Notes for a Phenomenology of Musical Performance (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
2019
This dissertation engages the questions and methodologies of phenomenology, the philosophy of culture, the philosophy of music and ethnomusicology in order to investigate the significance of music in human life. The systematic orientation of Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms provides the overarching framework that positions the approach in chapter one. Following Cassirer, art in general and music in particular are not regarded as enjoyable yet dispensable pastimes, but rather as fundamental ways of experiencing the world as intuitive forms and sensations. Establishing the ontological significance of music entails unpacking the sui generis experience of time, space and subjectivity that characterize the musical experience.
In this paper I extrapolate a notion of experience from Dewey and Heidegger, whereby I conceive of an experience as an existential notion. Conceived as such, I then examine the phenomenological structure of an experience through the lens of Dewey's Pattern of Inquiry. Dewey's Pattern, as I use it, is a means of access to various themes presented by Heidegger throughout 'Being and Time' that I use to ground the structure of having an experience. It is argued that this general structure is embodied by music, and because of this, in the experience of performing music (which is simultaneously receptive and active) the tacit and implicit conditions of the experience are illuminated, making them explicit to the performer; hence the 'Self-reflexive nature' of performing music. This self-reflexivity can be compared to Authentic Being for Heidegger, as we become absorbed in taking care of ourselves through musical experience. I propose, as a topic for further research, that perhaps with this kind of phenomenology we can understand the phenomenon of 'loss of self' in intense aesthetic experiences or quasi-religious practices such as yoga or chanting.
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.
Understanding musical meaning: Interpretative phenomenological analysis and improvisation
The adoption of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis from psychology to consider musical meaning arises from the view of music as a participatory aspect of a lived-in world. Philip Bohlman describes this as the ‘ontology of world music’ and contrasts it with the Western ontology of music where music is treated as if it were an object, an autonomous entity possessing meaning in-and-of-itself. He has suggested that the complex aesthetic embeddedness of world music is radically different from Western music. As an example he describes how the aesthetic power and meaning of sacred music resides in its ability to do something, to effect change, to transform text, narrative and ritual into meaning. (2002: 13). Rather than being satisfied to say that it is a matter of discourse that defines the differences of music’s ‘epistemological status’ and that there are other cultures for which music as an object is foreign, this paper argues for an aspect of musical meaning fundamental to its nature as an experienced phenomenon (the ontology of musical experience if you like). It is the position of this paper that music’s transformational qualities form a significant part of the meaningfulness of all musical experience. And that with appropriate analytic tools and an informed epistemological outlook this kind of meaning might be considered more universally. Perhaps ethnomusicology (or at least Philip Bohlman) deserves some criticism for perceiving itself as something dealing with music as more embedded, as much as musicology does for insufficiently emphasising music as an experienced phenomenon.
NTNU Open Access, 2018
In this artistic research project, I have performed contemporary works and reflected upon my artistic practice in order to make the processes and insights accessible to a wider audience. This is presented in this pdf as a written reflection, as well as the website exposition www.makingsense.no showing a shortened presentation of my artistic research project, with video and sound examples, as well as the three final artistic presentations realized in November 2017. My reflections have been developed from a performer’s perspective; I have worked with both embodied knowing with my instrument and cognitively with interpretation and the performer’s development. I outline, explain and show a means by which this can be realized. In order to do this, I open the space before and after the musical performance through reflection on the complex process of preparing a work for concert: from practice, rehearsals, and musical analysis of the works, to what happens during the performance. I hope to awaken an interest in both performer and listener of contemporary art music with respect to the musician’s role and the psychophysical inner work of the musical performer. I have throughout the project aimed at developing my musical performance and tacit knowledge, broaden and contextualize my artistic research and performances in an international context, and to contribute to new knowledge about interpretation, embodiment and presence from a performer’s perspective. My initial research question and research aims have been guides and sources of motivation throughout my project and have helped me define the parameters of my research. I have built my reflections on and around concepts related to these aims as tools for understanding and artistic development. This project develops strategies for performing contemporary music, strategies that are inspired by rhetoric performance practices, the creation of presence in performing, and how to use such practices to become a freer interpreter of contemporary music. The artistic research project is by nature a multi-faceted endeavour and has created an intriguing laboratory setting in which my contemporary music performance could be continually thought and reworked. The title Making Sense refers to my intention to create an embodied feeling of sense through my performances both for performer and listener, without a logocentric meaning 1) Initial research question: How can I perform contemporary classical music to communicate more directly with the listener, by working with presence as a performer, and using prosody (the melody and rhythm of the language) as an inspiration for performance? My main research aims have been: * to explore different methods for reaching an intensified presence in performing. * to describe the process of learning and performing a musical work – both physically and mentally thus using and documenting a reflective practitioner approach to musical experience. * to create new understandings about practice with particular attention to contemporary music. This artistic research project has been inspired by music- as-speech. I aim to develop a more internally controlled playing, and to use affects as a sort of artistic “raw” material for expression, in other words, to develop “the psychophysical musician”. When I talk about affects I see them as autonomous intensities in the body, independent of our conscious self and happening before our feelings. I think of the embodied affects in the music as being not the actual notes on the score nor the personal feelings of the performer, but rather a use of the raw material in ourselves in the interpretation of the music. Jane O’Dea describes it as: ”[…] not their own personal emotions, but the expressive content enshrined in the score” (O’Dea, 2000, p. 57). As the performer I am not trying to add my feelings to the expressions of the music, but use these embodied affects as a resource in the performance. My writing communicates my reflections on working with artistic development. Language has become a key to communicate the thoughts and processes of a performative inquiry, and gives an explicit verbal account of the implicit knowledge and understanding embodied in artistic practices and products, while at the same time art may escape or go beyond what can be expressed by words and resist (academic) conventions of accountability. In my project, I studied these questions through one performer, myself, and give a reflective account of the lived experience of developing as a performer while broadening my knowledge through artistic research. My study accounts for the specific ways in which meaning is created as interaction between performer, embodiment, and audience, and opens up space for a more subjective type of reflection than traditional scientific research allows for. With this in mind, I could say that I have attempted to explore the world of musical performance rather than explain it.
The (Musical) Performance at Stake: An Ethnomusicological Review
2020
I have always considered the observation of a musical manifestation more or less as the analysis of a musical "performance." My recent interrogations and research about what is, in fact, a "performance"? have led me to formulate an observation. While looking for an answer in the performance studies literature, it is quite clear that music is not included as a subject of analysis but appears more as an object or a pretext to the analysis of the meaning(s) hidden behind the music, the best example being theater. A simple Internet search for "performance studies" only shows a few titles on music. Even The Cambridge Introduction to Performance Theory (2016) presents performance with keywords like "Drama and Theater" and "Literature." Also, looking to different performance studies programs and courses syllabi from American universities like New York University, Brown, Northwestern, University of California, Davis, etc., it is quite clear that the notion of "performance" is widely associated with communication. 1 Though it surely is, this understanding appeals to a very particular intellectual lineage, characterized by the writings of eminent authors like philosophers John L. Austin (1962) and John R. Searl (1969), cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (1982, and drama theorist Richard Schechner (1988), for whom the performance is at first a way to observe language, ritual, and everyday life interactions.