Here’s the part where the paper gets at least a little bit technical, as Schutz draws from Husserl’s account of the internal consciousness of time in establishing the tuning-in relationship at the heart of making music together.
The implications for human social interaction in general, and for ethics in particular, are striking. In a nutshell, the roots of ethics and the roots of music are older and deeper than any theoretical account of them; they are even older and deeper than language.
Time and Meaning
The phenomenological method begins with bracketing off or putting out of play all reflective or theoretical understanding, all metaphysical or scientific knowledge, including any assumptions derived from empirical psychology or cognitive science regarding the nature of sensation or perception. The aim is not to deny or negate such understanding but, as Merleau-Ponty (1968: 167) frames it, to remember where it comes from, to arrive at “the expression of what is before expression and sustains it from behind.” Phenomenological description may then bring to light the primordial structures of consciousness, the originary or pre-reflective meaning that gives life and depth to human experience and human action.
In his phenomenological account of musical experience, Schutz (1951: 78) notes “a strong tendency in contemporary thought to identify meaning with its semantic expression and to consider language, speech, symbols, significant gestures, as the fundamental condition of social intercourse as such.” Schutz’s own earlier work exhibits this tendency: in The Phenomenology of the Social World (1967: 75), he defines “meaning-context” in such a way as to suggest a primacy of conceptual understanding, that is, the primacy of “monothetic” over “polythetic” constitution of meaning. A series of experiences “stand in a meaning-context only if, once they have been lived through in separate steps, they are then constituted into a synthesis of a higher order, becoming thereby unified objects of monothetic attention.”
The meaning of a piece of music, however, cannot be constituted monothetically: there is no way to look back and capture in a single ray of attention the meaning of the music, nor to capture it in a single expression or formula (see Schutz 1976: 29). And yet, a piece of music has a meaning in which those writing and playing and listening and dancing to the music can all share. Schutz resolves the puzzle by admitting the possibility of a meaning-context which is essentially polythetic: the only way to capture the meaning of music is to recollect the experience, step by step, as it unfolds in inner time; the only way to share together in the meaning of music is for the participants to “tune in,” to synchronize the flow of inner time, one with another.
I am playing fiddle on stage with my band. It is late on a Friday night, and we are playing a traditional reel for a contra dance.[i] At the start of one iteration of the tune, I take the music in an unexpected direction, dropping down to a lower register and playing a strongly syncopated rhythmic pattern while the flute player continues with the more straight-ahead melody line.
I did not plan this variation ahead of time, nor do I think to myself, “I should drop down an octave and play a syncopated rhythm” with a specified pattern laid out like a map. Rather, in the flow of experience, I perceive a possibility, an opening through which I might go, and I follow it without thinking of how I might emerge from the other side. Perhaps I am responding to some subtle shift in the left-hand rhythm laid down by the piano player, or perhaps the rhythmic figure is implicit in the tune as I first learned it, or perhaps something in the movement of the dancers suggests syncopation just then, without any of those cues rising to a level of reflective awareness. If we are all tuned in with one another, the other musicians will catch on to what I am doing and will follow along, taking some new direction in the meaning-context of the music that will carry over into the experience of the dancers.
“For our purposes,” writes Schutz, “a piece of music may be defined – very roughly and tentatively, indeed – as a meaningful arrangement of tones in inner time.” This is so for composer, performer, and listener alike; for the latter, “while listening he lives in a dimension of time incompatible with that which can be subdivided into homogeneous parts” (Schutz 1951: 88–89). In his “Fragments on the Phenomenology of Music”, Schutz (1976: 37) considers a box of 78-rpm records. One side of a twelve-inch record plays for about three minutes, by the clock, which would matter to someone, say, planning a radio broadcast. It would not matter to the listener for whom, he says, “it is not true that the time lived through while listening to the slow movement of a symphony was of equal length to the time he lived through listening to the finale, although each movement needed the playing of two sides of a twelve-inch record.”
To elucidate the structures of inner time, Schutz draws on both Bergson and Husserl. On Bergson’s account, pure duration is an unbroken flow of conscious states, while outer time is an unhappy mixture of that flow with structures derived from spatial relationships. Outer time can be measured in regular intervals, conceived as separate from one another; duration admits of no such measurement, no such separation. Bergson often appeals to the experience of music to illustrate the point. In recalling past states, Bergson (2001: 100) claims, duration “does not set them alongside its actual state as one point alongside another, but forms both the past and present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another.” A melody, Bergson (2001: 100–01) claims, is like a living being
whose parts, though distinct, permeate one another just because they are closely connected. . . The proof is that, if we interrupt the rhythm by dwelling longer than is right on one note of the tune, it is not its exaggerated length, as length, which will warn us of our mistake, but the qualitative change thereby caused in the whole of the musical phrase.
From Husserl, Schutz draws a more complex account of the structure of internal time consciousness. The unrolling of a piece of music in inner time is meaningful for composer and listener alike “because and in so far as it evokes in the stream of consciousness participation in an interplay of recollections, retentions, protentions, and anticipations, which interrelate the successive elements” (Schutz 1951: 88). In short, Bergson and Husserl between them suggest that an exclusively exterior, spatialized conception of time would make it impossible to account for the meaningful experience of a melody, or even of a single note. If time is only a succession of infinitesimal now-points, each external to the others, all we could have is a collection of punctiform sound-points or silence-points lined up, side by side, in no way constituting a meaningful whole (see Husserl 1991: 25). We can catch a tune or a rhythm only if the present moment is a phase in a continuous running-off of experience, ripe with the no-longer and the not-yet.
If Schutz is correct that making music together shares its underlying structure with human social interaction and communication generally, then the underlying meaning-context of encounters involving ethical values would likewise by polythetic, a matter of responsiveness to cues and promptings in the social situation in the flow of time. An effort after the fact to give an account of – and be accountable for – a response to a given situation would involve reconstruction of the flow of experience, and an attempt to put words to the originary or pre-reflective meaning of the response.
Something like the tuning-in relationship in ethics may be found in Nel Noddings’ account of caring relationships, in which she argues for the primacy of a receptive mode of consciousness. Receptivity is affective and attuned to the concreteness of the present moment and to the particularity of the cared-for. More abstract or theoretical approaches to moral values have their uses, Noddings (2013: 35) maintains that it is necessary always to return to receptive mode: “a permanent or untimely move from feeling and affective engrossment to abstract problem-solving would be a ‘degradation’, a movement from the appropriate to something qualitatively different and less appropriate.” This suggests that the pre-reflective meaning of a caring relationship is also constituted polythetically in the flow of inner time, and that efforts to press that meaning into a monothetic mold would do some violence to it.
Checking in on the young engineer, Schutz’s account has so far clarified only what she needs to do when the lead engineer pauses at the end of the meeting: she must “read the room,” tune in to the crosscurrents of intention and anticipation among the others there with her, so she may improvise a response at the opportune moment. The unrolling of her hesitation and her sifting through possibilities in internal time runs up against the lead engineer’s anticipations as to how the meeting will end and his sense of what constitutes a sufficient pause, and against the internal struggles of some in the room and the impatience of others, all while the clock on the wall ticks away the seconds until noon.
If she were to speak, the meaning of her utterance would be subtly shaded by when she speaks: too close to the beginning of the pause might give it a cast of over-eagerness, or even rashness; too close to the end of the pause might give it a cast of uncertainty that could undermine the seriousness of her concerns. It does not help that the end of the pause is still indeterminate, still over the horizon. In the overlapping of internal and external time, there may be a barely perceptible shift from too soon to too late. Whenever she speaks, though, she is likely to disrupt the anticipations of the others, and how her interruption is received will depend on how near the end of the lead engineer’s pause is to the horizon of the present moment for each of them.
References
Bergson, Henri. 2001. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Dover Publications: Mineola, N.Y.).
Husserl, Edmund. 1991. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917) (Kluwer Academic Publishers: Boston).
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible (Northwestern University Press: Evanston).
Noddings, Nell. 2013. Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (University of California Press: Berkeley, CA).
Schutz, Alfred. 1951. ‘Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship’, Social Research, 18: 76–97.
———. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, IL).
———. 1976. ‘Fragments on the Phenomenology of Music’, Music and Man, 2: 5–72.
[i] Modern urban contra dance is the present-day extension of a centuries-old tradition of American social dance, with couples arranged in longways sets, subdivided into “minor sets” of two couples each. A caller prompts the dancers through a sequence of figures for each round of the dance, after which each couple progresses up or down the longways set to dance the same sequence again in a new minor set. The musical repertoire of modern contra dance is broad, but it draws from and remains close to the traditional music of the British Isles and North America.
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