ROMAN INGARDEN'S CONTRIBUTION TO SOLVING THE ONTOLOGICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY OF MUSIC ANASTASIA MEDOVA (original) (raw)
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2020
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...
2020
Based on chapter 3 “The musical Work and its score” of Roman Ingarden’s The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity, this paper examines the semiotic theory on which Ingarden bases his analysis of music. at first sight, Ingarden’s semiotic position seems staunchly traditional, fitting the augustinian definition according to which the sign is “a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind, besides the impression that it presents to the senses”. Yet Ingarden’s notion of sign is more complex than the augustinian, as we see in the distinction he makes between being a physical object and having a typical aspect, namely a characteristic feature manifesting itself in different, yet similar, objects. According to this view, the sign is to be understood as a typical aspect, based on a material object, performing an immaterial function, in virtue of the intentionality of a consciousness. Ingarden’s definition of ‘sign’ will be located with regards to the debate on the equivocity of the ‘sign’, focusing on the contributions of Edmund Husserl and Kazimierz Twardowski. In contrast to Husserl, who claims that the term ‘sign’ is equivocal, Ingarden states that it has to be unequivocally and strictly understood as a dual entity, combining a material and an immaterial side. and against Twardowski, Ingarden characterizes the sign as an intersubjective means of communication, and not as a larger notion erasing the difference between distinctive marks and communicational signs. In doing so, Ingarden stands by a strict ontological distinction between the sign and what it signifies, enabling him to show that the musical work must not be confused with its notation or score.
Musical Phenomenology: Artistic Traditions and Everyday Experience
Avant, 2018
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.
From Mersmann to Lewin: Toward a Conceptual Shift Within the Phenomenological Analysis of Music
Musicologica Olomucensia, 2016
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
Charting the Phenomenology of Music [preprint]
2016
The present paper forms part of a complex research project and is designed to be a chapter in the book based on a closed-reading approach I am conducting in opera semiotics and literary and philosophical anthropology with the aim to provide a series of interpretations of drama and opera of selected operas of Mozart and plays of Shakespeare, inviting Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as our guides. The thorough study of the subject invites comparisons which should lead to new insights into the musical drama, i.e. the way drama is conveyed by the musical form. To quote Osip Mandelstam, "Music is no guest here called in from outside, but an active participant in the debate, or to put it more precisely, the one who promotes discourse”. The term I have coined as the "phenomenology of music” refers to the methodology of outward or perceptible indications depicted (or the depictability of such indications) in form(ation)s and configurations related to and conditioned by the musical expression. The findings presented in this paper are intended to serve as a stepstone for close-reading based analyses of other operas. In the first part of this paper I offer a close-reading analysis of a scene from a Musorgsky opera leading us to identify a "musical trope” – the musical metaphor – which I term as the "musical synecdoche.” Musical tropology, likewise metaphor in language, becomes a key tool in approaching the musical work. One of the characteristic elements in the poetic arsenal of Gogol, a technique termed by Boris Eikhenbaum as the "Gogolian mask,” reappears in Musorgsky's last opera, Khovanshchina, having a musical genre adapt a literary legacy. The second part of the paper approaches the subject in a more pragmatical way, insofar it examines an opera staging set, the Figure of the Child from Andrei Tarkovsky's production of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, intending to draw attention to the importance of selecting the right tools in designing the visuality of an opera performance.
Phenomenology of musical meaning. An English translation of the article published in Russian
Phenomenology of musical meaning, 2024
The article deals with the phenomenological analysis of music perception on the material of rock songs. The structure of a song is simpler than the structure of a classical piece of music, but all the results are valid for any music with appropriate complication. “Listening device” – a computer program that translates sounds into musical notation - perceives individual sounds. But the musical consciousness understands the specific musical thought. It groups sounds into motifs and phrases. The concept of musical thought has different interpretations and needs a thorough phenomenological analysis based on Husserl's doctrine of the constitution of sense. F. Tagg introduces the concept of “museme” – a unit of musical meaning. Musemes have meaning only for the understanding consciousness. Musemes of different levels include motifs and phrases, metric signature, rhythm, and the structure of the whole work. In a melody there may be "key sites" in which the concentration of musical thought is maximized. They are constituted by musical consciousness and are largely subjective. The phenomenon of key site is not specific to music; key sites are found in literature and philosophy. Their appearance sheds light on the peculiarities of acts of understanding. The understanding of a musical work takes place in time, and this allows the consciousness to mark out a segment of time, to arrange the intelligible structure in it. A melody is a meaningful whole that has its own logic of unfolding. It encompasses a segment of time and transforms it into something stationary. Melody can be represented in the form of a scheme. The subject of music is the compression of time into such structures. An interesting example of musical perception and understanding is psychedelic rock. When listening to psychedelic music, the constitutive activity of consciousness is reduced and an altered state of consciousness occurs. The horizon of meaning narrows, the protention disappears. Here we should recall the notion of “saturated phenomenon” introduced by J.-L. Marion. The saturated phenomenon does not allow for constitution and assimilation. Psychedelic music modifies the horizons of future meanings. The article concludes with a question about computer music: will it make sense to us? So far there is no unequivocal answer to this question.
Dialogue and Universalism, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, 2018
In light of recent studies in the phenomenology of music, the essay engages anew in the classical phenomenological controversy over the ideal status of musical works. I argue that musical works are bound idealities. I maintain that the listener's capacity to apperceive physical sounds as musical melodies, which can be repeatedly and intersub-jectively experienced, accounts for the ideality of musical works. Conceived of as bound idealities, musical works 1) are bound to the acts that sustain them; 2) do not have retroactive validity; 3) are inseparable from their reproductions; 4) are modified by the performances. I conclude with some reflections on the importance of bound idealities for the phenomenologically-oriented philosophical anthropology.
The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenology of Music Cultures
The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures, 2024
A source of profound insights into human existence and the nature of lived experience, phenomenology is among the most influential intellectual movements of the last hundred years. The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures brings ideas from the phenomenological tradition of Continental European philosophy into conversation with theoretical, ethnographic, and historical work from ethnomusicology, anthropology, sound studies, folklore studies, and allied disciplines to develop new perspectives on musical practices and auditory cultures. With sustained theoretical meditations and evocative ethnography, the book’s twenty-two chapters advance scholarship on topics at the heart of the study of music and culture today—from embodiment, atmosphere, and Indigenous ontologies to music’s capacity to reveal new possibilities of the person, the nature of virtuosity, issues in research methods, the role of memory, imagination, and states of consciousness in musical experience, and beyond. Thoroughly up-to-date, the handbook engages with both classical and contemporary phenomenology, as well as theoretical traditions that have drawn from it, such as affect theory or the German-language literature on cultural techniques. Together, these essays make major contributions to fundamental theory in the study of music and culture.
Irreality of a Work of Music in Phenomenological Aesthetics
Die Nicht-Existenz eines musikalischen Werkes in Form eines realen Gegenstandes basiert auf traditionellen ästhetischen Überlegungen, welche die Welt der Töne als etwas Entmaterialisiertes ansehen. Das hängt insbesondere damit zusammen, dass die in der Musik hervorgebrachten Töne, im Gegensatz zu anderen Sachen, nicht primär in ihrer räumlichen Lokalisierung zu erfassen sind, sondern dass sie als etwas, was sich in dem uns umgebenden Raum befindet, wahrzunehmen sind. Die Irrealität des musikalischen Werkes wird allerdings von der phänomenologischen Ästhetik fast mit derselben Gültigkeit für alle Arten der Kunst erklärt und stützt sich auf die Beziehung eines permanenten Wesens des Werkes zu seinen verschiedenen Vergegenwärtigungen in der Situation der Rezeption, resp. auf einen besonderen, dem Werk immanenten Charakter seiner Botschaft. Im Gegensatz zu Husserl, welcher die Musik für einen idealen, unter verschiedenen Umständen identisch erscheinenden, Gegenstand hielt, betonten Conrad und Ingarden, bei denen eine Meinungskontinuität zu verfolgen ist, eine fehlende endgültige Bestimmtheit des musikalischen Werkes, welcher erst Ingarden eine grundsätzliche Rolle für die Bestimmung der historischen Identität des Werkes und seiner Offenheit für Veränderungen im Bereich der Rezeption zuerkannte. Deren Standpunkt konzentriert sich auf das Verhältnis des Werkes zu einem ästhetischen Objekt, wobei Schütz die Problematik des Charakters des musikalischen ästhetischen Gegenstandes außer Acht lässt und sich mit seinem Inhalt und mit dem spezifischen Charakter des musikalischen Werkes als eines idealen Gegenstandes unter idealer Gegenständlichkeit als solchen auseinandersetzt. Conrad und Sartre stellen sich die Frage nach dem spezifischen Charakter der Rezeption des musikalischen Werkes: Conrads Betonung der Suche nach einem festen Standpunkt für die Wahrnehmung des Werkes und Sartres Auffassung des Kunstwerkes als eines Gegenstandes der Imagination bieten die Idee, dass das Wahrnehmen des Kunstwerkes in einem Modus des immanenten, an den eigentlichen Akt der Werkbeziehung orientierten Wahrnehmens, vor sich geht. Nur für Ingarden ist das musikalische Werk nicht ein idealer Gegenstand, sondern er sieht darin einen rein intentionalen Gegenstand, wobei er den Aspekt der Genesis des Gegenstandes (Datierbarkeit seines Entstehens) und nicht den Charakter der Sinnkonstitution, die er im Unterschied zu dem idealen Gegenstand nicht einbezogen hat, berücksichtigt.