Musical Minimalism and the Metaphysics of Time (original) (raw)
Related papers
Music cognition, semiotics and the experience of time: Ontosemantical and epistemological claims
Journal of New Music Research, 2004
This paper is about musical epistemology. It stresses the role of how a listener can have a unified coherent experience over time. Central questions involve the conceptual construction of time, the role of non-objectivist as against objectivist cognition, and the role of cognitive mediation and imagery in music cognition. In order to discuss these claims a conceptual framework is introduced that does justice to the dynamic ongoing characteristics of the sonorous unfolding in time, leaning on the theoretical work of Kant, Husserl, and Schütz. An attempt is finally made to provide a formal description of dealing with music that objectifies the temporal unfolding of sound under the guise of presentational immediacy and as a kind of synthetic activity of the mind, stressing both the sequential experience and the construction of relational continuity.
AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MUSIC AND METAPHYSICS
2024
Thinking together about all the elements of music based on concrete indicators and the qualities of this field that point beyond what is known, brings to the agenda an accumulation of knowledge on the axis of art, philosophy, and music. The idea of art, which is the subject of music, or the key issues that transform music into art, point to the deep meanings of music in connection with metaphysics. The approaches adopted in the history of thought, scientific advances and social turning points have shaped the quality of music and the meanings attributed to it. In this descriptive study, which aims to make an epistemological examination of the relationship between music and metaphysics through this accumulation, metaphysical issues that enable us to characterize music as art are revealed. Thus, regardless of the context, it is possible to see a metaphysical perspective that progresses intertwined with music in many circumstances, with various semantic contents, forming itself from not only as a natural outcome of music but also an axis that inspires music.
Musical Time, Embodied and Reflected
This article, which is a contribution to a Festschrift for Christopher Hasty, develops a view of musical time through the lens provided by recent research in cognitive science, and especially on human memory. It includes analyses of compositions by Toru Takemitsu, and thus makes a pair with my "Remembering Music," which was published in 2012.
The Metaphysics and Theology of Music
2021
This article aims to analyze music from a philosophical and theological perspective, using the principles of multi- and transdisciplinary methodology. After a brief introduction, which presents the main moments in the history of the musical phenomenon, a first chapter addresses the metaphysical dimension of music in classical composers. The second chapter shows the position of philosophers towards music, starting with Pythagoras and ending with Schopenhauer. The third chapter focuses on music theology in general, but also on the theology and metaphysics of music to the French philosopher of Romanian origin, Emil Cioran, who, after Augustin and Schopenhauer, wrote probably the deepest pages on the ontology of music. The last chapter refers to to the archetypal character of music.
Epoche, 2021
This is a translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s 1988 essay, “Musik und Zeit: Ein philosophisches Postscriptum.” The essay, although brief, is noteworthy in that it contains Gadamer’s philosophical reflections on music—reflections which are largely absent in his masterwork, Truth and Method. In the essay, one finds several important Gadamerian hermeneutical themes such as the notion of art as performance or enactment (Vollzug), the linguisticality of understanding, the importance of lingering with an artwork or text, and how our absorption in the work gives rise to a particular experience of time.
A Critique of Susanne Langer’s View of Musical Temporality
Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 2018
Susanne Langer’s idea of the primary apparition of music involves a dichotomy between two kinds of temporality: “felt time” and “clock time.” For Langer, musical time is exclusively felt time, and in this sense, music is “time made audible.” However, Langer also postulates what we would call ‘a strong suspension thesis’: the swallowing up of clock time in the illusion of felt time. In this paper we take issue with the ‘strong suspension thesis’ and its implications and ramifications regarding not only musical meaning, but also the purported metaphysics of music construed as essentially inhering in felt time. We argue that this thesis is overstated and misdirecting insofar as it purports to describe what we experience when we hear music with understanding. We discuss a selection of examples of repetitive formations, from mediaeval music to contemporary music, which show that persistent, motion-inhibiting repetition undermines the listener’s ability to identify order and coherence due to a relative inability to anticipate the next occurrence of a differentiating musical event. We argue that Langer’s one-sided view of musical temporality, which patently relies on the conceptual framework of memory time and the specious present, exemplifies what we propose to call ‘the searchlight model of musical understanding,’ wherein the constant span of illumination of the searchlight (representing the span of the specious present) moves continuously parallel to, and along, its postulated target, i.e., the music heard, as it ‘illuminates’ it. We argue that, in the last analysis, memory time conceptually presupposes the publicly identifiable means of chronometric length. One maintains the ‘strong suspension thesis’ on pain of conceptual confusion.
Materialising Time and Space within Acousmatic Music (Joint paper with Stephen Kilpatrick)
L'espace du Son III, Musique et Recherches, Belgium, 2011
The intention of this paper is to discuss space in acousmatic music from a phenomenological perspective. It will argue that space, and our spatial experience, is radically dependent upon intentional acts of consciousness and thus, to some extent, listener dependent. It will go on to demonstrate that intentional acts are not uniform; different sound materials invoke different kinds of intentionality and, for this reason, space in acousmatic music is heterogeneous. The paper will begin by identifying different sorts of intentional acts and consider the role they play in the construction of our spatial experience. Following this, we will introduce Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and, taking this as a point of departure, provide some much needed terminology to facilitate spatial discourse.