Our Language of Harmony: A Phenomenological Investigation of Communal Expression in Music

by Henry Hall

Professor Will Dudley, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Philosophy

WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts

May 10, 2011

2 Table of Contents: Introduction.................................................................................................................... 3

Chapter 1 Overview of Early Phenomenology: Rigorous Reflection......................... 7 Edmund Husserl: Pure Phenomenology................................................. Martin Heidegger: An Ontological Response............................................ 7 9

Chapter 2 Merleau-Ponty & French Phenomenology: Turning Outward................... 14 Sartre: A Pessimistic Ontology................................................................... 14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Consciousness Embodied................................... 16 Communication and the Cultural World.................................................... Chapter 3 Mikel Dufrennes Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience: A Helpful Misconception of Music............................................................................. The Aesthetic Object in Music................................................................... Action and the Untranslatable.................................................................... The Language of Music: A Derridean Illustration..................................... Feeling and Character: The Stuff of Music................................................ Harmony, Melody, and Rhythm: Musical Spatiotemporality.................... Chapter 4 Dufrennes Lacuna: Communal Expression in Music............................... Cultural Expression.................................................................................... 24 27 28 31 33 38 43 48 49

Communal Expression................................................................................ 53 Chapter 5 Synologue and Being-For-Ourselves......................................................... Conclusion..................................................................................................................... Works Cited................................................................................................................... 62 67 68

3 Introduction Philosophy has long been pre-occupied with the mind, and understandably soit is a primary condition of the possibility of philosophy in the first place. But because were so thoroughly bound up in it, the mind is exceedingly difficult to understand and discuss. Extricating ourselves from it entirely and considering it from an external, objective standpoint seems almost paradoxical. Near the end of the 19th century, perhaps the most rigorous effort to date was made in this field, specifically by the infant sciences of psychology and psychoanalysis. These attempts at a third-person explication of mental processes ranging from physical action and perception to memory and emotion met with mixed success and a great deal of criticism. By 1900, laboratory psychology was still struggling to gain a legitimate foothold, and Freuds comparatively speculative practice was only slowly gaining public attention. That very year, the German philosopher Edmund Husserl published his seminal work, Logical Investigations, a treatise that embraced the very problems that psychology faced. He approached the mind from a first-person experiential perspective, and effectively founded the philosophical branch of phenomenology. With his new species of philosophy, Husserl strove to study consciousness through a vehemently non-psychological lens. His aim was to establish a new science with what he called pure consciousness as its focus, excluding from its practice any appeal to external reality and using a method of reflection instead. Though his emphatic attempts to distinguish phenomenology from psychology resulted in some major theoretical flaws, Husserls endeavor laid the foundation for some of the centurys

4 greatest thinkers, such as his protg Martin Heidegger and the French phenomenologists Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Despite Husserls intended restriction of phenomenology to pure consciousness, the field ultimately expanded to a philosophical study of experience on the whole. In his broader, ontological enterprise, Heidegger demonstrated that external reality was actually essential to Husserls conception of consciousness, thereby opening the doors for phenomenological investigations that would take the world into account. In 1943, Sartre responded to his German predecessors in Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, emphasizing the social world and going so far as to meld Husserls and Heideggers ideas with those of psychoanalysis. A couple of years later, Merleau-Ponty published his Phenomenology of Perception, in which the material body is held as absolutely central to an investigation of consciousness. Thanks to Sartres and Merleau-Pontys extension of phenomenology to our experiential relationships with external objects, it became an attractive investigatory medium for the study of many other areas rooted in the first person: free will, the body, culture, lovein short, anything that we experience. One such field, which has frustrated the pens of philosophers and other theoreticians for millennia, is especially amenable to such experiential investigation: aesthetics. A fair amount of work has indeed been published on the subject, but mostly with regard to the visual arts. The phenomenology of aural aesthetics, on the other hand, has been largely neglected, and the attention that it has received has yet to result in an adequate treatment of the subject. The French philosopher-aesthetician Mikel Dufrenne wrote a Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience in 1953, which is firmly rooted in Merleau-Pontys account of

5 experience, and is the most comprehensive work of its kind. While Dufrenne devotes much of his book to visual art, he considers the arts of sight and of sound in parallel as ultimately expressive media. However, when it comes to his musical discussions, he conflates music in general with classical music, as the latter had historically been the object of aesthetic study. By confining his scope to the dominant Western music of the past millennium or so, Dufrenne risks (and, as we will find, commits) significant overgeneralization in his analysis. But the greatest drawback of Dufrennes approach is not his narrow focus on the music of a particular genre or culture; rather, the restriction of Dufrennes study to one mode of musical production costs him a full understanding of musics ontological implications. More specifically: classical music is composed by an individual, and while it is often performed by a large group of people, the work of music is the expression of a single consciousness. Thus, Dufrennes reductive consideration of aural aesthetics forces him to neglect music that is not only performed but also created by a group. Such communally expressive music actually takes advantage of the arts potential in a way that classical composition cannot, and even constitutes an entire new field for the phenomenological investigation of social experience. That being said, Dufrennes Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience is invaluable to a phenomenological understanding of music, even if it does not tell the whole story. His account deals with a number of important facets of musical experience, such as the role of the body, the expressive content of music, the parallels between music and language, and the nature of musics spatiotemporality. Furthermore, he explains the

6 connection between expression and self-recognition, which we will use as a springboard for our analysis of communal expressions ontological implications. Our first aim, then, is to use Dufrennes incomplete phenomenology of music in an effort to provide a fuller account of the art, specifically with regards to its capacity for communal expression. We will then be in a position to appreciate the ontological implications of this musical capacity, as well as the phenomenological field indicated thereby. To realize what these implications are, and how they are manifested in music, I will proceed as follows: Chapter 1 A brief overview of the original German phenomenologists. While Dufrennes analysis of music does not appeal to these directly, they are essential to our understanding of Merleau-Ponty, whose import is based on both his continuity within and his distinction from this phenomenological tradition. Chapter 2 A more detailed discussion of French phenomenology, focusing on that of Merleau-Ponty, explaining not only its importance in the history of the field but also its special amenability to a phenomenology of music. Chapter 3 Dufrennes account of music in his Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, giving special attention to the intersubjective dimension of this artform. Chapter 4 A discussion of the communally expressive mode of music that Dufrenne neglects. Chapter 5 Communal expression considered more generally as synologue, including a provisional theory of being-for-ourselves as the experience of collective selfrevelation through expression.

7 Chapter 1 Overview of Early Phenomenology: Rigorous Reflection Edmund Husserl: Pure Phenomenology Inspired by the teachings of his mentor Franz Brentano and allured by the task of investigating the roots of pure logic without regard to empirical evidence, Edmund Husserl endeavored to found what he called a new fundamental science, pure phenomenology (M 124).1 In an attempt to gain an understanding of notthe concrete instance, butits corresponding Idea (M 67), he posits the phenomenon, which is the basic constituent of conscious experience. In his words: phenomenon signifies a certain content that intrinsically inhabits the intuitive consciousness in question and is the substrate for its actuality valuation (M 125). Phenomena are inherent to consciousness as it intuits the external world, and without them there would be no such thing as experience; they are the mental manifestations of any object of experience, and as such cover a wide range of things. The most basic example of a phenomenon is the way we encounter an object in the world. When we encounter an object, we engage with it through cognitive processes, specifically processes of intuition. Through these intuitive processes, we say that we experience the object, and come to know things about it. When I see an apple, I know its shape, size, color, and the like; I can walk around it, and experience it through multiple perspectives, giving me more accurate knowledge of the object; I can pick it up, and intuit it tactilely. These different ways in which an object can appear (M 125) to consciousness are phenomena. The experience that the apple is red is a phenomenon, as

All parenthetical citations of the form (M x) refer to: Mooney, T., & Moran, D. (Eds.). (2002). The Phenomenology Reader. London: Routledge.

8 is the experience that the apple is a single, consistent apple even though I regard it from multiple perspectives. But the various appearances of the apple as I regard it from these different perspectives are each, themselves, phenomena. And my experience of the fact that the apple is actual, that it exists in the world, is also a phenomenon. Husserl stresses that phenomena are not aspects of the external objects themselvesrather, they are the manifestations of those objects within consciousness. We should also note that phenomena are not only manifestations of natural objectsthe concept of the phenomenonincludes all modes in which things are given to consciousness[i.e.] all ways of being conscious of something (M 126). Thus, emotions, volitions, and aesthetics are all also experienced as phenomena (M 126). But Husserl does not seek to prove the existence of phenomena. Rather, he presupposes them as the elements of the general realm that he seeks to investigate: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness (M 129). The pure consciousness which he is after can only be contemplated by way of pure reflection, which serves as the basic method of Husserls phenomenology (M 129). Such reflection consists in an exclusively immanent view of consciousnessi.e., consciousness as considered by consciousness without regard to anything that exists externally to consciousness. Pure reflection excludes, as such, every type of external experience and therefore precludes any copositing of objects alien to consciousness (M 129). In the Husserlian vocabulary, this technique of bracketing off consciousness from the world is called epoch (M 172). By introducing epoch as the defining method of pure phenomenology, Husserl ardently distinguishes his philosophy from the relatively new discipline of psychology.

9 Husserl fears that his focus on consciousness and its mental acts might confuse the reader into interpreting his phenomenology as a branch of psychological science. To avoid such confusion, he frequently alludes to psychologys primary difference: Psychologyis science of psychic Nature and, therefore, of consciousness as Nature or as real event in the spatiotemporal world (M 129). While consciousness is a focal point of psychology, it is not the pure species of consciousness that Husserl claims to investigatepsychology is based on the very interaction between consciousness and Nature that Husserl seeks to bracket off. Ideally (and in Husserls opinion), pure phenomenology is a science akin to pure arithmetic, proceeding only from self-evident truths (M 74-75). Martin Heidegger: An Ontological Response Under Husserls wing, Heidegger sought to study not just consciousness but being as a whole. Over the course of his ontological investigations, Heidegger rejects the most fundamental aspect of Husserls phenomenologynamely, his strict isolation of consciousness as the object of his investigations. However, their personal and intellectual relationship was of such a close variety that, in Being and Time, Heidegger never openly criticizes Husserls views. Veiled as Heideggers rejection of Husserlian phenomenology might be, it is brought into relief by Sartres comments on Husserl in Being and Nothingness, to which we briefly turn our attention. In his introduction to Being and Nothingness, Sartre makes the simple and essential point: Consciousness is consciousness of something (S 17).2 While Husserl agrees with this aspect of consciousness, Sartre holds that Husserlmisunderstood its
2

All parenthetical citations of the form (S x) refer to: Sartre, J.-P. (2003). Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. (H. Barnes, Trans.) London: Routledge Classics.

10 essential character (S 17). If consciousness is consciousness of something, then Husserls pure consciousness is an empty concept. By completely divorcing consciousness from the world in which it exists, Husserl effectively replaces its very mode of being with an alien oneone that leaves it without an object and, thus, unable to function or even exist. Thus [on Sartres account] any attempt to study consciousness while bracketing the world is doomed to failure (St 103).3 Sartre points us to Kants Refutation of Idealism, in which the Prussian philosopher makes some key elucidations: I am conscious of my own existence as determined in time. All determination of time presupposes something permanent in perceptionBut this permanent cannot be an intuition in me. For all grounds of determination of my existence which are to be met with in me are representations; and as representations themselves require a permanent distinct from them, in relation to which their change, and so my existence in the time wherein they change, may be determined.4 Kant posits both time and external permanence as prerequisites for consciousness. The latter follows from the former, as time is a condition of the possibility of consciousness, whereas an external permanent serves as a reference point for the recognition of change, and so is directly essential to our intuition of time and thus indirectly essential to consciousness. By severing consciousness from the external spatiotemporal world, Husserl deprives it of the very things that give it meaning in the first place. So, his

All parenthetical citations of the form (St x) refer to: Stewart, J. (Ed.). (1998). The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 4 Kant, I. (2007). The Critique of Pure Reason. (N. K. Smith, Trans.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 245.

11 attempt to preserve the purity of consciousness is in vain, as purity thus understood is impossibleor, at least, nonsensical. From the start of Being and Time, Heidegger faces in a completely different direction than his predecessor. Rather than find consciousness at the core of philosophical inquiry, Heidegger takes a step back and considers the ancient, neglected, and fundamental question of Being. However, upon undertaking his ontological quest, Heidegger admits that he lacks not only the answer but even the formulation of the question of Being (H 44).5 Despite this initial set-back, he takes heart in the fact that, to work out the question of Being means to make a beinghe who questionsperspicuous in his Being (H 47). This is a promising start given that we, as humans, are perspicuous in our Being, and leads to an investigation not of Being on the whole but rather of this peculiar species of Being which allows for (and even creates) ontology in the first place (H 55-56). Heidegger calls this special type of Being of which we are examples Dasein (H 53). The defining feature of Dasein lies in its self-awareness: It is constitutive of the Being of Dasein to have, in its very Being, a relation of Being to this BeingThe ontic distinction of Dasein lies in the fact that it is ontological (H 53-54). Actually, Dasein is really pre-ontological, as ontological tends to indicate the explicit, theoretical question of the meaning of beings (H 54). In saying that Dasein is ontically distinguished by its pre-ontology, Heidegger asserts that it is different from other beings because of its inherent, albeit initially primitive, conception of its own Being. It is this

All parenthetical citations of the form (H x) refer to: Heidegger, M. (2007). Basic Writings. (D. Krell, Ed.) New York: Routledge .

12 pre-ontological awareness in Dasein that allows for any ontologies at all, giving it priority in Heideggers ontological investigation as the very basis for it. Heideggers account of Dasein marks the beginning of his critique of Husserls ideas: Dasein tends to understand its own Being in terms of that being to which it is essentially, continually, and most closely relatedthe world (H 58). That is to say that Daseins pre-ontological understanding stems from the very spatiotemporal world that Husserl avoided so urgently. And, though Heideggers noncommittal use of the word tends might provide some leeway for his teachers pure phenomenology, he goes on to deem time absolutely crucial to Dasein, and thus to the human consciousness that Husserl wants to isolate. As Kant posits, consciousness requires time, and, as Dasein is what it is by virtue of its self-consciousness, time is fundamental to it. Beings are grasped in their Being as presence; that is to say, they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time, the present (H 70). Likewise, Dasein grasps its own Being as its own presence, which is to say that it necessarily understands itself in terms of time. But Heideggers language of presence also underscores the spatiotemporality of consciousness. When a being is present, it is not only now (in time) but also here (in space). This duality of the notion of presence is another indication of Husserls primary misconception: he does deal with time, and even published a small work dedicated to the subject of temporal experience, but attempts to isolate internal timeconsciousness from external, or what he calls Objective, time (Hu 21).6 While our experience of time is certainly different from Objective time, Husserl glosses over the fact that presence is experienced not only as a temporal coordinate but also as a spatial
6

Husserl, E. (1964). The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. (J. Churchill, Trans.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

13 oneone is present in the world. Concordantly, as determination within time necessitates an external world, Heideggers conception of consciousness takes the world from which Husserl restricts himself to be essential to the very meaning of consciousness. Through his conception of Dasein, Heidegger effectively rejects Husserls attempt to abstract consciousness from the world. He places consciousness essentially within the world of time and space, thereby giving it its proper object, i.e., something of which to be conscious. And, while Dasein understands itself through (and thus is conscious of) the world surrounding it, it is also conscious of itself. Thus, Sartre revises Heideggers definition of Dasein: consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself (S 18). Though, in a way, Heideggers original conception of Dasein already includes this implication of the alien via the discussion of the external world in terms of which Dasein understands itself. So, while Sartre is right to point out the Kantian necessity of an external permanent, his allegedly revisionist point is implicitly stipulated in Heideggers original discussion of Dasein. In rejecting Husserls phenomenological enterprise, Heidegger actually revises and continues it: while he initially intends to turn his focus toward Being as a whole, he winds up narrowing this focus to the species of being that is self-consciousnessthe very object of Husserls studies, though Heidegger brings it out of the vacancy of pure consciousness and back into the world, the intuition of which and recognition as such is Dasein. Thereby, Heidegger releases phenomenology from its problematic restrictions, and re-founds a philosophical field for the investigation of experience.

14 Chapter 2 Merleau-Ponty & French Phenomenology: Turning Outward Fifteen years after Heideggers publication of Being and Time, Sartre published Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology as a sort of response, founding the French branch of phenomenology. A couple years later, his colleague Merleau-Ponty published Phenomenology of Perception, which, in turn, responded to some aspects of Sartres work. Below, we will focus on Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, as it provides us with the tools to discuss perception, expression, and intersubjectivity in musical experience. First, though, we will briefly touch on Sartres treatise, as his ontological discussion will prove useful both for our understanding of Merleau-Ponty and our account of the broader implications of communal expression in music later on. Sartre: A Pessimistic Ontology Following in Heideggers investigation of ontological modes, Sartre distinguishes between being-in-itself and being-for-itself (S 19). Being-in-itself is the ontological mode of everything aside from consciousness. It is useful to think of it as objective beingobjects in the world, trees, coins, planets, are all beings-in-themselves; their mode of existence is being-in-itself. They just are. Being-for-itself, on the other hand, is the being of consciousness. We do not have space here to explicate all the facets of this ontological mode precisely; suffice it to say that one of its defining characteristics is its capacity for self-determination, which is a result of its self-awareness. This capacity is what Sartre refers to with existentialisms catch-phrase, existence precedes essence (S

15 E 22).7 We mean that man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himselfHe will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself (S E 22). In fact, man is a confluence of the in-itself and the for-itself: he exists in the worldhe has an objective, corporeal being which simply isbut he also exists for himself. He consists not only in his body but also in his reflective consciousness, and given his intentionality he can determine himself: I am condemned to be free (S 462). As his attitude toward freedom suggests, Sartre ultimately takes his phenomenology in a fairly pessimistic direction, developing a notion of existential alienation from the duality of being-in-itself and being-for-itself that results in beingfor-others (S 545). While his first consideration of consciousness results in the discovery that human reality is-for-itself, Sartre rightly asks, Is this all that it is? (S 245) Unlike the free being-for-itself of consciousness, being-for-others is the determination of oneself from the perspective of the Other (i.e. a foreign consciousness), without regard for ones being-for-itself. To illustrate the experience of alienation caused by being-for-others, Sartre gives the example of racial labels: if one is born into a European Jewish family in the 1940s, one will be labeled as a Jew. The person being labeled has no say in the matter, Thus here I suddenly encounter the total alienation of my person: I am something which I have not chosen to beThe true limit of my freedom lies purely and simply in the very fact that an Other apprehends me as the

All parenthetical citations of the form (S E x) refer to: Sartre, J.-P. (2007). Existentialism is a Humanism. (C. Macomber, Trans.) New Haven: Yale University Press.

16 Other-as-object and in that second corollary fact that my situation ceases for the Other to be a situation and becomes an objective form in which I exist as an objective structure. (S 545) Most importantly for the development of phenomenology, Sartre asserts that his phenomenology plunges the human being back into the world (St 103), specifically the social world. As we will see, Merleau-Ponty has a significantly different take on interpersonal relations, though his ideas parallel Sartres in-itself/for-itself framework. Merleau-Ponty: Consciousness Embodied Already we see how French phenomenology, while indebted to its German predecessors, firmly roots itself in practical reality. It extends the investigation of the subjects consciousness to its interactions with other subjectsa far cry from Husserls epoch, but connected by his fundamental method of first-person experiential investigation. Following closely on the heels of Being and Nothingness, Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception takes this mode of study in a slightly different direction, focusing on consciousness relationship with the physical body, the world, as well as other consciousnesses. Merleau-Pontys phenomenology begins, like Husserls, with self-perception but in terms of the body. For him, self-perception is constituted not by a spatiality of position but by a spatiality of situation (M-P 115).8 I do not perceive my body as an object that exists in objective space, constantly changing in position relative to some fixed map of the world, i.e., in some sort of system of coordinates. In other words, my
8

All parenthetical citations of the form (M-P x) refer to: Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception. (K. Paul, Trans.) London: Routledge Classics.

17 view of the world is not objective but subjective, or perspectivala notion that is far from revolutionary. But Merleau-Ponty takes this further than the typical objective/subjective distinction. When I say, I know where my right hand is at this moment, I do not simply mean to say that I know how many inches my right hand is from my waist, from my left hand, from my right eye, &c. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty points out, I mean that I can do things with my right hand at this moment, without looking for it or somehow determining its position in objective space. So, bodily space is aim-oriented, task-oriented, and, simply, orientated (M-P 117). By considering the body in movement, we can see better how it inhabits space (and, moreover, time) because movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time, it actively assumes them, and takes them up in their basic significance which is obscured in the commonplaceness of established situations. (M-P 117) So, embodied consciousness does not simply exist in space and time, but uses them, existing with and through them. Merleau-Ponty illustrates the action- and end-oriented nature of our bodily being with an example from psychological research: a patient is incapable of pointing to his nose when asked to do so, but is fully capable of grabbing it. Given this, we see that, bodily space may be given to me in an intention to take hold without being given in an intention to know (M-P 119). Our knowledge of bodily space is subjective insofar as the subject is capable of intention, and so knows his body to the extent that he can do things with it.9

NB: In Phenomenology of Perception, this analysis does not preclude the subjects knowledge of his bodys position in space, but rather reveals the fact that consciousness

18 One central example of what we can do with our bodies is to subsume foreign objects under our bodily space via habitual action. When the typist performs the necessary movements on the typewriter, these movements are governed by an intention, but the intention does not posit the keys as objective locations. It is literally true that the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank space into his bodily space, (M-P 167) treating it as he treats his own body, i.e., as something he can do things with without thinking about its objective position. This example shows how habit has its abode neither in thought nor in the objective body, but in the body as mediator of the world (M-P 167). Here, mediator does not mean ambassador so much as medium: The body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to a figurative meaning, it manifests through them a core of a new significance: this is true of motor habits such as dancing. Sometimes, finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the bodys natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world. (M-P 169) Without the body there is no world for the subject, insofar as the world means what it means and is what it is solely through the bodyas far as the notion of a cultural world is concerned, I will consider that later in this chapter.

understood as intuiting purely positionally is an oversimplification. Merleau-Ponty asserts that there are different varieties of consciousness of place (M-P 119).

19 Perhaps the most intriguing use of ones body, indicated by Merleau-Pontys mention of figurative meaning, is the activity of expressionan activity that hinges upon the existence of foreign consciousnesses and implies a being-for-others on Sartres account.10 Merleau-Ponty discusses the phenomenology of foreign consciousness in Phenomenology of Perception, but not before examining the self and expression in detail. As we will see, his focus on The Body as Expression (M-P 202) makes MerleauPontys brand of phenomenology especially suitable for investigating the arts. The body is capable of expression in a variety of ways, with different degrees of complexity and abstraction. Merleau-Ponty focuses on speech, but by no means restricts human expression to linguistic expressionin fact, he thinks that, Speech is as dumb as music, music as eloquent as speech (M-P 455)but he uses speech to illustrate the peculiar simultaneity of thought and expression. On his account, The orator does not think before speaking, nor even while speaking; his speech is his thoughtThe speaking subject does not think of the sense of what he is saying, nor does he visualize the words which he is using (M-P 209). Of course, this need not always be the caseone is perfectly capable of visualizing words before speaking them, or mulling over a sentences sense and structure before saying it out loud. Merleau-Pontys point is that, as
10

One can, of course, express something without the presence of a foreign consciousness, such as by speaking to oneself or playing an instrument in private. In his Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, Dufrenne holds that Signs are exuded even in solitude, where we become for ourselves an imaginary other (D 380, see end of footnote). However, I would argue on another level that, even in such instances of private expression, what we express is capable of being communicated to a foreign consciousness. The development of expressive media (such as the structures of language or music) is an intersubjective process, so something expressed through such media is at least amenable to being interpreted by a foreign consciousness. All parenthetical citations of the form (D x) refer to: Dufrenne, M. (1973). The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. (E. S. Casey, Trans.) Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

20 one does not need to imagine ones bodys position in space in order to use it, so one does not need to preconceive expressionone can just speak, as one can just move. And, of course, speech is also a form of bodily movement: I do not need to visualize external space and my own body in order to move one within the other. It is enough that they exist for me, and that they form a certain field of action spread around me. In the same way I do not need to visualize the word in order to know and pronounce it. It is enough that I possess its articulatory and acoustic style as one of the modulations, one of the possible uses of my body. (M-P 210) Like the habitual use of an instrument or tool, ones use of the body itself is learned only after extensive repetition does one learn to shape ones mouth and exercise ones vocal chords so as to pronounce words. And, as ones body and the space it exists in form a certain field of action spread around me, so one could say that the vocabulary and grammar of language (or the formal elements of any expressive medium) form a certain field of expression around methe command and navigation of which must also be learned through practice. As for meaning, Merleau-Ponty believes speech to be a form of gesticulation. While accepted meanings of gestures vary from culture to culture, there is nevertheless some immanent meaning to them. If someone is furious about something and clenches his jaw and furrows his brow and flails his fists about, Merleau-Ponty asserts that The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself (M-P 214). This view is not so extreme as it first appears: Merleau-Ponty notes that the meaning of a gesture is not

21 directly perceived the way that the color of a carpet is perceived (M-P 214).11 Rather, the communication of gestures requires a common world to be established between the parties of communication, a world established by shared possibility and intention. If a child happens to witness sexual intercourse, it may understand it without the experience of desire and of the bodily attitudes which translate it, but the sexual scene will be merely an untoward and disturbing spectacle, without meaning unless the child has reached the stage of sexual maturity at which this behaviour becomes possible for itThe communication or comprehension of gestures comes about through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of my gestures and intentions discernible in the conduct of other people. (M-P 214-215, my emphasis) So, the gestures of anger do not have some preordained meaning, but their meaning is nevertheless apparent for one who, when angry, feels the impulse to act similarly. And while gestures are restricted to the subjects visually perceptible setting, verbal gesticulation (M-P 216) frees him of such fetters, and aims at a mental setting which is not given to everybody, and which it is its task to communicate. But here what nature does not provide, cultural background does (M-P 216). One important concern is that there is quite a leap between the almost natural meaning of gestures and the possibility that the link between the verbal sign and its

Nevertheless, there are scientific studies regarding some natural gestures, e.g. humans and chimpanzees actually assume the same begging posture (Premack 24, see end of footnote). Premack, A. & Premack, D. (1983). The Mind of an Ape. New York: Norton.

11

22 meaning [is] quite accidental, a fact demonstrated by the existence of a number of languages (M-P 217). In response to this, Merleau-Ponty writes: If we consider only the conceptual and delimiting meaning of words, it is true that the verbal formwith the exception of endingsappears arbitrary. But it would no longer appear so if we took into account the emotional content of the word, which we have called above its gestural sense, which is all-important in poetry, for example. It would then be found that the words, vowels and phonemes are so many ways of singing the world, and that their function is to represent things not, as the nave onomatopoeic theory had it, by reason of an objective resemblance, but because they extract, and literally express, their emotional essenceHence the full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. (M-P 217-218) His somewhat obscure idea here is that linguistic phonemes are a sort of emotional interpretation of their words referentsan idea that seems a bit far-fetched, but which contains some useful and reasonable jumping-off points for our subsequent discussion of musical expression. His mention of the emotional content of words, coupled with his notion of language as singing the world, opens the doors for our understanding of nonrepresentational and even non-conceptual expression. In order to discuss our bodily output (i.e. expression) by way of musical instruments, it will be useful to first consider Merleau-Pontys discussion of bodily input (i.e. perception) with instruments. Merleau-Ponty gives the example of a blind man who uses a stick to navigate the world. As he points out, one might think that the blind man feels on his palm the way in

23 which his stick moves when it touches an object and, based on the different positions of the stick, builds up a picture of the world, navigating by way of this picture. But habit does not consist in interpreting the pressures of the stick on the hand as indications of certain positions of the stick, and these as signs of an external object, since it relieves us of the necessity of doing sothe stick is no longer an object perceived by the blind man, but an instrument with which he perceives (M-P 176). Just as, when one perceives something tactilely, one does not actively translate the pressure data into a composite image of the object but, rather, simply feels the object in a direct way, so the blind man simply feels with his stick, thereby incorporating the instrument into his bodily space: It is a bodily auxiliary, an extension of the bodily synthesis (M-P 176). Psychology or neuroscience might contend that we actually do build up a composite image based on precise pressure data, but we do not experience touch in that way. We can now apply this account of instrumental perception to expression. For the blind man, the stick plays the same role as any sensory apparatus: it maps the world based on input, like an eye or an ear. To translate this to the expressive mode at hand, we should recall that Merleau-Ponty certainly considers music to be a form of expression: Speech is as dumb as music, music as eloquent as speech. Expression is everywhere creative, and what is expressed is always inseparable from it (M-P 455). And, just as speech is bodily expression (the active resonance of vocal chords in certain habitual patterns), so is singing, and by extension instrumental music, given Merleau-Pontys analysis of the blind mans stick. Taking, say, a violin as an auxiliary of bodily space (like the blind mans stick or the typists keyboard), it follows that the violinist should be

24 able to incorporate his instrument into himself, using it to express himself as he would use his vocal chords in song. Communication and the Cultural World As mentioned above, forms of expression (such as speech or gesticulation or music) are forms of communication and so, aside from instances of talking to oneself (through whichever medium), require a foreign consciousness to be the recipient of expression. A sort of intersubjective recognition is prerequisite for communication. So, before delving further into the phenomenology of musical experience and expression, we should take careful note of this condition of the possibility of communication and how Merleau-Ponty deals with it. He begins with a distinction between two types of worlds with which one is presented: Not only have I a physical world, not only do I live in the midst of earth, air, and water, I have around me roads, plantations, villages, streets, churches, implements, a bell, a spoon, a pipe. Each of these objects is moulded to the human action which it serves, and each of them indicates a cultural world (M-P 405). These objects are infused with intentionality, and so are traces of civilizationi.e., of foreign consciousness. The civilization in which I play my part exists for me in a self-evident way in the implements with which it provides itself (M-P 405). Of course, a small child to whom pipes, bells, and spoons are new objects would not experience the selfevidence of the civilization that crafted themshe would not immediately recognize them as instruments. So, turning the clock back further, The very first of all cultural objects, and the one by which all the rest exist, is the body of the other person as the

25 vehicle of a form of behaviour (M-P 406). This behavior must be internalized, or sympathetic on some level, before one can recognize it as belonging to a foreign subject. Like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between being-in-itself, which is that of objects arrayed in space, and being-for-itself, which is that of consciousness (M-P 407).12 Given these two modes of being, it seems nonsensical to try to conceive of a foreign consciousness: as far as I can tell, another person is-in-itself (as it is certainly an object in space in front of me), and so, given that I am-for-myself to the extent that I have access [to my being-for-itself] merely because that being is myself, and that my being-for-itself is the sort of being with no outside and no parts (M-P 407), I have no way of considering another person as being-for-itself. My understanding of being-foritself is too thoroughly and inescapably subjective for me to ascribe that mode of being to anything but myself. That is, unless I see something within that other person that I see within my being-for-myselfsomething which Merleau-Ponty finds in intentional action: A baby of fifteen months opens its mouth if I playfully take one of its fingers between my teeth and pretend to bite it. And yet it has scarcely looked at its face in a glass, and its teeth are not in any case like mine. The fact is that its own mouth and teeth, as it feels them from the inside, are immediately, for it, an apparatus to bite with, and my jaw, as the baby sees
12

Merleau-Ponty does not acknowledge being-for-others as such but rather asserts that There are two modes of being, and two only (M-P 407). In A Theory of Discourse, James L. Kinneavy writes otherwise, that the term Being-for-Others[is] used by both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Kinneavy 398, see end of footnote), though I have yet to find an instance of it in Merleau-Pontys writing. Nevertheless, the point that Kinneavy is driving at here, namely that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty both deal with the relation of the Other to the self (Kinneavy 399) is indeed valid, as Merleau-Pontys chapter on Other Selves and the Human World, to which I refer above, certainly deals with the subjects relation to the Other, but in different terms than Sartre. Kinneavy, J. L. (1980). A Theory of Discourse. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

26 it from the outside, is immediately, for it, capable of the same intentions. Biting has immediately, for it, an intersubjective significance. It perceives its intentions in its body, and my body with its own, and thereby my intentions in its body. (M-P 410) When we work within the limits of a subject/object dichotomy, the existence of the other is problematic because, to genuinely consider the other person as a subject, I ought to think of myself as a mere object for him (M-P 410).13 However, I cannot think of myself as a mere object because I inescapably know myself as being-for-myself. But if anothers body is not an object for me, nor mine an object for him, if both are manifestations of behaviour, the positing of the other does not reduce me to the status of an object in his field, nor does my perception of the other reduce him to the status of an object in mine (M-P 411). If I see you do something that I know how to do, or could see myself doing, and vice-versa, then together we achieve intersubjective recognition. And, if we take a step back from intentional activity and instead consider subjects as passive intuiters, we find that multiple consciousnesses are brought together in the one single world in which we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception (M-P 411). This is to say that intersubjectivity exists not only on the level of active communication or behavior, but also on the level of shared perception, and perception thus considered is a form of participation. Given Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, we are now in a position to consider intersubjectivity from both its expressive and its perceptive sides as it is manifested in musical experience.
13

This subject/object duality is the problem that Sartre attempts to solve with his notion of being-for-others.

27 Chapter 3 Mikel Dufrennes Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience: A Helpful Misconception of Music In his account of aesthetic experience, Mikel Dufrenne applies Merleau-Pontys thought directly to the arts. Perhaps more than any other category of objects, art provides for and depends on intersubjective recognitionit creates a cultural world in a uniquely poignant way, as it is the trace not only of subjectivity (like a tool) but also of intersubjectivity, without which it is meaninglessand to an even greater degree than everyday language. In fact, Merleau-Ponty says just that: music, and painting, like poetry, create their own object, anddeliberately confine themselves within the cultural world, [whereas]Prosaic, and particularly scientific, utterance is a cultural entity which at the same time lays claim to translate a truth relating to nature in itself (M-P 455). Dufrenne works within Merleau-Pontys expression/perception framework, analyzing art as a joint venture between the two. Specifically, he focuses on the adaptability of expression and the various intersubjective structures through which we can communicate, extending Merleau-Pontys considerations about languages to aural and visual art. Finally, he takes self-expression (artistic or otherwise) to be the moment of ones recognition of oneself as a being-for-itself. In order to provide an understanding of just what is experienced during aesthetic experience, Dufrennes phenomenology is punctuated by and grounded in ontological discussions of the aesthetic object (D xlvii). Simply put, aesthetic experience for Dufrenne is the experience of the spectator, while the aesthetic object is the trace of the creator and the thing experienced by the spectator. Though he acknowledges the importance of the artists creative experience, he identifies aesthetic experience with spectator experience because he considers the aesthetic object (and hence the entire

28 creative process) to be prerequisite for aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, he devotes a good deal of attention to the aesthetic object itself, and thereby to the artist. While the subject at hand is phenomenology, and while the ontology of aesthetics would alone fill volumes, we will necessarily provide some ontological framework for the same reasons that Dufrenne doesnamely, because without a basic understanding of the aesthetic object we would not know what we are discussing. Dufrenne writes on two species of art, pictorial and musical, but Dufrennes treatment of the phenomenology of music is incomplete. His focus is too narrow, as he deals almost exclusively with Western music of the past millennium or so, from which his false composer/listener dichotomy stems. This false dichotomy leads him to ignore an entire mode of musical expression, one that takes advantage of musics capacities in a way that individually composed music cannotnamely, communally expressive music. Given the significant implications of communal expression for the broader phenomenological traditionspecifically for Sartres and Merleau-Pontys ontological modesthis oversight ultimately amounts to more than a mischaracterization of music. While this chapter will be largely devoted to the helpful and enlightening parts of Dufrennes musical treatise, let us keep this at the back of our minds as we move forward. The Aesthetic Object in Music Dufrenne opens the problem of the being of a work of music with the question of composition: Is the work reducible to certain signs on paper that the printer reproduces? Yes and no. When Wagner set down the last chord in his manuscript, he could say that his work was completed. But when the composers job is done, the performers begins

29 (D 4). Put simplistically, the work is a confluence of composition and performancebut Dufrenne holds performance to be, For the work...only an occasion for manifesting itself (D 6). Already the problem of the aesthetic object of a musical work becomes apparent: it is not the score because that is simply a set of directions, but it is not the performance because that is only a rendition of the workone might say, That was a terrible performance of Beethovens 9th symphony, but that obviously does not mean that Beethovens 9th symphony is terrible. After a long and winding account of what the aesthetic object is not, Dufrenne arrives at an answer to this ontological question in his discussion of the opera Tristan and Isolde: What I hear are neither singers nor Tristan and Isolde singing, but songs: songs and not voices, songs which music, not the orchestra, accompanies. It is this verbal and musical ensemble which I came to hear, this is what is real for me, this is what constitutes the aesthetic objectwhat is irreplaceable, the very substance of the work, is the sensuous or perceptible element [le sensible] which is communicated only in its presence (D 10-11) While Dufrennes implied distinction here between singing and songs is a bit obscure, the idea it suggests is central to our understanding of the aesthetic object. The aesthetic object of a work of music, as weve just said, lies in its performance (i.e. its more than the directions that give rise to the performance), but is not any individual performance itself. Singing implies a singer, a performeran accident, a contingency. The aesthetic object is thus the performance stripped of contingent components: the

30 person singing does not matter except insofar as there is someone singing, i.e., there is song.14 The singer realizes the potential of the work of music, thereby creating song and the works proper aesthetic object. Dufrenne also distinguishes between the work of music and musics aesthetic object by appealing to the very substance of the work, le sensible. If the substance of a work of art is its perceptible element, we find perception at the heart of the aesthetic objectand, thusly, a perceiver. The work of art is what is left of the aesthetic object when it is not perceivedthe aesthetic object in the state of the possible, awaiting its epiphany (D 14). On Dufrennes account, then, the aesthetic object exists only when it is perceived. Here, we find a significant distinction between pictorial (D 274) and aural art: a work of pictorial art hangs in a gallery, and exists there regardless of whether it enjoys a viewer at any given moment. All that it takes for the paintings aesthetic object to be realized is the gaze of a perceiver. One cannot, however, walk up to a piece of music unlike visual art, aural art requires action not only on the part of the perceiver but by the performer as well.15 Once the musical work is brought into being, once the sound waves that it consists in are traveling through space, it simultaneously becomes its aesthetic
14

We should note that, while Dufrenne wants us to bracket off the contingent identity of a singer when considering the aesthetic object called song, the phenomenon of song still has, at its heart, subjectivitya person is singing, though who that person is may sometimes be, for the audience, immaterial. The role of subjectivity in music, and, perhaps more interestingly the role of music in subjectivity, will be made clearer later on. 15 The existence of modern musical reproduction does not undermine this assertion, as the music that is being reproduced through whatever medium would not exist in the first place if it were not for the performers action. One might initially object that the same could be said of painting, but the difference is that, for a painted work, the painter need only act once, then it is done, whereas with music, the work requires productive action every time that it is manifested. This means that there is a significant difference between a recorded work that can be perceived without musicians present and a painting that can be perceived without a painter present: recordings of music are recordings of a work, whereas a painting is not a recording of a workit is the work.

31 object. In fact, a listener proper (who we have been calling a perceiver) is not required for musics realization as an aesthetic object, because its performer perceives it too. This distinction between these two species of art indicates one of musical experiences central requirements: expressive bodily action. Action and the Untranslatable The (recent Western) composer writes out a piece in musical notationa shorthand which is completely reducible to language. Indeed, when one learns to read music, the notation is so translated: the violin teacher instructs the pupil to place the bow on the thinnest string and pull it across with an even pressure for a given amount of time. The teacher then tells the pupil that the action just performed is indicated by the signs:

The signs command an action, and that action is easily explained in words. The music produced by that action, however, is not reducible to language. In the spirit of MerleauPontys thoughts on the multiplicity of languages,16 Dufrenne asserts that, What is said in music can be said only by music (D 124). So, what happens? How does the musician jump from one expressive medium to the next, which is not translatable to the first? The first part of an answer to this question lies in the body. Through the act of playing an instrument, the deliberate production of sounds ordered by rhythm, harmony, and melody, the musician translates the theoretical to the real. But that is not allsomething is gained, appended to the theoretical music in a score through this action, and if one listens to a piece and transcribes it back into notation, this something is once again lost.
16

Above, p. 22

32 This unknown quality seems to reside in the lived experience of the perceiverthat is, in the role of the body in aural aesthetic experience. Music does not need to be reflected upon or interpreted in order for it to have its effect. It can be reflected on, and such reflection (say, by a composer, or a musician well versed in theory) might provide a different, intellectual species of appreciation and understanding, but listening to music need not be an intellectual exercise. As Dufrenne puts it, creating and following musical structures is an art deeply hidden within the human body[rhythmic structures] are necessary for the apprehension of the work. They need not be explicitly indicated as in a musical analysis. They need only be felt (D 263).17 The aural sensation is enoughand, perhaps, it is this bodily aspect of music that gives rise to a bodily response: dancing. The impulse to dance, I believe, demonstrates the bodys role in music. Styles of musical expression are by no means universalthe appreciation of a musical pieces aesthetic value is not immediate or inborn, but learned, and necessarily historical (thus the emergence of genres, periods in music, traditions and musical structures)but more on this in a moment. The point here is that, just as musical styles and their corresponding aesthetic appreciation are not universal, so are styles of dancing contextualdifferent eras, different cultures, different times and places, indeed different types of music have resulted in vastly different dances. That said, the impulse to dance to music, regardless of the type of dance and the type of music, does not seem to be

17

A recent neuroscientific study found that the speed patterns of peoples natural movements moving a hand from one place to another on a desk or jogging and slowing to stop match tempo changes in music that listeners rate as most pleasing (Belluck, see end of footnote), suggesting that rhythmic appreciation may be even more deeply hidden within the human body than Dufrenne had anticipated. Belluck, P. (2011, April 18). To Tug Hearts, Music First Must Tickle the Neurons. The New York Times, p. D1.

33 limited to one time or one culture, suggesting an inherent connection between music (aural music, not theoretical, notated music) and the body. Indeed, many cultures actually use the same word to refer to both music and dance (L 7).18 There also seems to be a correspondence between certain types of music and certain types of dancing, further attesting to this general association. Thus, we realize that music needs to be experienced aurally in order to incite such a bodily reaction, and that bodily aspect of musical experience which gives rise to dance is at least one of the aspects of music which is not reducible to language, i.e., which cannot have the same effect when translated into words or notation. The Language of Music: A Derridean Illustration We have repeatedly used the term expression in our discussion of music, but have said little about what is expressed. As we saw in our discussion of Merleau-Ponty, expression is communicatory; it can tell something to somebody else, and so is central to intersubjectivity. And, like all intersubjective matters, expression requires a world shared by the interacting subjects, a medium through which they can reach one another and connect (the original intersubjective medium being the body, as Merleau-Ponty asserts, which music appeals to as we just discussed). Postponing a little while longer exactly what is expressed by music, let us consider how music expresses. Perhaps the most helpful way to do this is to compare music to the expressive medium with which we are all most familiarnamely, language.

18

All parenthetical citations of the form (L x) refer to: Levine, L. (2007). Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.

34 Dufrennes notion of music resonates strongly with Jacques Derridas notion of diffrance. Derrida writes that: Diffrance is neither a word nor a concept (M 555). This claim is founded upon (and clarified by) the fact that: the signified concept [i.e. that signified by a word, phrase, sentence, &c.] is never present in itself, in an adequate presence that would refer only to itself. Every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or a system, within which it refers to another and to other concepts, by the systematic play of differences. Such a play, then diffrance is no longer simply a concept, but the possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual system and process in general. For the same reason, diffrance, which is not a concept, is not a mere word; that is, it is not what we represent to ourselves as the calm and present self-referential unity of a concept and sound. (M 559) Simply put: nothing means anything except to the extent that it stands in contrast to other things, i.e., differs from other things, most notably in the case of language or code. Well take the example of a word to illustrate the most basic notion of diffrance: a word means what it means by virtue of how it differs from all the other words in the language, or in any language really, and can only mean anything in such a juxtapositional context. When used in a sentence, a word also means what it means by virtue of the words that precede and succeed it, and even changes in meaning as more words follow it, affecting its use. In complete isolation, a word is empty. The etymology of diffrance (a misspelling in French of diffrence [difference]) lies in the verb diffrer, which can mean both to differ and to defer. Derridas idea is that words (for example) have meaning because

35 of how they differ from other words, and thus their meaning is deferred to other words. Of course, this suggests an infinite regress of deference, but that is Derridas point: there is no ultimate word, no foundational concept, to which all others deferthey all defer to each other. Dufrenne considers musical meaning from a structuralist point of view, which has important affinities with Derridas post-structuralist account of language: The cultural reality of the matter of sound is similar to that of a language. It possesses the same consistency and cohesion. The writer calls on language, that is, on a system of words which, because they have meaning, are defined by each other and are brought together in a sentence. Since the words have their own sound structure, they attract or repel one another according to rigorous demands of signification...[In music, the] note exercises certain powers of attraction or repulsion toward the other notes and assumes meaning only by functioning in the whole. (D 251-252) This idea of juxtapositional meaning is especially applicable to music because, like language, it is essentially durational. As such, it works in succession, which brings to mind Merleau-Ponty: with each moment our natural powers suddenly come together in a richer meaning, which hitherto has been merely foreshadowed in our perceptual or practical field, and which has made itself felt in our experience by no more than a certain lack, and which by its coming suddenly reshuffles the elements of our equilibrium and fulfils our blind expectation (M-P 177). Language and music share the capacity to fulfill our blind expectation in a similar way. In the context of Merleau-Pontys quotation, all experience fulfils our blind expectationbecause all experience is

36 temporally ordered. However, language and music fulfill with expressive meaning, a meaning which is filled and created over time, the expectations for which, while somewhat blind, are significantly more constrained than those in general experience, specifically by syntax and vocabulary, but also by convention and the context of the ongoing expression. To the extent that music is akin to language, we can see that its syntax, so to speak, is not inherent to it but rather historically and culturally agreed upon. Poetry, for example, is a highly expressive form of languageone might say that it is capable of expressing something more than prose (Merleau-Ponty says just that, M-P 455). However, it has historically been even more rigidly structured than prosaic language. In addition to following the rules of grammar, it is often subject to strict guidelines of meter, rhyme, form, &c. Yet this in no way detracts from poetrys great power of expression: if anything, it allows for it. Such structural elements provide the accustomed reader with an orientation, a template of understanding, without which he would be lost. Likewise, the classical music about which Dufrenne writes is highly structured: a piece is bound by a key, a time signature, a set of instruments and their respective capacities for tone and texture, &c. Whether a style of music is limited to a 5-tone or a 12-tone scale is not so important as the fact that it is limited to a scale (D 255). That some structure is agreed upon allows for the spectators understanding of the composers/performers expressionthe specific form that structure takes in any culture or at any time in history is not what is essential here. Such specific structures may indeed reflect certain aspects of their respective cultures, but as far as the expressive capacity of a work is concerned, they simply create an expressive space which can be filled in any number of ways.

37 Before taking this parallel too far, we should note that, while music shares aspects with language, the two are not the same thing. While we can speak of the referent of a word or phrase in English, we cannot speak of the referent of a musical note. Here, we see that music is more thoroughly Derridean (in its tie to diffrance) than spoken language itself, because while language uses juxtaposition and contrast to give meaning to individual words (or, in Derridas opinion, the illusion of such meaning), music is not guilty of this pretense. There is no concept corresponding to the set of frequencies called A!. There is simply the note (albeit labeled), which refers only to itself. Even more than language, music can only speak, that is, express, through contrast. Poetry is the most obvious example of languages capacity for the play between wordscertain ways of juxtaposing words certainly strike us as more powerfully expressive (or poetic) than others. Music, it seems, distills such juxtapositional expression, abstracting the referential aspect of words away from poetry, and so is closely related to poetry (note the use of terms like measure and rhythm in descriptions of poetry, as well as the prevalence of poetical devices in song).19 It seems, then, that Dufrennes structuralist approach to musical meaning might be more accurate if given Derridas post-structuralist spin. While the structuralist approach contends that one should be able to pinpoint the meaning of an element in a bounded and finite system (e.g., a word in a language), Derrida indicates that no intersubjective system is actually bounded and finite. This renders the meaning of each element elusive, as it is always affected by the unfathomable complexity of context. While we will not hold that linguistic debate here, we should note that the mercuriality of meaning to which Derrida points us is readily apparent in music, as any given note (i.e.,
19

This and the preceding paragraph were conceived for a paper entitled Deconstructed Structures: The Unconscious in Erwartung written for MUS116 Music in Modernism.

38 any element in a system of musical tones) can serve any number of expressive ends, deriving meaning exclusively from context. Feeling & Character: The Stuff of Music Returning to the question that sparked this discussion: what exactly is expressed in music? What sort of understanding does the listener experience when she listens to a piece of music? As I acknowledged early on, a rigorous answer to this question is not our aim, but a basic understanding of what music expresses will be essential to appreciating the implications of our critique of Dufrennes account. Before, we mentioned musics provocative component: it has the potential to inspire the listener to dance, to participate in the music through her body without necessarily doing anything musical (i.e. aurally expressive) herself. But reducing aesthetic aural experience to a bodily experience thus considered does not do it justice music has a palpable emotional component. While it can make the listener dance, it can also make her weep. Music has the capacity to drastically change ones mood. By listening to music, someone in the highest of spirits can be brought to wallow in depression, and someone with good reason to cry can find himself filled with optimistic energy. If we consider music as the communication of some feeling or emotional state, it only makes sense that it should be capable of changing the way we feel. Language can certainly do thatwhen our friend is sad, we tell her a joke to cheer her up. A poignant enough story of loss or a broken heart can bring anyone to tears. These things can change someones state of mind because the listener can relate to them on some level. Of course, this is all highly general: some stories will have an emotional effect on some people but

39 not on others, just like pieces of music. If someone has experienced the pain of the death of a loved one, then a story about such a death will definitely pull at that persons heartstrings more than it would affect someone who has not had such an experience. The same could be said of music, but on a less direct level. Linguistic articulation conveys concepts and situations, making a story appear more directly relatable because it can describe a situation similar to one that I have been in through recognizable and specifiable terms. Music does not provide the same sort of content (i.e., propositional, conceptual content) as a story, and so it is more difficult to say something about a piece of music the way one can say of a story, Oh, thats happened to me before, or even, I can imagine that happening to me. Though the two media of expression arent so entirely different as one might think: a story, while propositional and full of conceptual content, leaves one with a feelingsomething happens in the story, but thats not all; whatever happens feels a certain way, so one could say, I can imagine that happening to meI can imagine how that would feel. Still, even if one says of a piece of music, Ive felt that before, or, I feel that way, her meaning is, in a way, less clear. It might be completely understandableI might respond to her, Me too, but the that to which we are reacting is difficult to specify. This seems to stem from musics lack of external referents that we discussed in the previous section. But a lack of referent does not result in a lack of meaningful content. As we just mentioned, music can certainly make us feel a certain way. But it can nevertheless conjure associations. Of course, there is the sense in which we experience direct associations: I used to listen to some song frequently when I was on the beach on Long Island, so when I hear that song, I think of that beach. Even general aspects of a

40 piece of musicits beat, chord progression, tempocan have such associations. But music with no such memorial associations can still make us think of events, places, people, images, and the like. The person writing the music has probably never heard of the object of my associationthe music is not trying to reference that which comes to my mind. The question of what causes such an association, then, leads me to believe that music expresses feeling (emotional or attitudinal content) in a way that is more direct than language. There need not be anything in a piece of music that has anything to do with beaches in order for it to make me think of the beachand it will produce an association in another listener that is entirely different. This seems to be because it causes me to feel something, and that feeling is what is associated with the beach. For me, the beach is carefree, optimistic, a place for playso a piece of music that makes me feel carefree, optimistic, and playful may make me think of the beach. This idea of music directly communicating feeling is also suggested by the way people generally describe music: through simile. When we are not describing a piece's feeling directly, through some emotional adjective like "nostalgic" or "optimistic" or "uplifting," we most often describe it as feeling like somethinglike flying, like a storm at sea, like a breaking heart. We are relegated to the realm of simile, or analogy, simply because of the impossibility of expressing in language that which we do in music: Anything we may say of it in another language is pitifully inadequate to express what music expresses (D 266). As language is referential, when we try to describe the feeling inspired by a song, we are necessarily referencing that feeling, using emotional adjectives to make us think of a feeling. But music does not make us think of a feelingit simply

41 makes us feel. This is what Dufrenne is referring to when he writes, Meaning [in music] immediately surpasses itself toward expression (D 265). In his section on The unanalyzability of expression (D 326), Dufrenne observes that, We most often name an expression in accordance with the name of the creator of a work, because the characteristic quality of that work also appears to designate its creator. It is common to the work and the creator, and it functions as a sort of living bond (D 326). As Dufrenne indicates here, human feelings are not the only things expressed by music: there is also a sense in which the self, the character, of the composer is expressed. This characteristic quality is equivalent to a stylefor example, paintings by Caravaggio are Caravaggesque, and Shakespeares plays are Shakespearian. So, if I am familiar with Vivaldis works, I can quite immediately recognize a piece that he composed based on its style, regardless of whether the feeling expressed in that piece is joyous or melancholic. Later on, Dufrenne argues that character is not only communicated by way of expression, but actually created as such through self-expression. Self-expression is thus characterized as A need, which arises from the fact that the for-itself exists only in its self-exteriorization (380): We are born to ourselves only in our active self-embodiment and in using our bodies not as available equipment to be utilized for preconceived ends but rather as that through which we are what we are. Expression is the revelation of self, simply because it causes us to actually be what is expressed. Expression creates an interior in the very constitution of an exterior, and only at its instigation is the life of the interior rendered

42 possibleI am what I do because only through me does what I do take consistency and form. But the expression of my self in actions is not so much what I do as the manner in which I do it. (380-381) The external behavior by which we recognize another being-for-itself on MerleauPontys account is thus not only a device for intersubjective recognition but constitutive of subjectivity in the first place, insofar as subjectivity entails a self-awareness as such. Note that Dufrenne considers this to be a self-revelation, not a self-becoming. One always has being-for-itself, which is to say that one always has the potential to do whatever it is that consciousness does, but it is in self-exteriorization that one realizes oneself as a for-itself. Through expressing ones self, one becomes aware that there is a self to be expressed, and defines that self in so doing. Though Dufrenne is careful to note that ones self is not necessarily expressed by the content of ones actions so much as by their manner, which explains why I can recognize a piece by Vivaldi not based on its content, the specific feelings it expresses, but on its style, or manner, which expresses a common character regardless of the feeling expressed.20 Given these expressive capacities of music, we can now turn to the formal elements of the art that constitute a vehicle for such expression.

20

This is not to say that the content of expression is irrelevant, that the self is only expressed in a style. Rather, this notion arises from Dufrennes concern with the possibility that one can express in a deceitful way, and be unfaithful to the way one actually feels: Expression can undoubtedly be employed for the sake of deceiving and not for the sake of being. Thus it becomes a language capable of truth and falsehood (D 381). But Dufrenne thinks that, unlike the content of expression, the manner of expression is always faithful to the expressors self in this sense. even if we refuse to be the person we express, the other self who we are at a deeper level is still destined to expression (D 381), and this deeper level is expressed in ones style.

43 Harmony, Melody, & Rhythm: Musical Spatiotemporality Dufrennes chapter on The Musical Work begins with a discussion of that aspect of music which will serve as the formal basis for our critique of his strict creator/perceiver dichotomy: harmony. Dufrenne writes, All music is harmonious, because harmony is the primary condition of musical being. Harmony defines sound as sound, as well as the work itself as the totality of sounds (D 255). Above, we discussed musics relation to language with regard to its reliance upon juxtaposition: [In music, the] note exercises certain powers of attraction or repulsion toward the other notes and assumes meaning only by functioning in the whole (D 252). A single note carries little if any expressive weight; it is only in light of a notes juxtaposition with other notes that the expressive capacity of music comes to bear. This is most immediately recognizable in the being of melodya succession of notes attracting and repelling one another. Applying Merleau-Pontys account of perception in general to our account of music: by [a melodys be]coming, [each note in the melody] suddenly reshuffles the elements of our equilibrium and fulfils our blind expectation (M-P 177), where our blind expectation is our anticipation of the continuation of a melody, an elaboration on or fleshing out of the feeling expressed. While a melody reshuffles the elements of our equilibrium over time, with each note acting on the ones preceding and succeeding it, harmony establishes a scale, a musical space within which the melody can move, at once. To harmonize, in the strict sense of the term, is to construct a chord, to define the role of the scale tone in relation to a certain tonal field which is itself taken from the milieu of sound (D 254). A chord (i.e., an instance of harmony) presents us with certain tones abstracted from the milieu of

44 sound (which is to say that it is constituted by a selection of chosen tones from the vast field of possible tones available to one working in any given tonal tradition). We can say, then, that harmony defines a certain milieu of sound whose imperious reality is acknowledged by the ear and perpetuated by tradition (D 254). This observation, that the milieu of sound established by an instance of harmony is perpetuated by tradition, is supported by our reading of music as akin to language in its culturally evolved nature. The milieu of sound could be considered as a kind of musical vocabulary, a vocabulary that differs from culture to culture, as evidenced by the different scales used in, say, the Western, Middle-Eastern, and Eastern musical traditions. This is why we can say that harmony establishes a scale, a space for potential movement: tradition trains us to expect certain tones (not necessarily individual notes, but at least a restricted set of notes) once weve been given a certain chord. Whether the chord expresses stability, as a major chord does, or whether it conveys an uncertain transitory effect, as does a seventh chord, its role is always defined in terms of possible movement (D 254). Of course, after someone plays a chord, they could go anywhere with the music; they could play a note or chord that was in no way foreshadowed by the initial harmony. However, Dufrenne then notes that, Even an innovative or revolutionary composer is governed by rules as rigid as those he denies, insofar as the new rules define a space which must be maintained in order to prevent music from disintegrating into noiseThese [innovative] works cannot exist as works except in relation to [the traditional] milieu (D 254). Even if an artist breaks from tradition, and successfully produces something completely unexpected, he is still working within a defined space; in fact, this space creates its own tradition, i.e. its

45 own milieu of sound, which is only innovative with respect to the established tradition in which it is thusly inscribed. Actually, such innovation is precisely what most listeners enjoysomething completely predictable would not be stimulating, but something completely unpredictable is too chaotic to be appreciable. Perhaps Dufrenne puts it best when discussing musical masterpieces which, rather than creating altogether new milieux, constantly explore and enlarge [the traditional] milieu (254). Regardless of the extent to which the composer pushes the boundaries of the established milieu of sound, the harmonies he creates will fall within a framework: As music has become increasingly complexprogressing from constant modulation either to final rejection of a tonal center or to retention of a tonal center...harmonic analysis has been rendered practically impossible. Still, the fact remains that a note must always be conceived in relation to other notes, whether the scale is a five-tone or a twelve-tone one. As a field for his work, the musician selects a certain region of the field of sound. In this respect, we can consider the harmonic schema as the tonal basis for the musical work. (D 255) It is the harmony (rather than the melody) that constitutes the tonal basis for the musical work because of the simultaneity of its components, which ultimately renders it nondurational and instead creates the counterintuitive musical space that we referred to

46 above.21 This space, in turn, makes becoming into being (D 256), and gives the music an objective reality. Dufrenne considers rhythm to serve as a bridge between harmony and melody. While harmony can be considered apart from melody (as a tonal space, within which melody moves), Rhythm, like melody, is a unified wholeIt denotes the very movement which animates the work. As such, rhythm is undefinable and cannot be apprehended separately from the work[it] is perceived as incorporated into and blended with the work (D 258). In isolation, rhythm is a form with no content. It is a condition of the possibility of melodythe form that is rhythm must be filled with tonal content in order to be capable of being perceived. When filled with such tonal contentcontent that is drawn from the tonal space established by the harmonyrhythm both gives rise to, and becomes apparent in, melody. The temporal aspect of music is obvious enough: a piece of music takes time, it fills a definite duration that must be experienced in order for the music to be experienced. As suggested above, the strictly and necessarily temporal component of music is the melody22: one musical element seems unreducible to space. This is melody, precisely the term which Bergson uses to describe durationMelody is the work itself qua duration
21

Dufrenne notes that, Obviously, it is questionable whether we can speak of spatialization where space isonly experienced on the ambiguous and obscure plane of imaginationthe plane on which the aesthetic attitude places us (D 271), so references to musical space hereafter will assume this understanding of an imaginary (as opposed to a physical) space. However, from a phenomenological perspective, this still means that we experience harmony as somehow spatial, an experience suggested by our descriptions of tones as high and low. 22 We might initially think that rhythm is the strictly temporal aspect of music, but the way that Dufrenne treats rhythm precludes such a conception. As we just said, considered in itself, before the introduction of tonal content, rhythm is only a formit is an abstract structure, which cannot be considered temporal until it is filled with tonal content, at which point it becomes melody.

47 (D 265). It is the melody that consists in the succession of notes and that results in anticipation and fulfills our blind expectation. As Dufrenne has it, Melody incorporates [rhythm and harmony] and cannot be reduced to themRhythm occurs in all art as an element of compositionand in all reality bearing its own duration, that is, in living beings and perhaps in historical events. The same is true of harmony (D 266).23 Unlike melody, harmony is spatialized, as it is defined by specifiable intervals and considered apart from the duration and intensity of sounds (D 256) before it is incorporated into melody with the help of rhythm. As we found above, harmony is defined in terms of possible movement, but does not itself consist of movement.24 The introduction of movement tootherwise put, the temporalization ofharmony, through rhythm, gives us melody. Melody, then, is a sort of musicalization of these two aesthetic components, which are not necessarily musical, but which are drawn on by melody and thereby become music. Thus, Melody is the meaning of music because it is the essence of music: the meaning of music is music itself (D 266). Harmony is a framework of tones, and rhythm a structure for the succession of tones, but melody is itself something more: it is an ordering of these components in a thematic and durational way, resulting in musical expression.

23

Here, Dufrenne is speaking of rhythm and harmony in broad termsthey occur in all art to the extent that harmony is the choice of juxtaposing elements from a scale (which in music is the scale of tones, but in painting there is the scale of color and lines, and in architecture the scale of size or volume, which one chooses from according to proportion) and that rhythm is the ordered duration of a lived experience (most obviously in dance, theatre, and film, but also in static objects like painting or sculpture which can inspire a sense of movement and, thus, duration). 24 This makes sense, as movement can only occur over time, whereas harmony does not consist in the duration of tones but rather in the intervalthe spacingof tones.

48 Chapter 4 Dufrennes Lacuna: Communal Expression in Music As we noted at the beginning of the previous chapter, Dufrennes primary and constitutive distinction (namely, that between creator and spectator, artist and audience) is, at least in the case of music, misguided. One might object to it merely because of the significance of the performerthe relationship between composer and listener is not strictly binary, but rather includes some form of intermediary interpretation and representation, as Dufrenne himself stipulates; or the performers role is problematic for a strict binary because it includes both an expressive (playing the music) and a perceptive (listening to the music) function. While these problems with Dufrennes account are not trivial, they become secondary when we realize that the artist/spectator binary as well as the composer/performer/listener relationship are not innate but contingent to music. We will be critiquing Dufrennes distinction at a fundamental level, with an understanding of his binary as representing not an inherent characteristic of music, but rather the predominant Western manifestation of music in the past millennium or so. Furthermore, the species of music that Dufrenne conflates with music in general actually limits musics expressive capacity, whereas the communally expressive forms of music that he ignores take full advantage of musics potential. As such, well take musics capacity for communal expression as our object of investigation in an attempt to better understand just what music is capable of accomplishing, as well as what broader philosophical implications its capacities have. First, we should distinguish between two possible referents of the ambiguous term communal expression, both of which apply to music. One sense of the term is the idea that a piece of music can express not just the individual sentiments of a composer but also

49 the greater feelings of the community, period, and culture in which he is composing. This idea of music as an expression of Zeitgeist was actually foreshadowed in Platos view of music, and enjoys a plethora of examples in the Western musical tradition. The other sense of the term communal expression (and the one that will prove most helpful in our critique of Dufrenne) is the one in which musics full potential is realized: the expression of communal feeling and character by a community (i.e., not by an individual composer). Traditionally, this form of musical expression has not been favored by Western cultures, though the past couple centuries have seen some significant moves in its direction. For the sake of clarity, we will refer to the first sense, the expression of Zeitgeist by an individual, as cultural expression, while the term communal expression will be reserved for the second sense, in which a community expresses something together. Finally, we should note that these two categories are not immune to overlap; as we will see, there are some forms of cultural expression that incorporate communal expression proper, and communal expression tends to express Zeitgeist as well.

Cultural Expression In his Republic, Plato actually devotes some attention to the culturally charged status of music: In a word, the overseers of the city must devote themselves to this principle, preserving it from secret destruction, and guarding it with all carethe principle, namely, that there shall be no innovation of the established order in gymnastic and music. They must watch over this with all possible care, fearing when they hear such words as

50 For men more praise That which is newest of the minstrels lays, lest, perchance, some one thinks the poet means, not new songs, but a new fashion of songs, and praises that. But he must neither praise such a novelty nor understand this to be the poets meaning. He must beware of changing to a new kind of music, for the change always involves danger. Any alteration in the modes of music is always followed by alteration in the most fundamental laws of the state. (Plato 424b-c)25 This description of musics revolution-inspiring potential might seem a bit extreme, but if we take his point in a general sense then we find it is actually quite well demonstrated. Plato might give music an excessive amount of credit in its causal impact on the most fundamental laws of the state, but some relationship between the music of a cultural group and the broader political state of that group cannot be denied. Perhaps the most immediate and familiar embodiment of this relationship is the Counterculture movement of the 1960s. This movement was fueled by Americans frustration regarding everything from the status of civil rights to international policy, sexism to freedom of speech, and was epitomized by the music festival at Woodstock in 1969.26 For decades, the many emerging styles of music put under the umbrella term rock & roll had been denounced and even condemned as the devils music, largely by members of older generations.

25 26

Plato. (1929). Republic. (A. D. Lindsay, Trans.) London: J. M. Dent & Sons. The lifestyle and constitutive behavior of members of the Counterculture was given a forum at Woodstock, Three days of peace and music, where people not only listened to music for three days but lived, forming a community, for three days. The pertinentand astonishingly unquestionedpoint is that this congregation and demonstration all revolved around music, not political speeches or something of the sort. Music thus served as the forum for this temporary realization of a Counterculture community.

51 Even the label the devils music begins to demonstrate musics capacity to be expressive and even emblematic of a group or attitude, but more interesting is the fear that this music inspired (as indicated by the hostility with which many received it). Over two thousand years after they were written, Platos words held uncannily true: the rise of a new fashion of songs, an alteration in the modes of music, threatened the established order. While it would be absurd to purport that the music of the Counterculture movement single-handedly changed the world, it would be equally absurd to deny the fact that it was a driving force at the time. And, whats more, it bound the members of the movement together.27 In his late-nineteenth century book The Evolution of the Art of Music, Sir Hubert Parry suggests the related idea that, as music can be a significant social force at the time of its production, it serves as a representation of a cultures attitude in retrospect. The style and intrinsic qualities of music so faithfully reflect the state of human affairs of the time at which it is produced, that it becomes a sort of symbol of the spirit of the worldThe spirit of the old uprising [the Reformation] was illustrated in its highest aspect by the sincerity, depth, and nobility of sentiment of J. S. Bach, and by the best utterances of

27

Psychological studies have shown that singing and/or dancing along to music as a group improves a given groups sense of being a group (Wiltermuth, see end of footnote). One can imagine that if a group is not only singing/dancing along to music, but specifically to music that expresses a feeling or character common to them, then this psychological phenomenon would only be intensified. Wiltermuth, S., & Heath, C. (2009). Synchrony and Cooperation. Stanford University, Department of Organizational Behavior. Stanford: Association for Psychological Science.

52 Handel; and the spirit of the modern uprising found its first adequate musical expression in the work of Beethoven. (Parry 249)28 This understanding of music as a sort of symbol of the spirit of the world gets at the idea of cultural expression from the other side: when it is new, music can serve as a revolutionary voice, but when its time has passed, it provides us with a window onto the feeling and character of the culture from which it was born. However, Parrys view on the matter is a bit simplistic; the panes through which we see the spirit of the world in old music refract that spirit through the musical movements between then and nowthough the same could be said for any understanding of the past. As we discussed before, to the extent that music is an expression of feeling and character, appreciating music is most often29 appreciating the feeling or character expressedi.e., sympathizing with it, recognizing in it something that one recognizes in oneself. It only makes sense, then, that most of the immensely well-known composers, the Mozarts and Beethovens, should be considered to give expression to the spirits of their times: their fame and popularity were garnered by the magnitude of sympathy they aroused. They were popular during their lifetime because they expressed a feeling or a character with which many people sympathized. And the fact that many people sympathized with it means that it was a good expression of the most general feeling of the time, and so it becomes our window onto that time. Though we should be careful not
28 29

Parry, Sir H. (1950). The Evolution of the Art of Music. London: Routledge. As acknowledged above (p. 32), there are other sorts of musical appreciation, such as that of the theoretical structure of a piece, just as one can appreciate the skill in a philosophers argument without sympathizing with the arguments content. However, as music is non-propositional, it would be difficult to say that one disagrees with a piece of music, so in general musical appreciation resides on a more visceral and emotional level, giving rise to a sort of resonance or lack thereof rather than the agreement or disagreement one experiences with regard to conceptual, literary expression.

53 to generalize: there are certainly popular composers who do not survive the test of time because, while they would accurately represent their respective Zeitgeists, they do not capture timeless human emotions in the way that Mozart and Beethoven do. Important as it is to our understanding of music, this notion of cultural expression is by no means precluded by Dufrennes account, as such expression can occur even when a strict separation of composer and audience is maintained, so long as the composer gives voice to the sentiments of his audience. Let us now turn our attention toward communal expression: first, we will provide some clarifying examples (examples which, until relatively recently, were mainly to be found in non-Western cultures), and then examine how music provides the formal means for such expression. Communal Expression In the introduction to his neuroscientific take on music, This Is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin cites an anthropological account: Jim Fergusonnow a professor of anthropologyperformed fieldwork in Lesotho, a small nation completely surrounded by South Africa. There, studying and interacting with local villagers, Jim patiently earned their trust until one day he was asked to join in one of their songswhen asked to sing with these Sotho villagers, Jim said in a soft voice, I dont sing, and it was true: [though a talented instrumentalist,] he couldnt carry a tune in a bucket. The villagers found his objection puzzling and inexplicable. The Sotho consider singing an ordinary, everyday activity performed by everyone, young and old, men and women, not an activity reserved for a special fewThe villagers just stared at Jim and said,

54 What do you mean you dont sing?! You talk!30Singing and dancing were a natural activity in everybodys lives, seamlessly integrated and involving everyone.31 This phenomenon indicates the beginnings of the major flaw in Dufrennes account, namely the dissolution of the boundary between performer and audience. Unfortunately, Levitin does not provide a more detailed account of the Sotho musical tradition; with the question of the songs composition remaining open, there may be little difference between the Sothos communal song and dance and a church congregations hymns. One appreciable difference between these two, though, is that, while hymns are reserved for, say, a weekly gathering, to be communally performed at very specific times during a set event, the Sothos song is seamlessly integrated into everybodys lives as an ordinary, everyday activity. Furthermore, in a religious setting, there is generally a designated choir which consists of real singers, people who are somehow divided from the rest of the population in their expressive abilitiesa division that does not exist in Sotho culture. Nevertheless, while the Sothos form of communal expression collapses the performer/audience distinction, that between composer and performer might remain. It is not difficult to imagine a proper instance of communal expression, a sort of mass improvisation or composition that unites the emotions of a group, but a real example will certainly strengthen our critique of Dufrenne. For that, we turn to a dissertation published last spring by Jennifer Sieck entitled Mixtheory: Non-Linguistic Communal Expression in African American Literature. In her dissertation, Sieck focuses
30

This retort not only emphasizes the extent to which singing is a common practice in such cultures, but also helps to confirm our understanding of music as intersubjectively expressive, like talking. 31 Levitin, D. (2007). This Is Your Brain on Music. New York: Plume, p. 6.

55 on Frederick Douglass autobiographical accounts of instances of song in the context of slavery. In his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he writes, While on their way, [the slaves] would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sign as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came outif not in the word, in the sound;and as frequently in the one as in the other. (Sieck, 21)32 First, we should note the element of improvisation: They would compose and sign as they went along. And, like Merleau-Pontys orator for whom his speech is his thought (M-P 209), the thought that came up, came out.33 This form of communal song, then, is significantly different from the ubiquitous Western form of the hymn. It is not a performance of a pre-existing work; it is an instance of spontaneous expression, and (which is more) the expression of a groups feeling by that group, a true example of communal expression rather than the cultural expression discussed above. Furthermore, this indicates the rise of communal expression in the Western world; the American slave trade had inadvertently imported a new culture, and thus the artistic modes in its tradition.
32

Sieck, J. (2010). Mixtheory: Non-Linguistic Communal Expression in African American Literature. George Washington University, English. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. 33 This is the first indication that Dufrenne is neglecting an entire mode of music; he never discusses improvisation, which allows for the kind of communal music we are considering here. The mode of improvisation, alone, constitutes a major gap in Dufrennes account. When we think of expression, epitomized by Merleau-Pontys orator, we do not think of recitation. And, while there is certainly expressive merit in the painstaking composition of a work, such premeditation does not take full advantage of the fact that music is a temporal art. Unlike plastic arts, music exists only as duration, and so like language it can be spontaneously and dynamically expressive. To consider music without acknowledging improvisation is like considering language without acknowledging spontaneous speech.

56 In Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, Lawrence W. Levine provides an account of the Westernization of this communal expression. In his discussion of the proliferation of the blues at the end of the nineteenth century, Levine writes: blues singing signaled the rise of a more personalized, individualoriented ethos among Negroes at the turn of the century [but while the] personalized, solo elements of the blues style may indicate a decisive move into twentieth-century American consciousnessthe musical style of the blues indicates a holding on to the old roots at the very time when the dispersion of Negroes throughout the country and the rise of the radio and the phonograph could have spelled the demise of a distinctive AfroAmerican musical style. While it is undoubtedly true that work songs and field hollers were closer to the West African musical archetype, so much of which had survived the centuries of slavery, blues with its emphasis upon improvisation, its retention of the call and response pattern, its polyrhythmic effects, and its methods of vocal production which included slides, slurs, vocal leaps, and the use of falsetto, was a definite assertion of central elements of the traditional communal musical style. (L 223-224) The evolution of Afro-American music that Levine refers to confirms our reading of Dufrennes false dichotomy as Western, as it is the increasing emphasis on the individual that makes the blues a decisive move intoAmerican consciousness. But, while it is certainly a Western move, the blues kept [the musicians] still members of the group, still on familiar ground, still in touch with their peers and their roots (L 238). This

57 individualized yet group-oriented form of music suggests a move from communal expression toward cultural expression in a way that is epitomized by the words of American blues musician, Henry Townsend: you can tell it to the public as a song, in a songYou express yourself in a song like that. Now this particular thing reach others because they have experienced the same condition in life so naturally they feel what you are sayin because it happened to them. Its a sort of thing that you kinda like to hold to yourself, yet you want somebody to know ittheres some things that have happened to me that I wouldnt dare tell, but I would sing about them. Because people in general they takes the song as an explanation for themselvesthey believe this song is expressing their feelins instead of the one that singin it. They feel that maybe I have just hit upon somethin thats in their lives, and yet at the same time it was some of the things that were wrong with me too.34 (L 190) As we observed above that the American Counterculture movement of the 1960s was given a voice by its bands, so the Afro-American community of the early twentieth

34

A timely article in The New York Times presents a neuroscientific account of just this phenomenon: the mirror neuron system, a set of brain regions previously shown to become engaged when a person watches someone doing an activity the observer knows how to do dancers watching videos of dance, for example [ showed bursts of activity when the subject was listening to a person playing music]. But in Dr. [Edward] Larges study, mirror neuron regions flashed even in nonmusicians. Dr. Large further hypothesized that the mirror neuron regions are tapping into empathyas though youre feeling an emotion that is being conveyed by a performer on stage, and the brain is mirroring those emotions (Belluck). This phenomenon suggests musics capacity for intersubjective activity: as Merleau-Ponty illustrates intersubjectivity with the example of a baby biting (above, p. 26), who recognizes an adults being-for-itself through a shared capacity for that action, so people can engage intersubjectively with musicians, recognizing their shared capacity for the feeling or character expressed musically.

58 century had their feelings expressed by individual blues musicians. Townsends words on the matter confirm musics affective capacity that we hypothesized in the third chapter, as well as its communally binding force that we considered in our discussion of the Counterculture movement. Before returning to our central object of investigationDufrennes flawed phenomenologywe must take this account of the evolution of communal expression in American music one step further. In addition to the blues and rock & roll (the latter being arguably an extension of the former), one form of music stands out as a distinct product of the Afro-American tradition in the twentieth century: jazz. While Levine does not discuss it at length, he does mention that in a number of respects jazz represented much of the same phenomenon as blues. That is, it manifested the simultaneous acculturation to the outside society and inward-looking, group orientation that was so characteristic of black culture in the twentieth century. In terms of the growing importance of the solo instrument and of the improvised solo, jazz showed the same individualized emphasisan emphasis essentially new to black musicas did the blues. But, like the blues, jazz too remained a communal music[illustrated by] the respect black jazz musicians had for the individual identities and style of their peers even as [they] stressed the dependence every one of them still had upon the group. (L 238) While jazz is largely characterized by its solo component, the entire group remains vital to the soloists potential. Of course, there are many varieties of jazz, but nearly all of

59 them depend upon the cooperation of the individual instrumentalists. The balance of individual and group that we find in the blues (the individual musician and the group he gives voice to) and in jazz (the emphasis on the soloist and his maintenance of harmony with his fellow musicians) indicates a confluence of the classically composed music that Dufrenne accounts for and the non-Western, communally expressive music that he neglects.35 Whats more, jazz in particular combines the highly formalized character of classical music (the syntax that allows for cooperative playing) with the spontaneous, improvisational element of communal expression. Having explored these examples of communally expressive music, we can finally answer the question as to why it is so crucially different from what Dufrenne considers to be music, and, furthermore, how it takes advantage of musics formal properties in a way that classical individual composition does not. As noted in the previous chapter, Dufrenne actually spends a great deal of time discussing the element of music that undermines his composer/listener dichotomy: harmony. Music is capable of something that the other primary mode of temporal expressionlanguageis not, and this capacity is provided by harmony. Recall our discussion of the analogy between music and language: both depend upon juxtaposition for meaningwords are juxtaposed with words in a sentence or in a language or set of languages, and notes are juxtaposed with notes in a piece of music or a musical tradition. But this analogy reaches its limit when we consider the fact that most individual words have referents (subjects, objects, concepts, actions, states, &c.) while

35

This neglect is especially odd given the conspicuous popularity of jazz in France during the years leading up to the publication of The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience.

60 notes and tones do not. It is this very objectlessness that allows for harmonythat is, that lends intelligibility to a chord, such that two notes can be played simultaneously without losing their meaning. In fact, a chord is the instantaneous manifestation of that juxtaposition which provides melody with its species of meaning in the first place. And, as any one note layered over a chord changes the feeling expressed by that chord, so any melodic line layered over another changes the feeling expressed by the original line. Just what notes are acceptable when joined in a chord, or what melodies can be successfully layered over others, is a matter of the syntactical tradition that we have discussed. Whats important is that it is the spatiality of music, the tonal and rhythmic space that can be filled in any number of ways and to any number of degrees (a solo instrument playing a single line or a full symphony of instruments each playing their distinct parts), that allows for such layering, and that musical meaning is not lost in but rather created by harmony. Let us apply this in an example which will hopefully shed light on the importance of harmony in communal expression: a woman says, This town is miserable, cold, and snowy; all I want is some sunlight and to be comfortable walking outside. Her friend then says, Williamstown has such a hostile climate in the winter; I cannot wait for the snow to melt and the days to be enjoyable again. These are similar, compatible sentiments, expressed in slightly different ways but with similar structures. Now, imagine that the woman and her friend say these things simultaneously: TWhiilsl tioawmns itso mwin shearsa sbulceh ( W i l l i a m s t o w n h a s s u c h) The result is gibberish. The meaning of each individual sentiment is lost completely when the two people try to express themselves at the same time. Each one can speak in turn, and so
T his to w n is m i s e r a b l e

61 after hearing both a listener can realize that they are saying similar things, but they are restricted to speaking as individuals, and so the listener must do work to bring the temporally and personally separated sentiments together. He might even be able to understand that they are saying similar things if they speak at the same time, but only by isolating each voice, interpreting it, and actively making the connection afterwards. Music, on the other hand, thrives on the simultaneous expression of (musically) compatible sentiments. Of course, an individual is perfectly capable of creating harmony on his own, by composing a piece with layered melodic lines, or by playing an instrument that can produce multiple tones at once (piano, guitar, &c.); harmony need not manifest itself through communal expression. However, even if an individual plays his own harmonized melody, another individual can layer over that a second melody that harmonizes with the first, and create a third melody that neither of the two is capable of producing individually. Of course, technically they would, in some sense, be capable of producing each separate harmonized part and thus the third joined harmony, but, as each person has his own way of saying something (e.g. concerning the weather of Williamstown), each musician has his own style of expressing a feeling, so the first individual playing a melody would, in all likelihood, not come up with the second individuals melody. Communally expressive music says something that no individual can say on his or her own, as it is the product of multiple subjectivities. The point is that, through harmony, music lends itself to communal expression, be it spontaneous (the songs in Douglass autobiography), composed (songs arranged by different members of a rock group), or a mix of the two (a jazz piece that consists of a written tune followed by the groups members improvising on it).

62 Chapter 5 Synologue & Being-For-Ourselves Now that weve considered the potential-actualizing form of musical expression that Dufrenne neglects, let us consider which elements of Dufrennes account can be fruitfully applied to communal expression, and what light such an application sheds on this phenomenon. Over the course of this discussion, we will pay attention especially to the greater implications of Dufrennes exclusive focus on the individual as expressor. More specifically, we will approach these implications with an eye to how expression factors into Merleau-Pontys in-itself/for-itself model of being and his notion of intersubjectivity. Perhaps the most fundamental overlap between individually expressive and communally expressive music is the basic condition of their possibility (and, as Kant has it, the condition of the possibility of experience in the first place): spatiotemporality. As we mentioned in our chapter on Dufrennes account, music requires not only time (the most obvious condition of music as it is what Dufrenne calls a temporal, or durational, art) but also space. Of course, it requires physical spacethrough which sound waves travel, in which instruments and eardrums existbut also its own, musical species of space. This space is established by harmony, which defines a space for potential movement in the broader space of tones, or frequencies. Both space and time are thusly preconditions for musical expression whether it is by an individual or by a group. However, the musical space functions slightly differently for the two: in Dufrennes account, the composer delimits the musical space through harmony, whereby the listener is provided with expectations of where the music might go; the listener is then affected differently depending on whether and how the ensuing music falls in line with those

63 traditional expectations or breaks from them. In the case of communal expression, musical space also serves as a way for the many individuals constituting the group to stay together. They delimit the space togetheras we said in our discussion of harmony, members of a group can layer tones over one another, thereby expanding the musical spaceand, having created such a space, they can work within it and maintain harmony. We can also extend Dufrennes observations concerning the untranslatability of individually composed music to communally expressive music. Recall Dufrennes Merleau-Pontian assertion that, What is said in music can be said only by music (D 124). Ironically, this actually applies to communal music to an even greater extent than it does to music that expresses an individuals feeling and character. As we concluded in the previous chapter, music has a capacity for communal expression that is not common to every expressive medium. So, while Dufrennes quotation holds for music in general because it expresses feeling and character by means of its own species of spatiotemporality, and constitutes a sort of language whose syntax and juxtapositional vocabulary is uniqueit holds especially for communal music insofar as it is constituted by a type of expression that, say, language does not allow.36 Dufrennes account of self-expression (i.e., the expression of ones general character as opposed to a particular feeling or emotion) can also be applied to communal expression, and with some exciting results. On a collective level, the examples of cultural expression we discussed in the previous chapter indicate a sort of character expressed by such music, whereby the expression becomes cultural, i.e., emblematic of a culture or

36

Though, as I have not fully investigated the communal potential of all other nonlinguistic expressive media, the exclusivity in Dufrennes quotation might be a bit extreme when considered in this sense.

64 movement which, itself, has a character. Nevertheless, while there may be a character common to all individual expressors of a given culture (among blues guitarists of the early 20th century, or among musicians who played at Woodstock), the individuals character is also expressedJanis Joplin and Joe Cocker share a cultural character, but their expressive styles are also immediately distinguishable. This reading can also be extended to communal expression, in which the identity or self expressed is also culturalbut not in quite the same way. To the extent that a cultures character is made up by the characters of its constitutive individuals, we can say that there is some expression of the self in communal music, but the aesthetic object that results from communal expression is not experienced as a sum of separate objects of individual expression that happen to be experienced at the same time (recall our discussion of the climate of Williamstown); rather, it is experienced as a whole, and so has a character as a whole. So, while there is a non-trivial level of individual expression, there is also, in this product of individual expressions, a communal expression (much in the way that individual notes constitute a whole harmony). Such expression is not dialogue (a conversation, a back-and-forth), monologue (an individual expressing himself), or polylogue (a group all expressing a single thing in recitative chorus), but rather what we can call synologue. Communally expressive music is thusly indicative of the possibility of synologue. While I basically gave an account of synologue in Chapter 4, it will be useful to put it in more general terms for our discussion of the French phenomenological modes of being. As was just suggested, synologue could be considered the mode of expression that is analogous to harmony: it is composed of individuals, each expressing something on his or

65 her own, but within a shared framework such that the individual lines of expression come together in a meaningful way, the product of which is an expression of the group which cannot be achieved by an individual alone. In his chapter on Reflection and Feeling in Perception, Dufrenne writes that the primordial function of expressionis the revelation of myself as a for-itself (D 386). It is through expression that one realizes oneself as a subject. This brings us back to Sartres and Merleau-Pontys similar conceptions of ontological modes (recall Sartres being-initself, being-for-itself, and being-for-others, and Merleau-Ponty who asserts that only the first two of these are modes of being, as the third is explained away by his notion of intersubjectivity). Dufrenne touches briefly on being-for-others, as the individual artist experiences such being intensely given the public gaze upon his work (and, to the extent that an artists work expresses his self, the public gaze is on him through his work). For the most part, though, Dufrenne focuses on being-for-itself, because being-for-itself is prerequisite for expression, and at the same time expression provides the revelation of myself as a for-itself. This fits, of course, with Dufrennes exclusive attention to the individual artist, i.e. the expressor who creates a work alone. However, the individual artists expressive mode is a sort of monologue that, as we have seen, differs significantly from synologue. If we apply Dufrennes theory of individual self-expressions relationship with individual self-revelation as a for-itself to synologue, we find that communal expression provides for a self-revelation as a for-ourselves, a real revelation of intersubjectivity not in dialogue, not a bridge across individuals over which feelings and characters can be given or received, but rather a binding, a confluence of individual subjects in a group. Like a

66 musical chord, a community is not merely a sum of its parts but, rather, a product. Synologue is a way for the group to discover not only what it is capable of expressing, but what it is, what its members are together. Synologue, then, is a collective selfrevelation and a self-revelation of being a collective. Synologue is thus indicative of being-for-ourselves, a sort of collective subjectivity that is experienced on a daily basisby families, teams, nations, friends and that is evidenced by emotional reactions from the group as a whole when all or part of it is attacked, aided, or experiences something in common. Being-for-ourselves appears to be akin to sympathy, but it consists of something more than sympathy. When I feel sympathetic towards someone, I can imagine or remember myself in her place, and so understand what it is that she is experiencing (to some extent). If someone is slighted in a way that I was once slighted myself, I feel sympathy for that personI feel badly for her, but I do not actually feel offended myself, i.e., I do not feel compelled to, say, avenge that person. Being-for-ourselves differs from sympathy in this way: subjects who share a being-for-ourselves react to the experiences of their fellow-subjects as if they were their own experiences.37 When we hear about a distant town full of innocent civilians that is attacked, we feel sympathy for those devastated, and condemn those responsible. But when a town in our own country is attacked, we go to war. Of course, this is not a strict rule; there are certainly times when one country stands up for another, and goes to war on its behalf, but that is still the manifestation of a being-forourselves, and the most general one at that: humanity.

37

This is a rhetorical simplification; such subjects seem to treat their fellow-subjects experiences as their own in proportion to the strength of the emotional bond between the two (otherwise put, in proportion to the strength of their sense of being-for-ourselves).

67 Conclusion Perhaps we can now appreciate why Heidegger continued Husserls tradition of phenomenology despite the fact that he sought an answer to the ontological question of Being. Through our investigation of aural aesthetic experience, we have encountered not only the specific phenomenon of musical communal expression but also the broader mode of expression that I have called synologue, which in turn indicates the ontological mode of being-for-ourselves. While music appears to be especially amenable to the expression of such being, it is by no means the sole manifestation of being-forourselves. Thus, our consideration of one species of synologue has opened a pregnant ontological field for phenomenological investigation. While philosophers like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have devoted much attention to intersubjectivity and the social world of consciousness, they have focused on the individual level of personal interaction rather than the collective level of being part of a larger group. A phenomenology of communal experience thus seems warranted, as such experience has just as great an effect on the individual as interpersonal experience. Communal experience shapes our sense of self, but perhaps more importantly, it allows us to surpass ourselves, and become integrated into that product of intersubjectivity that we call society.

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69 Wiltermuth, S., & Heath, C. (2009). Synchrony and Cooperation. Stanford University, Department of Organizational Behavior. Stanford: Association for Psychological Science.