Digging deeper into the phenomenology of making music together and thence to the phenomenology of social life, the next section of my 2023 paper concerns embodiment.
Making music together is something we do as living beings of a species with a peculiar history, a species with a distinctive way of experiencing our own embodiment.
Does that carry over into social life in general, including moral awareness and responsiveness?
Embodiment
In bringing to light the temporal structure of musical experience, Schutz has provided an indication of what is happening when people make music together, but not how it is happening. Internal time may have priority in establishing the meaning of music, but the possibility of more than one individual sharing in that meaning requires an appeal to external, spatialized time “that can be measured by metronomes and clocks, that is, the time that a musician ‘counts’ in order to ensure the correct ‘tempo’” (Schutz 1951: 89). Musicians playing together, and those listening to or dancing to the music they are making, participate together in an intersubjective world of spatial cues that may serve to synchronize or mesh together the internal duration of each.
Schutz acknowledges only in passing that bodies in movement are the indispensable middle term between internal and external time, and hence between one interiority and another. The tuning-in relationship is established, Schutz (1951: 96–97) writes, “by living through the vivid present together, by experiencing this togetherness as a ‘We.’” Within this We-relationship, “the other’s body and its movements can be and are interpreted as a field of expression of events within his inner life.” So, at least some of the spatial cues that enable tuning in are bodily cues.
Schutz’ account of embodiment is not entirely satisfactory, at least in part because he is held back by his own assumptions or biases about the proper forms of musical expression. What may be called his idealist bias and his passive-listener bias may both stem from what amounts to a high-culture bias, which is not only a preference for the music of the European concert hall, but the tacit assumption that what happens in the European concert hall is the paradigm of human music-making.
The idealist bias emerges in Schutz’ insistence that a work of music is an ideal object that may exist entirely in the mind of the composer. As such, the meaning of the work of music is not tied to or conditioned by any external object and need not even have any external expression, either in performance or in musical notation. This includes “the technical possibilities and limits of musical instruments” as well as musical notation and recording technology, which are “merely means for the product, the reproduction and conservation of the work of music,” and they have “only a mediate impact on the experience of the listener as well as the composer” (Schutz 1976: 27).
To emphasize the point, Schutz (1951: 82) cites with approval an astonishing claim: “it has been said that Raphael would have been one of the greatest painters even if he had been born without arms.” But surely, Raphael was not born with his artistic vision fully developed; surely, it developed out of the interplay of eye and mind and hand and brush and oil and pigment and surface, with the possibilities and limits of each responding to the possibilities and limits of the others. Composing and performing music likewise develops from the interplay of minds and bodies and voices and instruments, each with its own possibilities and limitations. To stay within the confines of the concert hall, it is notable that Sibelius’ Violin Concerto stands out as among the most technically demanding of its kind, which may be attributed to the fact that Sibelius was himself a violinist: he knew the instrument well, and so he knew just how far the interplay of fingers and arms and bow and strings could be taken, and what sort of music would fit within that interplay.
In addition to the idealist bias, Schutz is prone to a passive-listener bias, in that his account of the tuning-in relationship assumes the social relationships peculiar to the European concert hall: professional musicians on stage perform music by a composer who may be absent – or long dead – for an audience that is expected to sit very still and make as little noise as possible. That Schutz (1976: 42–43) takes this to be the paradigm of musical experience becomes clear when he sets aside as exceptions any “special use of music to accompany certain events in the outer world – music for dancing, music for marching, music in combination with drama,” and so on.
What is striking in this is that the division of the world into professional musicians and passive listeners (or consumers) is itself an exception to the prevailing rule, across human cultures and throughout human history, that music is participatory (see Sacks 2007: 244). A more complete phenomenology of musical experience would have to get out of the concert hall, and perhaps even out of the dance hall, to elucidate the musicality of ordinary human life, across cultures. In that wider world, one would always encounter human beings in motion.
Schutz’s passive-listener bias shows itself most tellingly in his claim that that “it is not at all certain that rhythm is essential to musical experience itself. Rhythm is only peculiar to certain musical cultures” (Schutz 1976: 47). This is a perplexing claim, which suggests he may be applying an especially narrow conception of ‘rhythm’ that excludes it from the concert hall. In his “Fragment on the Phenomenology of Rhythm,” his analysis of rhythmic occurrences does suggest mechanical repetition, with “numerically identical phrases” and “recurrent events in immediate repetition”, and the stipulation that “the end of each unit leads to a reestablishment of the same situation which prevailed at its beginning” (Schutz 2013: 21). Walking and breathing serve as examples, but the paradigm case of rhythm as Schutz defines it would be banging on a drum. Even in this constricted sense, though, rhythm and movement have been essential to the experience of music in most human cultures, past and present (see, for example, Levitin 2016: 58).
Consider, however, an expanded and more generous sense of rhythm, derived from the phenomenology of dance. According to Sheets-Johnstone (2015: 88), rhythm is inherent in movement as such, arising from the interplay of the areal, projectional, and tensional qualities of an abrupt downward swing of the arm, say, or the sustained opening of the line of the body in drawing a deep breath. Rhythm is experienced as an accentual pattern woven into the dynamic line of the dance, which need not – and often does not – repeat itself.
Back in the dance hall, suppose my band is playing a traditional tune, “St. Anne’s Reel.” The tune itself may be construed as an ideal object, for some purposes, as when noting that it has been taken up in a number of musical traditions in North America, with variants found from Québèc, where it is known as “Reel Ste.-Agathe,” to the southern Appalachians. Some musicians may learn it from notation, but it is more commonly passed “by ear” from musician to musician, which can account for the variations that occur across its range. It is not known who first composed the tune, or when it was first written down, and there is no definitive version of the tune, and yet it is recognizable whenever it is played. To that point, at least, Schutz insistence on the ideality of a musical work seems to hold.
It must be said, though, that the tune as it is widely known is especially well suited to the fiddle in standard tuning (GDAE); it is, to that extent, “a fiddle tune.” The fingering falls readily into place, in the version the band is now playing, and the melody moves back and forth across the strings of the fiddle in such a way that the bowing can take on a dancing quality, a rhythmic pulse inherent in the movement. A tune written by an accordion player, or one traditionally played on woodwind instruments, or again one traditionally played on a fiddle in “Callico” tuning (AEAC#), might not fit so comfortably within the possibilities and limits of a fiddle in standard tuning, and so might have a very different overall feel.
The feel of “St. Anne’s Reel” on a fiddle in standard tuning might be characterized as “bouncy” and almost irrepressibly cheerful; it meshes well with a contra dance the figures of which tend to be percussive, with abrupt shifts in weight or direction. When written down, the notation usually specifies cut time (2/2); in the first measure, a quarter note is followed by six eighth notes. I play the quarter note with an abrupt but light down bow on the E string that is closed off by my first finger, sounding an F#, followed by a lifting up bow slurring the two eighth notes, sounding the F# again as I bring my second finger down abruptly to press the E string to the fingerboard, directly alongside my first finger, sounding a G. Rhythmically, this is a strong down beat followed by a light but accented off-beat: “ONE and-a”. I may then play the descending line of four eighth notes with light, short bow strokes with a slight separation or articulation between them, but still with a slight accent on the third eighth note, which also falls on the off-beat: “two-e-AND-a.” Already I have created a rhythm that supports the dance, with an accent on the off-beat that often gears into the lifting of dancers’ feet following a step on the beat: “ONE and-a two-e-and-a.”
It is only in analyzing movement after the fact that I can describe the first measure of the tune in these terms. When I am playing, it is as though fingers and bow and fiddle are dancing together. To maintain a steady beat and reinforce the accent on the off-beat, I may stand and walk in place, or sway my torso by tensing downward very slightly on each beat and opening upward on the off-beat. If all is going well, musicians, callers, and dancers are all tuned in together, dancing our own given roles in the same dance, adjusting to one another and to the rhythms inherent in the movement of human bodies.
Even in the concert hall, rhythm in this sense may be the key to the tuning-in relationship, seldom as an obvious, percussive thumping, but always in the pulse and flow of the dynamic line of the music. Just as if dancing, the conductor moves to establish not just a tempo, but the character or feeling of a passage, and to adjust the balance of forces in the orchestra. An abrupt, forceful movement of arms and torso places a strong accent; a sustained lateral swaying movement of arms and torso establishes an even, flowing line; tensing the body, hunching slightly, with small, controlled movements of the arms quiets the orchestra, which swells into a crescendo with the expansive opening of the body line and arm movements of the conductor. Each movement has its own temporal span, affected by the range of the movement but arising mainly from its projectional quality (Sheets-Johnstone 2015: 83).
The musicians on the stage may be constrained by social conventions from any sort of overt or dramatic movement of their own but, if they are fully engaged in making music, they may join in the conductor’s dynamic line through subtler changes in body line, range of movement, or tension and relaxation: a slight lean forward; a lifting of the head; bow strokes that are shorter or longer, more abrupt or more sustained; breath that is projected with greater or lesser intensity.
Listeners in the audience may be even more tightly constrained by social conventions, to be read in the stony faces and controlled postures of those around them. But a listener fully engaged in the music might respond by sitting up a little straighter, drawing a breath, clenching a fist – anything but tapping a foot or rising up singing! That little expression is allowed does not rule out the possibility of a bodily response as vital to drawing audience members into a tuning-in relationship with the performers.
Back in the meeting in the engineering firm, the lead engineer asks if there are any questions or concerns, then takes a half-step back, letting his eyes scan slowly back and forth across the room; his shoulders are relaxed, his arms at his sides. Among the others in the room, some are shifting uncomfortably in their seats, avoiding eye contact, or giving an eager – or is it anxious? – glance at the clock on the wall above the door. Others are gathering together their papers and other belongings, while still others are leaning forward in their seats as if preparing to stand. No one speaks.
The lead engineer steps forward again, his chin lifted slightly and his face bearing an expression of satisfaction. He nods, as if to himself, then draws a breath: the line of his body opens up, his shoulders moving slightly upward and to the back. He opens his mouth.
References
Levitin, Daniel J. 2016. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Penguin: New York).
Sacks, Oliver. 2007. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Alfred A. Knopf: New York).
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.
———. 2013. ‘Fragment on the Phenomenology of Rhythm’, Schutzian Research, 5: 11–22.
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2015. The Phenomenology of Dance (Temple University Press: Philadelphia).
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