Introduction

Abstract

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.