Aesthetic Experience, Social Interfaces, and the Phenomenology of Music

Abstract

Abstract The distinction that John Blacking draws between music that serves a social purpose and music that he regards as enhancing human consciousness calls for a further consideration of how the experiences that music affords are the source of its meaning and significance. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s phenomenological analysis of play, the author sets out a hermeneutical approach that accounts for music’s expressive vehemence. Paul Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis provides a hermeneutical foundation for understanding how music’s expression of moods and feelings gives rise to different ways of inhering in the world. Music’s exemplification of the moods and feelings to which it gives voice, the author accordingly argues, is the spring of its worlding power. Conversely, Thomas Turino’s adaptation of Peirce’s semiology both draws on and supports ethnographic descriptions of emotive, musical behaviors. In turn, these descriptions presuppose the meaningfulness of the experiences that music occasions. Blacking’s insight into the primary significance of what he identifies as “music for being” thus reserves a place within ethnomusicological discourse for a phenomenological hermeneutics for which music’s worlding power is the ground of the interfaces between music’s expressive force and its place in social life.