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‘A Unique Way of Being’: The Place of Music in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception

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Performance Phenomenology

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Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to examine Merleau-Ponty’s references to music in his classic text Phenomenology of Perception. This procedure reveals four major themes related to music, namely notions of motor space and tacit knowledge, the unity of music and sound, music and the tradition, and intersubjectivity and contestation. Recent work in neuroscience seems to bear out the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking to musicking as a fundamentally embodied process, what he terms ‘a unique way of being.’

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The grand piano, whose design and construction materials have largely become standardised since the 1860s (Rowland 1998) conforming to a keyboard layout of eighty-eight black and white notes, presents a different set of problems related to touch (how much bodily energy is required to produce a given musical dynamic)—that is, how the instrument responds to the performer’s actions at any given moment.

  2. 2.

    ‘Representations are one of the fundamental explanatory tools of cognitive science. Cognitive scientists regularly explain particular cognitive achievements (such as the navigational achievements of rats in mazes) by modeling how the organism is using representations of the environment’ (Bermúdez 2014, 11). However, the behaviour patterns of rats learning to navigate mazes do not begin to approach the ecological and cognitive complexity of the human experience of music. This begs the question as to the ‘size and shape’ of musical representations: Are these schema-based (Leman 1995), notation-based (for professional western art music practitioners), or altogether a fiction (Chemero 2011)?

  3. 3.

    See also Dreyfus (2006) for a discussion of the concepts of ‘intentional arc’ and ‘skilful coping’ from a contemporary neuroscientific perspective.

  4. 4.

    Defined (Reybrouck 2015, 5) as the immediate environment of the creature, following Uexkull.

  5. 5.

    Examples such as Joni Mitchell’s disastrous solo piano performance at the Isle of Wight Festival (1970) and the less than friendly reception of Ornette Coleman’s music come to mind, as well as the tumultuous reception history of works by composers such as Debussy and Stravinsky.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

    Marc Duby

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  1. Marc Duby
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Correspondence to Marc Duby .

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  1. Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Stuart Grant

  2. Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie

  3. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Matthew Wagner

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Duby, M. (2019). ‘A Unique Way of Being’: The Place of Music in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. In: Grant, S., McNeilly-Renaudie, J., Wagner, M. (eds) Performance Phenomenology. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98059-1_6

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