In the Phaedo – a dialogue investigating the immortality of the soul – Socrates compares himself to the swans of Apollo who sing “most beautifully” before they die. Working principally from the Phaedo (but also Timaeus, Parmenides, and Philebus), the aim of this article is to determine the relation between the song of the swan and the song of the philosopher. First, we examine the use of language in human song as a way to consider the other side of logos: logos not only as word but logos as ratio – i.e., as a relation between temporally-ordered terms. This ratio we then examine as the sense of before-and-afterness that Aristotle explores, in Physics IV, as the “number of movement” that is time; for, through the counting of this “number of movement” (accomplished by the soul), we begin to understand how swans (through song) and philosophers (through dialogue) share a temporal orientation toward what transcends the present moment. This temporal orientation, I argue, pertains to sempiternity, an ageless or undying [ἀθάνατος] movement of the soul. Thus, I conclude that philosophy as “the highest kind of music” (Phaedo) – like the song of the swans of Apollo – concerns itself with the undying state of the soul and, hence, with ethos.
I read the whole of Augustine's Confessions (not merely book XI) as an extended essay on the phenomenology of time-consciousness, understanding the Confessions as a performative text—as a text that enacts or performs the very content it describes. The key to this reading lies in a careful study of Augustine's use of psalms and hymns in his work, centered upon “Deus, creator omnium.” This hymn not only appears in book XI but forms an important structural element (as referenced also in books IV, IX, and X); it plays a similar and significant role in Augustine's De Musica as well. Through his interpretation of the performance of “Deus, creator omnium” in De Musica, Augustine presents a highly sophisticated notion of rhythm that discloses a nonlinear account of time essential to my reading of book XI of the Confessions; memory comes to be understood as illuminating not only the past but also the present and future. Moreover, the centrality of rhythm in De Musica allows us to understand how the structural whole of the Confessions is organized rhythmically, performing a “beginning” that serves as origin only retroactively, through relation or proportion to the end.
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Drawing upon Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, I apply the laws of mereology—the study of parts and wholes—to the analysis of time-consciousness in his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), arguing that Husserl’s phenomenological solution to problems raised by empirical psychology in the late nineteenth century concerning the relation between subject and object was inspired by a rethinking of the notion of intentionality in terms of an extensional whole. Turning, then, to descriptions from Husserl’s careful analyses of tone and melody in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), I claim that melody’s structure of expression pertains specifically to retention (which I distinguish from recollection) as a nonindependent part of a flowing whole. This mereologic reformulation helps us think through the problem of how a melody is perceived in time. Furthermore, I show how, according to Husserl, there is a unity of the sensation of “tone” and the “flow of consciousness,” and I argue that by understanding this unity as a whole of nonindependent parts, we grasp a significant insight that illuminates phenomenology’s overall aim of considering the evidence of empirical science together with the formal laws of logic.
This introduction presents a critical overview of the phenomenology of music, examining its origins, history, limits, and future possibilities. Since Plato, Western discourse about music has articulated a conflict between music’s mathematical, objective properties and its effects on embodied, situated human subjects. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, approached similar philosophical problems via a theory of intentionality. If consciousness is always intentional (i.e., directed toward things), then there is an essential correlation between the subject and the world. Since 1900, phenomenological analysis of musical problems has taken several forms: (1) from around 1910 to 1940, a quest to define the very object of musical phenomenology in opposition to the contemporaneous trend toward a “naturalistic” music aesthetics; (2) from around 1940 to 1970, greater concern with aesthetic production (including both performance and modernist poetics); (3) from around 1970 to around 2000, the prioritization of musical “experience” as a counterweight to music-theoretical abstractions; and (4) from 2000 to the present, a growing acknowledgment of embodiment, technology, and the interaction of the two. Because musical form is generated through time, because we make and feel music with our bodies and instruments, because music communicates shared meaning with others, and because music is performed in diverse social contexts, a phenomenology of music must work with key themes of phenomenology itself—time-consciousness, embodiment, intersubjectivity, and the lifeworld.
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