Virtuosity, Obviously

This chapter employs a phenomenological framework to argue that virtuosity—often understood as individual musical excellence—is an intersubjective phenomenon that centers on skill made apparent and socially meaningful. Rather than locating virtuosity solely in a performer’s body, a piece’s demands, or a listener’s opinions, the author argues that it arises within the dynamic relationships—what Maurice Merleau-Ponty would call the “intentional threads”—that connect audiences, performers, and musical sound. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of intersubjectivity, intercorporeality, and apperception, the author utilizes Ravi Shankar’s early reception in the United States as a case study in how audiences come to experience musical performances as virtuosic, despite their lack of background knowledge or musical understanding. A phenomenological approach to virtuosity reframes the issue not as one of objective measure or subjective opinion, but of intersubjective experience and value.

The Expressive Culture of Sound Communication among Humans and Other Beings

This chapter is divided into four parts, addressed in turn to four questions: (1) How might phenomenological methods inform field research and ethnographic studies of people making music? (2) How do concepts from phenomenology, especially direct social perception, direct perception empathy, and embodiment, inform research on the expressive culture of same-species beings, both human and nonhuman, communicating with each other by means of sound? (3) How might phenomenology contribute to our understanding of cross-species sonic communication? (4) What might be gained (and lost) when ethnomusicologists reorient their research from the study of people making music to eco-ethnomusicology, the study of beings making sound?

Ways of the Mind

This chapter proposes a progressive approach to research at the intersection of autism studies and music studies, one through which scientific frames of objectivity-aspiring, anonymizing representation are replaced by ethnographic and phenomenological frames of personhood-aspiring, individual re-presentation. Through a case study of the musical experiences of first author Dotan Nitzberg, a concert pianist on the autism spectrum, and through the re-presentation of dialogues between Nitzberg and the chapter’s second author, ethnomusicologist Michael Bakan, the commonplace practice of objectifying and dehumanizing autistic individuals, including musicians, is challenged. The authors posit that phenomenological approaches, and those informed by a Levinasian philosophy of alterity in particular, have the capacity to leverage this challenge in affirming the agency and humanity of people on the autism spectrum, fostering an appreciation for their difference and contributing to a larger activist agenda of reducing the stigma and marginalization to which they have historically been subjected.

Aesthetic Experience, Social Interfaces, and the Phenomenology of Music

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

Jazz Etiquette

The interaction among a group of musicians before, during, and after the performance of a jazz standard is analyzed to show the interdependence of jazz aesthetics and jazz ethics. The authors argue that what makes jazz distinct from other kinds of musical traditions is not just the ubiquity of improvisation in the genre but the vulnerability that jazz improvisation always generates—a vulnerability that is due to the genre’s reliance on both shared conventions and partly unpredictable individual choices. Analyzing video recordings of a university course on jazz organized to reproduce the setting of a jam session, the authors examine in detail the interactional assumptions and consequences of choices made by band members during the performance of “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise.” The authors’ analysis shows how musicians position themselves to be responsive to one another as the song progresses, starting from an improvised “introduction” that sets the tempo, rhythm, and style of the song and continuing with smooth transitions from one solo to the next. Drawing from Erving Goffman’s ideas about the presentation of self and the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, the authors examine the ethical implications of a musical “vacuum” that was created by one musician’s decision to wait to take his solo. In the interaction, the other musicians responded to the vacuum by assuming responsibility for the group’s performance and, more broadly, the performance of the jazz tradition, and this chapter uses their actions to illustrate how “jazz etiquette” operates as a practice that includes aesthetic, ethical, and practical concerns.

Not Just One, Not Just Now

This essay offers a vision of voice as relational and temporal, in contrast to figurations of voice as “one” (as a soliloquy that directly expresses a sovereign individual subjectivity) and “now” (as immediately present, in contrast to the spatial distance and temporal delay of writing or reflection). This abstract construal of pristine subjective oneness and atemporal objective presence underlies both Husserlian semiotics and the Derridean critique of the “metaphysics of presence” long associated with the voice. In practice, however, most vocal action (public singing and speaking, chatting and harmonizing with others, vocal uproar, protest, negotiation) is undertaken in relation to others and unfolds over time. Politically, the irrelational individual-expressivist figuration provides the metaphysical scaffolding for groupist-expressivist figurations of voice, in which homogenous collectivities are understood to speak in unison, cut off from interlocutors, response, or counterpoint—cut off, that is, from actual sociality. What political and ethical possibilities might open up by turning from irrelational soliloquy to relational colloquy, among others, in time?

Young People’s Lived Experience of Music in Everyday Life

Over the last decade, there has been growing psychological interest in studying everyday experiences with and of music in ways that bypass a selective focus on musical function, mood, emotion, or the perception of musical attributes. Ecological perspectives on music listening—where experience is understood as the multimodal sum of a systemic interaction between perceiver, environment, and musical attributes—have also been influential. This has been reflected in an increase in the number of empirical studies exhibiting a phenomenological approach. However, little research has explicitly addressed children’s and adolescents’ holistic interactions with music. Drawing on findings from a mixed-method empirical inquiry into UK ten-to-eighteen-year-olds’ involvement with music (employing interpretative phenomenological analysis), this chapter explores the phenomenology of children’s and adolescents’ unfolding, lived experiences of music in everyday scenarios. It discusses ways in which the experience of music across this time span changes in terms of psychological characteristics, kinds of consciousness, and meanings attached to music. Key themes are related to topics within phenomenology’s philosophical tradition, and the relationship between philosophical and psychological understandings of phenomenology is considered.