Picking up from the story of the young engineer who needed to find the groove of a fraught meeting at work, I turn to set up the main argument of my 2023 paper on music and ethics.
The Tuning-In Relationship
These reflections on the plight of the young engineer point toward the possibility that ethical practice has something in common with musical practice, if only to the extent of needing to be able to catch the rhythm and tempo of a social situation and to improvise a response. This is hardly a novel observation: Aristotle, for one, frequently appeals to the activity of musicians as having something in common with one or another aspect of ethical action, as do latter-day commentators on his work (see Annas 2011: 13–14). As it is with a physician or a pilot – responding well and beautifully to the opportune moment – so it is with a musician playing the lyre or the flute.
To be very clear, the task at hand is not to determine whether training in music contributes directly to moral development, nor is it to determine whether judgments about music are fundamentally moral judgments; those are tasks taken up by others, in other contexts (see Cobussen and Nielsen 2016). Rather, the task is to bring to light the structures of perception and cognition by which it is possible for people to make music together, with the primary aim of clarifying some of the basic structures of human social interaction as such. This is the heart of the matter: music and ethics alike draw on modes of human cognition – attention, sense-making, and motivation – that are older and deeper than moral theory, older even than language and music themselves (see Tomlinson 2015: 24–25). Investigating those primordial modes of cognition by way of a phenomenology of making music provides a point of entry into a domain of human experience that is ethically salient, but which might otherwise be overlooked in accounts of ethical practice founded on principles of right action or calculations of net aggregate utility.
As a first point of entry, consider Alfred Schutz’ phenomenological inquiry into musical experience. In “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship”, Schutz (1951: 79) uncovers a structure he contends is at the root not only of shared musical meaning, but of human communication and social relations as such: the “mutual tuning-in relationship.”
Schutz (1951: 76) first sets out musical experience as a puzzle: “Music is a meaningful context which is not bound to a conceptual scheme. Yet this meaningful context can be communicated”; among composer, performer and listener “there prevail social relations of a highly complicated structure” (see also Schutz 1976: 23–24). The complex structure arises from the distinct roles of the various participants: one musician would have to tune in with another, listener with musicians, musicians with composer, listener with composer.
What would it mean to have a single meaning-context, shared among people in all these various roles, without language? Schutz primary answer lies in the phenomenology of the internal consciousness of time: musical meaning is shared when the unfolding of temporal experience in one aligns or synchronizes with the unfolding of temporal experience in another, such that they catch the same meaning. The listener, for example, “is united with the composer by a time dimension common to both, which is nothing other than the derived form of the vivid present” (Schutz 1951: 90).
The aim of what follows is to draw out Schutz’ account of the tuning-in relationship in making music together, to assess its merits and its limitations as a contribution to the effort of elucidating the deeper roots of social interaction in general and ethics in particular. To spoil the ending, a bit, Schutz’ analysis of temporality is an important contribution to this effort, but his own assumptions and biases regarding the proper forms of musical experience lead him to understate the importance of embodiment and of social practices as conditions for shared meaning.
References
Annas, Julia. 2011. Intelligent Virtue (Oxford University Press: Oxford; New York).
Cobussen, Marcel, and Nanette Nielsen. 2016. Music and Ethics (Routledge: Abingdon, UK).
Schutz, Alfred. 1951. ‘Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship’, Social Research, 18: 76–97.
———. 1976. ‘Fragments on the Phenomenology of Music’, Music and Man, 2: 5–72.
Tomlinson, Gary. 2015. A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (Zone Books: New York).
Leave a Reply