Phenomenology Of Music Research Articles

6. From Musical Psychology to Husserlian Phenomenology to Schenkerian Analysis

Abstract This study is written at the suggestion of Master Octav Calleya, a disciple of Celibidache and Franco Ferrara, who addresses those passionate about Musical Phenomenology and Acoustics. It is not very technical, it is more an introduction to the “roots” of this scientific approach to music imposed by Celibidache, which can be an open gate for those who want to enter this vast universe of knowledge.

Imagery Agnosia and its Phenomenology

Lack of vivid sensory imagery has recently become an active subject of research, under the name of aphantasia. Extremely vivid imagery, or hyperphantasia, is at the other end of the spectrum of individual differences. While most research has focused on visual imagery in this paper I argue that from a neuropsychological perspective this phenomenon is much more widespread, and should be categorized as imagery sensory agnosia. After over twenty years of learning to play music phenomenology of auditory imagery agnosia is described from the first-person perspective. Reflections on other forms of imagery agnosia and deficits of autobiographical memories are presented and a hypothesis about putative brain processes that can account for such phenomena is discussed. Extreme individual differences in imagery and in autobiographical memory have implications for many fields of study, from consciousness research to education.

Membunuh Tradisi’: Adegan Musik Metal Dan Subkultur Madura

Abstract— Metal music is not 'easy listening' music. Unlike pop music which is full of "laziness", metal music is full of "explosions" from a musical aspect so, not everyone is able and willing to explore metal music. Because of its aggressive noise, metal music is flourishing in the big cities. Madura, whose society tends to be traditional, is a serious obstacle for its young people who enjoy metal music. Those who enjoy metal music are commonly referred to as "metal youths". So far, there have not been many metal studies in Madura. In fact, Madurese metal youths performed metal music scenes that were no less great than those of outsiders. Therefore, this study seeks to describe scenes of obedience to Madurese metal youths with a musical phenomenology approach, and to explain them from the perspective of subcultural studies. Based on the results of the research, it shows that the scenes of the metalization of Madurese metal youths are not only centered on the musical scene, but also, jump out of the musical scene which shakes the stability of the tradition and the political domination of their religion.
 
 Keywords—: Metal Music Scenes; MadureseMetalYouths; Subcultural Studies.

Music as a Modus of Accomplishing Epochē: Four Theses on Musical Phenomenology

Music as a Modus of Accomplishing Epochē: Four Theses on Musical Phenomenology

Pierre Boulez and Heinz Holliger: on the problem of transformation of a musical language

The article focuses on the problem of transformation of a musical language, the correlation between an esthetic guideline, an invention, a composition technique and a language. The author describes the two strategies of life and work of Pierre Boulez which allowed him to gain significant cultural authority, and enumerates the persons who had influenced Boulez’s esthetics. In a broad esthetic and philosophical context, the author shows the turn from the technique to the language in esthetical and theoretical texts of Pierre Boulez; describes the three concepts of the language, the period of synthesis following the period of rejection, and Boulez’s concerns about the problems of music perception. In the context of Boulez’s thesis about the unity of an invention, a technique and a language, the author considers the piece for viola “Trema” (1981) by Heinz Holliger, Boulez’s adherent. The author uses a comprehensive approach as a combination of elements of comparative analysis, musical phenomenology (focusing of mind on music structures), and hermeneutics (the process of understanding, interpreting). The research material is of a methodical importance for modern educational courses of theory and history of music. The author arrives at the conclusion that Boulez, as well as Kant, directs the concept of art towards Aristotle's category of “poiesis” as “craft and creation”; focuses on the overcoming of the esthetics of rejection (preceding the classic-romantic tradition) in Boulez’s turn to the period of “synthesis” which includes not only the turn from a technique to a language, but also electroacoustic “sound manufacturing”.  The following aspects of Hollinger’s “Trema” are considered for the first time: the idea, the principles of new solo music, the new technique. The author arrives at the conclusion about “Trema” belonging to the “multilayered music epoch” and that radical rethinking of a musical language sharpens communication.   

Phenomenology of style as musicological discourse

Background. Among the studies of the last five years we note scientific researches which reveal different phenomenological concepts in musicological discourse and reveal the final maximum of the phenomenological study of music essence. R. Kurenkova’s research is one of them, which explores the content of the phenomenological approach to the analysis of musical art works, and traces the analysis of the history and theory of the phenomenological method. In V. Sokolov’s work the attention is focused on the categories of musical thinking, which for the first time becomes the subject of methodologically advanced phenomenological analysis. A. Karipova traces the connection of musical phenomenology with E. Husserl’s temporal concept in her research. T. Ivannykov studies the phenomenon of guitar art. The phenomenology of style, which was first introduced into the scientific musicological circulation, is studied by the article’s author in the PhD research. Objectives. The article’s objective is to form a musicological discourse on the problems of musical phenomenology on the basis of existing scientific sources and to reveal the understanding of composer’s style as a phenomenon of musical creativity. Methods. The research methodology is focused on the synthesis of different approaches: historical, functional and structural, genre, stylistic performing and interpretive, phenomenological approaches. Results. Phenomenology as a direction studies phenomena, reveals their content by means of structural complexes in their integrity. In the 19th century, the search for common interconnection and common methods of a unified process of cognition began in Western European philosophy. The theoretical concepts of the leading philosophers and phenomenologists E. Husserl, F. Brentano, M. Heidegger are considered. Extrapolation of the teachings of outstanding philosophers and phenomenologists to the material of musical art proved that Phenomenology as a process of cognitive knowledge of musical creativity reveals the fact of an individual performer’s experience as well as the experience of his artifact, which at the final stage forms the result of theoretical understanding. The valuable concepts of phenomenology of musical creativity by L. Akopian, O. Losev, M. Arkadyev, Z. Fomin, R. Kurenkova, V. Sokol, O. Krayeva, A. Karipova, I. Konovalova, T. Ivanikov are considered, which determine the musicological debate and give perspective on this issue’s development. Music, as the comprehension of being, is an irrelevant form of its expression, it contains meanings that do not “lie” on the surface, requiring their understanding and recognition. Therefore, the phenomenological approach leads to the isolation of a special subject named “phenomenology of musical creativity”. Accordingly, the phenomenology of musical objects is a method of musical phenomena recognition defining the descriptive function of their essence. Since phenomenology is involved in musical creativity, it should be noted that it is connected with a created, completed and final product (work), its performer, and subject (listener). Therefore, phenomenology can be involved at all levels of musical communication: both external (genre, performer, listener) and internal (work, form, dramaturgy, style). Phenomenological approach to the study of the composer’s style specifics leads to a structured attitude to the content of musical phenomena. The broadest sense for the extrapolation of phenomenology to musical art gives the notion of life-creation, whose meaning implies not only an artist’s belonging to historical age and composing school. The phenomenology of composer’s style is connected with the knowledge of a work’s semantic orientation in its “performanceappropriate” style reproduction. The performance concept is an appropriate task of phenomenology in the sense of knowing the semantic direction and its performanceadequate reproduction that is personal interpretation. Thus, before performing the compositional structure of a work and type of musical dramaturgy, a performer should establish a research position. In order to develop a work’s phenomenological concept, it is suggested to consider all factors of composer’s style as a two-level system: general stylistic intonation and performing concept. Сonclusions. The actualisation of the phenomenological method of cognition is evidenced by the various positions (cognitive attitudes) that relate to the subject who is the subject of “composer – performer – researcher” creativity. The levels of manifestation of creative phenomenology are fixed in the artifacts (a composer’s musical archive, audio and video recordings of different performers) should allow to consider composer’s style through its evolution. The model of style phenomenology is built as a system of functional levels and connections between them that emerge on musical communication basis (author – performer – listener).

Queer Music Theory

AbstractQueer musical phenomenology refers to the practice of disorientation away from established music theories, including one’s own. In Lewin’s “Phenomenology” article, queering can be understood as his intentional, self-critical, conceptual disorientations—first departing from Schenkerian theory, and then moving toward and finally away from the perception-model. Through a close reading of Lewin in combination with Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, which offers a theory of embodied lives marginalized by pathways of normativity, I examine the generalizable application of theories such as queer phenomenology to another domain beyond gender and sexual embodiment: music theory at large. Lewin’s practice models a form of music theory that I regard as phenomenologically queer.

Rethinking the Body and Space in Alfred Schutz’s Phenomenology of Music

What is initially striking about Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological account of the musical experience, which encompasses both the performance and reception of music, is his apparent dismissal of the corporeal and spatial aspects of that experience. The paper argues that this is largely a product of his wider understanding of temporality wherein the mind and time are privileged over the body and space, respectively. While acknowledging that Schutz’s explicit or stated view is that the body and space are relatively insignificant to his account, the paper reveals how they actually feature significantly in the latter, but in ways that remain largely implicit. First, the analysis demonstrates that the mental and temporal aspects of Schutz’s phenomenology of the musical experience cannot be considered independently of their interrelations with the equally important, albeit under-examined, corporeal, and spatial aspects. Concepts from Nietzsche’s early aesthetics are recruited to fulfil this task. Second, the analysis challenges Schutz’s dismissal of space in his theory of music perception. Lastly, it reveals the crucial, yet implicit, role of the body and space in his key examination of the intersubjective phenomenon he terms “making music together”. By presenting the above arguments, the paper aims to draw out the implicit dimensions of Schutz’s phenomenology of music and thereby enrich his influential account.

Cybernetic Phenomenology of Music, Embodied Speculative Realism, and Aesthetics-Driven Techné for Spontaneous Audio-Visual Expression

CYBERNETIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF MUSIC, EMBODIED SPECULATIVE REALISM, AND AESTHETICS-DRIVEN TECHNÉ FOR SPONTANEOUS AUDIO-VISUAL EXPRESSION JOSHUA BANKS MAILMAN INTRODUCTION HE CONCEPT OF WORLDMAKING AS TECHNÉ is a tantalizing prospect for adventurous or philosophically minded artists and musicians, taking it to mean that the creation of work is the creation of concepts, joining the efforts of theory and praxis in one process (techné), such that the results of our works are the expression of an ontological proposition (worldmaking). It is epistemologically productive while also being a unique expression of freedom, in the sense proposed by philosopher Hannah Arendt (1977, 1998). My claim to worldmaking as techné is that my work as a music theorist-analyst has always to some extent fed into my compositional and improvisatory musical activities. Technology often plays a role. In my essay (Mailman 2009a) that asserts an imagined drama of T 6 Perspectives of New Music competitive opposition in Elliot Carter’s flute piece Scrivo in vento (and comments on its symmetries, quantitative flux, and Heraclitean dimensions), I interpretively analyzed the composition through a narrative lens, such that elements of the music are imagined as inhabiting a turbulent adversarial world akin to that depicted in the Petrarch sonnet that inspired Carter’s composition. Crucial aspects of that analysis involved computational analytic procedures prompted by my hearing, procedures whose output in turn enhanced my experience as a listener and sparked my imagination for interpreting its poetic and philosophic context. Such a cybernetic circle of introspective reception and computational analysis has embedded itself in my musical activities —as well as those of others—to the extent it now seems second nature. There’s no going back. The feedback process model of artistic practice and reception swims against the tide of the fatuous cliché that artistry is magically inspired ex nihilo. I stress this because it is the feedback process aspect of the countervailing view that propels worldmaking as techné. Specifically, the lynchpin connecting recent and ongoing interpretive and creative practices of myself and some others is cybernetic phenomenology, which is both a receptive-perceptive and creative-constructive activity, to be explained further below.1 Flexibilities of categorization and ontology that arise from cybernetic phenomenology relate to Nelson Goodman’s (1978) theory of worldmaking , exemplified in his assertion that “worlds differ in the relevant kinds they comprise” (10). New methods for defining and creating enable new relevant kinds to be identified or brought into existence. Thus new worlds are distinguished, or indeed made. Like artistic works themselves, cybernetic phenomenological activities evolve out of past musical and other creative and interpretive practices. Yet that fact fails to forecast what has already started to happen. The flexibility of early 21st-century technologies is enabling technologically proficient artists to venture beyond what could be foreseen—even by its inspirers, such as the philosopher Henri Bergson. How could it be foreseen that such disparate phenomena as the buoyant color and morphological dynamism of Kandinsky’s paintings, the stimulus saturation of Scriabin’s synesthesia, harmonic palettes ranging from Wagner and Liszt’s to Schoenberg’s, to Varèse’s, to Partch’s, textural fluidities of Xenakis or Truax, or the propulsive processes of Ligeti or Reich, the expressively intricate rhythmic spontaneity of free-jazz improvisation, and the visceral visuality of modern dance could enact and activate each other, not just in some abstract poietic theory, but rather in physically experienced live Cybernetic Phenomenology of Music 7 spectacles and audio-visual documents? This is beginning to happen, and is yet still only a basis of far greater expressive potential. Much of this present and future artistic activity—a new phase of artistic practice —can be understood, and also further motivated, through a synthesis of cybernetics, process philosophy, and cognitive metaphor (embodied mind) theory—a synthesis I will merely suggest but not undertake fully in this essay. In the four sections that follow, this essay considers the historical background of techné as worldmaking in regard to music, and how recent and current practices build on, and in some ways transcend, these patterns. The first section, “Music as Worldmaking as Techné,” considers the evolution of music theory as techné and the tradition of music as worldmaking. The...

Cybernetic Phenomenology of Music, Embodied Speculative Realism, and Aesthetics-Driven Techné for Spontaneous Audio-Visual Expression

CYBERNETIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF MUSIC, EMBODIED SPECULATIVE REALISM, AND AESTHETICS-DRIVEN TECHNÉ FOR SPONTANEOUS AUDIO-VISUAL EXPRESSION JOSHUA BANKS MAILMAN INTRODUCTION HE CONCEPT OF WORLDMAKING AS TECHNÉ is a tantalizing prospect for adventurous or philosophically minded artists and musicians, taking it to mean that the creation of work is the creation of concepts, joining the efforts of theory and praxis in one process (techné), such that the results of our works are the expression of an ontological proposition (worldmaking). It is epistemologically productive while also being a unique expression of freedom, in the sense proposed by philosopher Hannah Arendt (1977, 1998). My claim to worldmaking as techné is that my work as a music theorist-analyst has always to some extent fed into my compositional and improvisatory musical activities. Technology often plays a role. In my essay (Mailman 2009a) that asserts an imagined drama of T 6 Perspectives of New Music competitive opposition in Elliot Carter’s flute piece Scrivo in vento (and comments on its symmetries, quantitative flux, and Heraclitean dimensions), I interpretively analyzed the composition through a narrative lens, such that elements of the music are imagined as inhabiting a turbulent adversarial world akin to that depicted in the Petrarch sonnet that inspired Carter’s composition. Crucial aspects of that analysis involved computational analytic procedures prompted by my hearing, procedures whose output in turn enhanced my experience as a listener and sparked my imagination for interpreting its poetic and philosophic context. Such a cybernetic circle of introspective reception and computational analysis has embedded itself in my musical activities —as well as those of others—to the extent it now seems second nature. There’s no going back. The feedback process model of artistic practice and reception swims against the tide of the fatuous cliché that artistry is magically inspired ex nihilo. I stress this because it is the feedback process aspect of the countervailing view that propels worldmaking as techné. Specifically, the lynchpin connecting recent and ongoing interpretive and creative practices of myself and some others is cybernetic phenomenology, which is both a receptive-perceptive and creative-constructive activity, to be explained further below.1 Flexibilities of categorization and ontology that arise from cybernetic phenomenology relate to Nelson Goodman’s (1978) theory of worldmaking , exemplified in his assertion that “worlds differ in the relevant kinds they comprise” (10). New methods for defining and creating enable new relevant kinds to be identified or brought into existence. Thus new worlds are distinguished, or indeed made. Like artistic works themselves, cybernetic phenomenological activities evolve out of past musical and other creative and interpretive practices. Yet that fact fails to forecast what has already started to happen. The flexibility of early 21st-century technologies is enabling technologically proficient artists to venture beyond what could be foreseen—even by its inspirers, such as the philosopher Henri Bergson. How could it be foreseen that such disparate phenomena as the buoyant color and morphological dynamism of Kandinsky’s paintings, the stimulus saturation of Scriabin’s synesthesia, harmonic palettes ranging from Wagner and Liszt’s to Schoenberg’s, to Varèse’s, to Partch’s, textural fluidities of Xenakis or Truax, or the propulsive processes of Ligeti or Reich, the expressively intricate rhythmic spontaneity of free-jazz improvisation, and the visceral visuality of modern dance could enact and activate each other, not just in some abstract poietic theory, but rather in physically experienced live Cybernetic Phenomenology of Music 7 spectacles and audio-visual documents? This is beginning to happen, and is yet still only a basis of far greater expressive potential. Much of this present and future artistic activity—a new phase of artistic practice —can be understood, and also further motivated, through a synthesis of cybernetics, process philosophy, and cognitive metaphor (embodied mind) theory—a synthesis I will merely suggest but not undertake fully in this essay. In the four sections that follow, this essay considers the historical background of techné as worldmaking in regard to music, and how recent and current practices build on, and in some ways transcend, these patterns. The first section, “Music as Worldmaking as Techné,” considers the evolution of music theory as techné and the tradition of music as worldmaking. The...

렘 콜하스 공간의 음악현상학적 시간성에 대한 연구

Today, the views on Temporality of space have been changed not only to be based on the concept of time, but also to identify the space with a body adapted to the new circumstances. The study suggests that the actions of performers in space have been important by changes of views and are connected to the music phenomenology mixed with music whose tempo is the phenomenology related with of human consciousness itself, and derives the temporal property by putting them into Rem Koolhaas space with the fluid quality. According to Clifton's Phenomenology of Music, an understanding of music is made in both human body and consciousness as two ways to listen to sounds and enjoy music. Though a correlation between the characteristics of Clifton's Phenomenology of Music and one of resulted from uncertainty and immateriality of modern space Temporality, we could work out four kinds of characters which are the continuity of the fluidity from temporal programs, contrasting changes or synchronicity, the multidimensionality from synesthesia of line and face, ventilation by quality of the material and immaterial circumstances of sound effects, the implication in events resulted from cognition for information and unexpected actions, and the autonomy of the route of a variety of experiences including intimate connection of inter-related events and temporary and diverse external conditions. Hereby Temporality of musical phenomenology in Rem Koolhaas's space can be experienced by systems base oh the importance of host's motion, changes of programs according to the motion as well as uncertainty and immaterial changes. Due to the changes user's emotion and motion is undergone as Temporality that changes automatically.

Chanting in the gallery: Ritual sound and its phenomenology in contemporary art

ABSTRACTArtists Bill Viola, Meredith Monk, Janet Cardiff and Marcus Coates have employed ritualistic singing and chants as tools of critical expression in their practices. What types of experiences do sounds associated with religion and belief systems elicit within the viewers and listeners of the work? Are the causal factors of these experiences implicit in the music or present in the individual listeners? This article draws upon musical phenomenology, neuro-phenomenology, musical time and Heidegger's Dasein in order to formulate an understanding of the role of ritual singing in art, and the ways in which art audiences access transcendental experiences.

What is Phenomenological Music, and What Does It Have to Do with Salvatore Sciarrino?

WHAT IS PHENOMENOLOGICAL MUSIC, AND WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH SALVATORE SCIARRINO? AARON HELGESON HERE EXISTS, IN THE CIRCLE of contemporary musicians in which we find ourselves, a growing discussion of a music which is purported to be phenomenological. This label seems to be applied consistently to several composers making use of non-traditional instrumental sounds (Helmut Lachenmann, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, and Rebecca Saunders, to name only a few), but it has made its most conspicuous appearances in relation to the music of Salvatore Sciarrino. For example , program notes for the Kontinent Sciarrino series at the 2008 Salzburg Festival describe his music as: concentrated expressions of life, which while listening allow the border to dissolve between inner or outer reality. This art of T What is Phenomenological Music? 5 refined perception has been variously related to Sciarrino’s Sicilian origins: the silence of the heat of midday, the deserted landscape and the shimmering Mediterranean light as a background, against which this kind of musical phenomenology can unfold.1 As has often been the case in situations where such labels are used to categorize emerging musical practice, the word has been applied not primarily by its practitioners, but by its observers. In such instances, these labels have frequently been reclaimed, revised, and re(de)fined by those whose work has been so categorized. Most recently, we have observed the coining of the label spectralist by musicologists, and the term’s subsequent reclamation by composers like Tristan Murail, Jonathan Harvey, and Joshua Fineberg. Similar examples in the twentieth century can be found with labels such as minimalist, serialist, new complexity, and experimental. There is, however, an important way in which the label “phenomenological ” stands out from these examples, for it invokes a particular intellectual discourse that predates its current usage by at least a century. That discourse is the phenomenological philosophy of Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This philosophical tradition—known for its emphasis on empirical observation and radically descriptive (as opposed to explanatory) investigation—brings with it a very long and complicated history in describing perceptual experience. Surprisingly, though, the works of these philosophers include barely any mention of sound, let alone music.2 Insofar as the philosophical practice of phenomenology has been invoked in describing contemporary music (including both its works and its workers), it is relevant to explore the meaning of words like phenomenon and phenomenological in such a context, and whether indeed their applicability is unique to the music they are used to describe. To begin, we must investigate what the phenomenological project is,3 in order to ascertain what it might be able to tell us about sound in general, and music in particular. Phenomenology is the study of phenomena. In the most literal sense, this means that phenomenological investigation aims to describe not things as they are (noumenon), but things as they appear to us (phainomenon). To a phenomenologist, perception is always perception of and about something: phenomenology contends that once underway all experience, whether fulfilled or remaining “empty,” is found to have a specific 6 Perspectives of New Music shape in that all experience is “referential,” “directional,” and “attentional.” All experience is experience of ———. Anything can fill in the blank. The name for this shape of experience is intentionality .4 Its of-and-about-ness means that there is an object to our perception (a marble, a song, a color, another person, a sunset) as well as an intentional act (seeing, thinking, walking, hearing). We therefore call these perceptual phenomena intentional objects: objects that exist in nothing more, or less, than our experience of them. Intentional objects distinguish themselves from physical objects in at least two important ways: 1) they need not conform to an objective explanation of reality,5 and 2) they are experienced all-at-once (Zugleich) as a totality, rather than as a summation of partial views or individual dimensions.6 For a simple example of the former, we need only consider the color black, which appears as a color, but which “in reality” contains no visible frequencies of light. For an example of the latter, imagine that I hear the sound of a...

What is Phenomenological Music, and What Does It Have to Do with Salvatore Sciarrino?

WHAT IS PHENOMENOLOGICAL MUSIC, AND WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH SALVATORE SCIARRINO? AARON HELGESON HERE EXISTS, IN THE CIRCLE of contemporary musicians in which we find ourselves, a growing discussion of a music which is purported to be phenomenological. This label seems to be applied consistently to several composers making use of non-traditional instrumental sounds (Helmut Lachenmann, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, and Rebecca Saunders, to name only a few), but it has made its most conspicuous appearances in relation to the music of Salvatore Sciarrino. For example , program notes for the Kontinent Sciarrino series at the 2008 Salzburg Festival describe his music as: concentrated expressions of life, which while listening allow the border to dissolve between inner or outer reality. This art of T What is Phenomenological Music? 5 refined perception has been variously related to Sciarrino’s Sicilian origins: the silence of the heat of midday, the deserted landscape and the shimmering Mediterranean light as a background, against which this kind of musical phenomenology can unfold.1 As has often been the case in situations where such labels are used to categorize emerging musical practice, the word has been applied not primarily by its practitioners, but by its observers. In such instances, these labels have frequently been reclaimed, revised, and re(de)fined by those whose work has been so categorized. Most recently, we have observed the coining of the label spectralist by musicologists, and the term’s subsequent reclamation by composers like Tristan Murail, Jonathan Harvey, and Joshua Fineberg. Similar examples in the twentieth century can be found with labels such as minimalist, serialist, new complexity, and experimental. There is, however, an important way in which the label “phenomenological ” stands out from these examples, for it invokes a particular intellectual discourse that predates its current usage by at least a century. That discourse is the phenomenological philosophy of Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This philosophical tradition—known for its emphasis on empirical observation and radically descriptive (as opposed to explanatory) investigation—brings with it a very long and complicated history in describing perceptual experience. Surprisingly, though, the works of these philosophers include barely any mention of sound, let alone music.2 Insofar as the philosophical practice of phenomenology has been invoked in describing contemporary music (including both its works and its workers), it is relevant to explore the meaning of words like phenomenon and phenomenological in such a context, and whether indeed their applicability is unique to the music they are used to describe. To begin, we must investigate what the phenomenological project is,3 in order to ascertain what it might be able to tell us about sound in general, and music in particular. Phenomenology is the study of phenomena. In the most literal sense, this means that phenomenological investigation aims to describe not things as they are (noumenon), but things as they appear to us (phainomenon). To a phenomenologist, perception is always perception of and about something: phenomenology contends that once underway all experience, whether fulfilled or remaining “empty,” is found to have a specific 6 Perspectives of New Music shape in that all experience is “referential,” “directional,” and “attentional.” All experience is experience of ———. Anything can fill in the blank. The name for this shape of experience is intentionality .4 Its of-and-about-ness means that there is an object to our perception (a marble, a song, a color, another person, a sunset) as well as an intentional act (seeing, thinking, walking, hearing). We therefore call these perceptual phenomena intentional objects: objects that exist in nothing more, or less, than our experience of them. Intentional objects distinguish themselves from physical objects in at least two important ways: 1) they need not conform to an objective explanation of reality,5 and 2) they are experienced all-at-once (Zugleich) as a totality, rather than as a summation of partial views or individual dimensions.6 For a simple example of the former, we need only consider the color black, which appears as a color, but which “in reality” contains no visible frequencies of light. For an example of the latter, imagine that I hear the sound of a...

Boulez, Music and Philosophy (review)

Boulez, Music and Philosophy. By Edward Campbell. (Music in Twentieth Century, no. 27.) Cam - bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xvi, 281 p. ISBN 9780521862424. $95.] Music examples, figures, tables, bibliography, index. Considering how large Pierre Boulez looms over post-war music, it is remarkable that neither his music nor aesthetic worldview has been subject of an Englishlanguage monograph for many years. While certainly encompassing both total serial and aleatoric extremes that characterize Darmstadt School's music in general, Boulez's output presents perhaps greater challenges to scholars and musicians seeking to analyze it-and to identify stylistic and procedural consistencies in it- than that of some of his peers, due to high volume of extensively revised and unfinished works. Edward Campbell's wellresearched investigation suggests that Boulez's resistance to closure can be partially attributed to composer's fluctuating engagement with twentieth-century intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno, Umberto Eco, and Gilles Deleuze. Camp - bell proposes that although Boulez's correspondence, writings, and lectures indicate that his knowledge of expansive philosophical systems is not always consummate, much of his music strives to generate in action through its imaginative aural realization of key philosophical concepts or terms present within these systems. Campbell, lecturer in Music Department of School of Education at University of Aberdeen, maintains interest of his reader by fusing together several methodological approaches: he explains significance of little-known source materials, provides fluid textual exegeses of monumental philosophical works, and offers cogent comparative musical analyses of works that Boulez links to specific philosophical ideas. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to and justification for study: Campbell makes it clear that although Boulez believes that historians and aestheticians tend to draw arbitrary connections between music and philosophy, composer's usage of philosophical lexicon is persistent and should be thoroughly interrogated (p. 4). He notes that scholarship that interprets Boulez's work in relation to literature and visual art has neglected his artistic responses to philosophical stimuli. Chapters 2 and 3 unearth important figures in Boulez's musical circle during his early years in Paris and outline his exposure to discourse on dialectical oppositions prior to meeting Adorno in 1955. Chapters 4 through 7 trace Boulez's personal engagement with esteemed twentiethcentury thinkers and his allusions to some of leading philosophical perspectives from 1940s to 1970s. Campbell surveys Boulez's lectures and writings to determine philosophical movements that seem to have greatest bearing on his ideas and music, and devotes chapter to each: dialectics; positivism; structuralism; poststructuralism. The final three chapters contain comparative musical analyses in which Campbell considers how concept of virtual, philosophical trajectory spanning from Henri Bergson to Deleuze, is an underlying preoccupation that motivates Boulez's allegiance to athematicism and how music designed in accordance with the dialectic of continuous and discontinuous results in works in which contrast of smooth and striated space and time is foregrounded. Campbell contributes greatly to Boulez scholarship by examining composer's early influences and acquaintances, including his friendship with Pierre Souvtchinsky, an authority on Russian music and passionate student of philosophy whom Jacques Derrida described as a philosophical amateur, in best sense of term (cited by Campbell, p. 16), and Boris de Schloezer, musicologist who published one of first books on Stravinsky (Igor Stravinsky [Paris: C. Aveline, 1929]) and presented musical phenomenology in his Introduction J. …

What Do We Hear When We Hear Music? A Radical Phenomenology of Music

In this contribution I want to sketch a phenomenology of music, expounding and expanding the philosophy of Michel Henry. In the work of Henry, several approaches to a phenomenology of music are made. The central question of the contribution is: What do we hear when we hear music? It is argued that there is an unbridgeable divide between the intentional sphere of the world and its sounds and what in Henry's philosophy is understood as Life. Music is the language of Life itself and cannot be merely considered a composition of sound. Music does not imitate nor even represent the world, but is the inner movement of life itself. In this respect, Henry is close to Schopenhauer's view on music, in which the Will is sharply contrasted to representation. However Schopenhauer's thought needs a phenomenological elaboration in order to understand music as an immediate experience. In the article, music is compared to painting, since this is a recurring methodological theme in Henry's thoughts on music.

Journal of Mathematics and Music (review)

Journal of Mathematics and Music. Edited by Thomas Noll and Robert Peck. Taylor and Francis. Triannual. Vol. 1, no. 1 (March 2007). ISSN 1745-9737 (print); ISSN 1745-9745 (online). Print and online (PDF and HTML) format. Access: http://www.informaworld.com/JMM. Subscription or inquiries originating from North America: Taylor and Francis Group Journals, 325 Chestnut Street, Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106. For other countries see: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/ contact.asp. E-mail: katie.chandler@tandf.co.uk. $75 individual; $198 institution (print and online), $188 (online only). The relationship between mathematics and music has fascinated philosophers and musicians for millennia. Pythagoras's mythical discovery that music was sounding number, and thus a sensible manifestation of the underlying numeric reality of the Pythagorean universe, cast a shadow over centuries of musical thought. Neo-Platonic philosophers like Boethius, operating within the Pythagorean tradition, considered musica nothing less than a branch of mathematics itself (that branch concerned with compared quantities, i.e., wholenumber ratios). The math-music relationship has persisted in various forms since then, waxing and waning with the intellectual tenor of the age. We currently appear to be in a waxing phase: since World War II, many prominent composers and music theorists have turned to mathematics as a means of stimulating musical creation and modeling musical thought. While mathematics may not play as central a role in musical composition today as it did in the postwar heyday of Darmstadt, mathematical music theory has rarely been more active. In the United States, the visionary work of David Lewin has captured the imaginations of many scholars, spawning the musictheoretic subfield of transformational theory. In Europe, the work of Guerino Mazzola has had a similarly galvanizing effect, stimulating a growing number of European scholars to pursue connections between mathematical category theory and an astonishingly diverse range of musical phenomena. The present journal arrives perched atop the crest of this wave of burgeoning musicmathematical thought. As the editors make clear in their introduction to this inaugural issue, the journal seeks not only to ride that wave but to channel and focus its considerable energy, funneling the many disparate strands of mathematical music theory into a shared discursive space, one in which connections can be drawn between sub-fields that have previously remained separate. Most notably, the journal aims to integrate American and European traditions of mathematical music theory, areas of inquiry that have thus far remained largely independent from one another due not only to geography, but also, one suspects, to differences in intellectual style. This commitment to trans-Atlantic dialogue is made clear by the international pair of co-editors: the German Thomas Noll and the American Robert Peck, both eminent scholars in their own right. Noll and Peck stress that they wish the journal to be not only a meeting place for American and European music theorists, but also a site for mathematical dialogue between theorists, composers, performers, cognitive scientists, and even those outside of the ivory tower-for example, working musicians involved in such fields as computer music and sound processing. This emphasis on boundary crossing, as the editors put it, is one of the most attractive and exciting aspects of the journal. For musicians not involved in any of these fields, and especially for those with some degree of math phobia, the idea of mathematical thought about music likely conjures up images of an arid, mechanical, hard science approach to the subject, one unresponsive-or even anathema-to the poetic and expressive immediacies of musical experience. This impression, though understandable, is in fact far from the truth. Much work in mathematical music theory is highly poetic and interpretive, ranging from issues of musical semiosis and hermeneutics, to mappings of embodied musical experience, to models of musical phenomenology. …

Studies in Music with Text (review)

IN MEMORIAM DAVID LEWIN Studies in with Text. By David Lewin. (Oxford Studies in Theory.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. [xii, 409 p. ISBN 0-19-518208-1. $65.] examples, index. David Lewin (1933-2003) was doubtless most significant music theorist of last half century. Oxford brilliantly inaugurates its new series, Studies in with a collection of essays that gives a more complete sense of Lewin's achievement than if we had been left with only two extraordinary but highly technical volumes published during his lifetime, Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) and Musical Form and Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). The essays comprise nineteen chapters, distributed over seven parts, each associated with a composer-six canonical German composers, organized chronologically from Mozart to Schoenberg, and Milton Babbitt (whom Lewin places as following in German tradition). Seven of chapters appear here for first time. Among twelve that have previously appeared are a number that may reasonably considered to have achieved status of classics of music theory and analysis: Music Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception, Au/ dem Flusse: Image and Background in a Schubert Song, Amfortas's Prayer to Titurel and Role of D in Parsifal, and most of Schoenberg articles chosen Lewin to represent his long engagement with this composer. In addition to-and more important than-the cultural boundaries within which contents of book are brought together, there are attitudes to music analysis generally and to analysis of music with text specifically that are characteristically Lewinian and that recur throughout. In his introduction, Lewin notes his tendency to seek ways in which music and text . . . each other. Thus, in his Tristan study, appearing here for first time, Lewin asserts a dialectic tension between the well-made play and the drama-of-passion, a tension that and is enacted by a tonal/atonal musical dialectic. There are three new essays on Robert and Clara Schumann, following an essay (also previously unpublished) on Schubert's Ihr Bild. Weaving biography and cultural history together with sort of metricharmonic reductions he used for first time in Auf dem Flusse essay, Lewin demonstrates an enactment per musica in Clara Schumann's setting of Ich stand in dunkeln Traumen that is far removed from Schubert's in Ihr Bild, but equally valid compositionally and poetically. In two related essays on modal-tonal ambiguity in Robert Schumann's Anfang wollt' ich fast verzagen and Auf einer Burg, Lewin leads us to hearings in which an ambivalence between ancient Phrygian and modern minor enacts temporal disjunctions for respective personae of songs. A postscript for opening Mozart essays discusses how tonics and dominants might said to drama, and be enacted drama. In final chapter, Some Problems and Resources of Theory, Lewin suggests that Babbitt's serial technique enacts central weaving imagery in Philomel (a suggestion, as we learn in an appendix added here, that was corroborated composer). Lewin's preference for locution enact is related to methodological stance he promulgated in many of his writings, in which he interpreted his favored transformational attitude as that of one who is inside music, as idealized dancer/singer (Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, p. 159). He wished to emphasize gestural, embodied activity of musician, singer, player, or composer, thinking: 'I am at s; what characteristic transformation do I perform in order to arrive at t?' ( Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, p. xiii). This stance is given its fullest expression (not only in Studies in and Text volume, but in Lewin's entire oeuvre) in article, first published in 1986, Music Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception. …

Influences of phenomenology: James tenney's theory

This article on James Tenney, the American music theorist and composer, sets out the overall framework of his theory of music, in particular the systematic analysis conducted in his essay entitledMeta+hodos. Although these reflections cannot be included in the sphere of American musical phenomenology, they show remarkable similarities with phenomenological themes. A Gestalt approach centred on the description of sound phenomena is delineated, together with a conceptualization hinging on the phenomenal nature of music and the idea of perceivable structures and expressive valencies. A theory of musical wholes and parts — from the cohesion and segregation viewpoint — is followed by a theory of form predicated on an original and significant definition: that form is the perception of differences. Finally, the methodological development of Tenney's theory is traced and criticized, in particular the conflict between descriptive and non-descriptive moments.

The logarithmic ontology of tone; Ernest Ansermet's phenomenology of music

The logarithmic ontology of tone; Ernest Ansermet's phenomenology of music