heidegger and music in the past. In those cases, the authors used their previ-
ous analyses as springboards for novel perspectives. We think that, as a result
of prioritizing the autonomy of our authors, the reader will find a variety
of new avenues from which to understand the philosophy of music from a
Heideggerian lens. The volume is organized into four parts, each of which is
briefly summarized below.
Part I of the volume is titled “Music and Being-Human.” In the first chapter,
Frederik Pio discusses how Heidegger’s philosophy can help us understand
the importance of music education in a contemporary context that reflects but
updates some of his thoughts in his coedited volume Philosophy of Music
Education Challenged: Heideggerian Inspirations.2 Pio uses Heideggerian
concepts to help us understand why we as humans are invigorated by musical
experience due to our inherent need for the phenomena of beauty in our lives.

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 Introduction xi

This chapter is followed by Jeff R. Warren who expands upon his insights
on Heidegger and music from his book Music and Ethical Responsibility.3
In chapter 2, Warren partners with sociologist John Reid-Hresko to explore
musical multimedia and mountain biking culture from a Heideggerian per-
spective, arguing that that ski and mountain biking films are tools of dwelling.
In chapter 3, Anthony Gritten examines the consequences of the observation
that Dasein hears. Gritten uses Heidegger’s ideas to develop a phenomenol-
ogy of sonic distraction, with particular focus on the ends of sounds, the
sound of Dasein’s being-toward-death. The last chapter of this section, by
Babette Babich, examines sound and death from another angle. Beginning
with Heidegger’s reading of the poet Rilke, Babich draws out the importance
of tone and sound in Heidegger’s ideas, showing the important role the acous-
tic and music play in Heidegger’s philosophy.
Part II is titled “Musical Traditions of the World.” The first chapter of this
section is by Erik Wallrup, who thoughtfully applied the Heideggerian con-
cept of Stimmung (attunement) to music in his book Being Musically Attuned.4
In his chapter, Wallrup looks specifically at the ways in which Heidegger’s
understanding of art as world-transformative can extend Nietzsche’s aesthet-
ics by looking primarily at European musical works in the grand style. Next,
J. P. E. Harper-Scott focuses specifically on the relationship between the
later Heidegger’s aesthetics and the iki aesthetics of the Japanese philosopher
Kuki Shūzō, who studied under Heidegger in the late 1920s, wrote the first
book-length study on Heidegger in Japanese, and is explicitly referenced by
Heidegger in the 1959 work On the Way to Language.5 Harper-Scott views
the English composer Benjamin Britten’s later music, that is, the music
that followed his engagement with Japan, as a focal practice (in Albert
Borgmann’s sense of the term)6 that is able to provide an example of musical
resistance to Gestell, that is, the age of modern technology wherein every-
thing shows up as mere resources. Chapter 7 takes the reader west across the
East China Sea from Japan to China—conceptually, at least. In this chapter,
Qinghua Zhu shows us how Heidegger’s philosophy of art can help us to
better understand ancient Chinese music and particularly the importance of
silence in that tradition. The next chapter is a collaboration between Peter
Trawny and Agamenon de Morais and continues the conversation on the
significance of silence. Trawny and de Morais provide a highly creative
chapter by juxtaposing Heidegger’s thoughts on silence with the musical
works of the Orthodox Christian Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who invented
the compositional technique known as tintinnabula, a minimalist technique
influenced by Pärt’s mystical experiences with chant music. In the final chap-
ter of this section, Eve Ruddock contrasts Heidegger’s philosophy with John
Murungi’s phenomenological exploration of African musical aesthetics. In
particular, Ruddock tries to highlight potential elements of “forgetfulness” in

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 xii Introduction

Heidegger’s thinking not only in terms of music but in terms of non-German

traditions.
“Musical Creation and Performance,” which is the title of Part III of
the volume, contains chapters that deal more explicitly with the practice
of creating and performing music. In chapter 10, Sam McAuliffe and Jeff
Malpas look specifically at improvisation from a Heideggerian philosophical
perspective. The authors examine the ways that Heidegger’s ideas of equip-
mentality, dwelling, and the event (Ereignis) relate to improvised musical
performance. They argue that Heidegger can provide insight into musical
improvisation, and also argue that musical improvisation can illuminate
elements of Heidegger’s thought. Chapter 11 features the work of Trevor
Thwaites, who continues the conversation on improvisation by looking at its
role in jazz performance. A jazz musician himself, Thwaites thinks through
the ways in which the digitization of jazz has eroded traditional methods of
sound production but finds hope in Heidegger’s concept of meditative think-
ing, a practice Heidegger describes during a speech at the commemorative
celebration of the 175th birthday of the composer Conradin Kreutzer, who
hailed from Heidegger’s hometown of Messkirch, Germany.7 In chapter 12,
Goetz Richter also finds inspiration in Heidegger’s concept of meditative and
poetic thinking, which is thinking that requires a mode of openness on the
part of the thinker. In contrasting this form of thinking with calculative think-
ing, which is inherently restrictive, Richter argues that Heidegger’s poetic
thinking can help us understand musical thinking, and that understanding
musical performance as a form of poetic thinking provides a resolution for
musical performers who often think in dualistic concepts. The final chapter of
this section is a collaboration between Justin Christensen and Janeen Loehr,
who are both researchers in the realm of psychology. Christensen and Loehr
employ the psychological concept of joint agency, that is, a sense of shared
control over actions and their consequences, and combine it with Heidegger’s
concept of being-with in order to understand how musicians are able to inter-
act synchronously in the act of performing music.
The last section of the book is titled “The Power of Music.” In chapter 14,
Casey Rentmeester attempts to build a Heideggerian ontology of music that
lies “somewhere between” the views of Plato and Steven Pinker. Rather than
a dangerous force to be censored (as Plato thought)8 or a mere pleasantry to
the senses (as Pinker has argued),9 Rentmeester utilizes Woodstock to show
how music’s true significance from a Heideggerian perspective lies in its abil-
ity to gather together meanings and open up new worlds for people but also
how the digital era of music threatens this world-building capacity. In the fol-
lowing chapter, Roger W. H. Savage also thinks through the ontological sig-
nificance of music. Savage draws upon his insights in his book Music, Time,
and Its Other,10 to analyze the ways in which both Heidegger’s philosophy

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 Introduction xiii

and the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur can help us under-

stand what it means to be touched by music. In chapter 16, Jill Drouillard
draws upon Heidegger’s ideas in providing an interpretation of the works
of the Italian composer Jacopo Baboni Schilingi. Keeping in mind Luce
Irigaray’s argument of Heidegger’s “forgetting of air,”11 Drouillard shows us
how Schilingi’s generative music makes air visible in his interactive musical
compositions, Argo and Terra, in such a way that can teach us how to dwell
before “the music stops,” that is, before death. In the last chapter, Gerry Stahl
discusses Heidegger’s philosophy in the context of electronic music as it
emerged in the 1960s. He combines Heidegger’s idea of the revelatory nature
of art with a Marxian understanding of the production of art being mediated
through technological means to demonstrate how electronic music is able to
open new sonic worlds.
This diverse collection of essays on Heidegger and music interacts with
and responds to a wide range of existing scholarship that considers Heidegger
and music, from the mid-twentieth-century interest in the phenomenology
of music to the growth of interest in Heidegger and music (and music and
philosophy more generally) over the past decade. We hope that this volume
continues these discussions and provides new ways to continue considering
the relationship between Heidegger’s ideas and music.

NOTES

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with the

Hammer, trans. Richard Polt (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1997), 10.
2. Philosophy of Music Education Challenged: Heideggerian Inspirations, eds.
Frederik Pio and Øivind Varkøy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015).
3. Jeff R. Warren, Music and Ethical Responsibility (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014).
4. Erik Wallrup, Being Musically Attuned: The Act of Listening to Music (London
and New York: Routledge, 2015).
5. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971).
6. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A
Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
7. Martin Heidegger, “Memorial Address,” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John
M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 43–57.
8. Cf. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis
and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992).
9. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
1997).

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 xiv Introduction

10. Roger W. H. Savage, Music, Time, and Its Other: Aesthetic Reflections on
Finitude, Temporality, and Alterity (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018).
11. Cf. Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth
Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A

Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Heidegger, Martin. “Memorial Address.” In Discourse on Thinking, translated by
John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, 43–57. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. New
York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Irigaray, Luce. The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. Translated by Mary Beth
Mader. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with the Hammer.
Translated by Richard Polt. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1997.
Philosophy of Music Education Challenged: Heideggerian Inspirations. Edited by
Frederik Pio and Øivind Varkøy. Dordrecht: Springer, 2015.
Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Plato. Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.
Savage, Roger W. H. Music, Time, and Its Other: Aesthetic Reflections on Finitude,
Temporality, and Alterity. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018.
Wallrup, Erik. Being Musically Attuned: The Act of Listening to Music. London and
New York: Routledge, 2015.
Warren, Jeff R. Music and Ethical Responsibility. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014.

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