Sound and Charm: A Phenomenological Account of Working with Music

Abstract

In this thesis, I develop a phenomenological account of music from the perspective of musicians and dancers. My central questions are these: given that working with music inextricably involves kinaesthesia, affect, vision, ideas, words etc. in addition to sound—just as dance can—how is it that music is the sounding art par excellence? In what way is music, as an object of consciousness, sounding; and what kind of act is musical listening? These are questions left unaddressed by accounts of music that equate music to sound, as well as those that emphasise music’s visual or embodied dimensions.

My starting point is qualitative interviews I conducted with professional musicians and dancers. They describe their first-person experience of working with music: what kind of relationship they feel with the sounds of the music, their bodies and their instruments or technology, in the midst of a meaningfully musical moment. Together with my own reflections as a pianist, the descriptions show that music, rather than being equal to its sounds, is experienced as a kind of atmosphere or presence, and as an energy that unfolds over time.

Two philosophers, Vladimir Jankélévitch and Jean-Paul Sartre, provide me with theoretical frameworks for further analysis. From Jankélévitch, I take the concept of the “charm” of music: an essentially temporal phenomenon, charm is the power that music has over us in its moment of unfolding. Musical charm can be understood as the very act through which we are gripped by music.

And this act requires sound. Using Sartre’s account of the imagination as presented in The Imaginary, I analyse the relationship between music and its sounding material, and also what kind of “presence” music is. I argue that music, unlike its sounds, is not a real presence that exists for us to perceive, but rather is an “irreal” (or imagined) object. We take music itself to be sounding, through an act of attentive and committed listening: an act of imagination that both feeds on and goes “beyond” sound.