Collaborative Temporality: Merleau-Ponty and The Phenomenology of Music by Rachel C. Elliott A Thesis presented to The University of Guelph In partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Guelph, Ontario, Canada © Rachel Elliott, December, 2018 ABSTRACT COLLABORATIVE TEMPORALITY: MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MUSIC Rachel Elliott Advisor: Professor John Russon University of Guelph, 2018 Music seems to illuminate the lived experience of embodiment. Described phenomenologically, musical experience reveals what Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception calls the habit body. In articulating the habit body’s role in music, it becomes clear that music contains the possibility of expanding the habit body, but also of reinforcing or stabilizing it. I bring this insight to bear on work locating the intractability of oppression in rigid and inhibited habit bodies, perpetrated and undergone respectively. Finally, I show how my habit body account of musical experience significantly enhances our understanding of an important and widely reported feature of musical experience: the sense of empowered belonging. I identify a theoretical shortcoming in accounts that source the ‘we’ experience to being in time together and offer an account of collaborative temporality based in the habit body as remedy. In so doing, I identify the openness of what Edmund Husserl calls protentional expectation as the mode in which collaborative temporality can occur, suggesting that the ‘we’ experience is an aspirational one. iii DEDICATION In memory of Katherine Peacock and Eleanor Stubley. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to my supervisor Dr. John Russon for his guidance and insight, and for continually pushing me to be more nuanced. I am thankful for the attention and encouragement of my committee members, Dr. Kenneth Dorter and Dr. Tracey Nicholls, and for the early-stage conversations I had with Dr. Eleanor Stubley and Dr. Jay Lampert. The opportunities and stimulation I received from Dr. Ajay Heble and the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation were indispensable, and the many in-depth exchanges I had with improvising musicians over the years contributed greatly to my thinking about music and community. I am appreciative of the Philosophy Department for believing in the value of my doctoral research from the beginning, and to Janet Thackray and Pam Armitage for helping me navigate the administrative side of graduate school. I am grateful for the grants I received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Government of Ontario, and for the Stanley Saunders Scholarship for Music, without which this thesis would have taken much longer to write. To my family, especially my parents and sisters: thank you for always picking up the phone and reminding me of the big picture. Thanks is also due to the many people who let me live in their spare rooms, and to Rutiger. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Dedication iii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v List of Appendices vii Introduction: Which Music? Studying Musical Experience 1 1. Chapter One: Five Phenomenologies of Music 7 1.1. Case Study #1 (Passive Listening): Simone Schmidt at the Tranzac 11 1.2. Case Study #2 (Active Listening): Rehearsing Olivia for Katherine Peacock’s Funeral 24 1.3. Case Study #3 (Dancing): DJ Cozmic Cat at the ROM and Carnival in Cuba 32 1.4. Case Study #4 (Solo Performance): Playing the Piano Improvisatorily 41 1.5. Case Study #5 (Group Performance): Goose 48 1.6. Conclusion: The Body as Means, Theme, and Material Form 55 2. Chapter Two: Merleau-Ponty’s Habit Body 57 2.1. Mechanistic and Intellectualist Shortcomings: A Third Approach to Embodiment 58 2.2. Lesions in the Nervous System and Anticipatory Resemblance 61 2.3. The Phantom Limb and Anosognosia 64 2.4. The Habit Body and The Body-at-this-Moment 71 2.5. Johann Schneider: Motility and the Body Schema 78 2.6. The Habit Body in the Phenomenologies of Music 96 2.7. Conclusion: Musicking Reveals the Habit Body 101 3. Chapter Three: Music as Transformative Gesture 103 3.1. The Life of the Habit Body 103 vi 3.2. Everyday Life and the Body Schema 108 3.3. Iyer: Traces of Embodiment without a Body Schema 111 3.4. Dewey and Body Schematic Expansion 116 3.5. Sullivan, Coates, and Schematic Contraction 119 3.6. Mimesis and Other People 138 3.7. ‘Dashing After the Sonata’ when Music Takes the Lead 156 3.8. Conclusion: Music’s Existential Significance 169 4. Chapter Four: Togetherness in Time 171 4.1. Music as Temporal Unity 171 4.2. Kathleen Marie Higgins and Ontological Security 176 4.3. Bronwyn Tarr: Synchronization as Mechanism of Social Bonding 179 4.4. Alfred Schütz: The Tuning In Relationship 184 4.4.1. Retention and Impression 196 4.4.2. Protention 202 4.4.3. Polythetic Synthesis 206 4.5. Passive Synthesis: Protentional Emptiness as Prefiguring a Rule for Transition 215 4.6. The Habit Body at the Origin of Subjective Temporality 238 4.7. Sensory Life as Pre-Habitual Synchronization 243 4.8. Protentional Negotiation as Basis of Musical Unity 253 4.9. The Sacred Harp: Shape Note Singing 259 4.10. “We Can”: Sharing Time 263 4.11. Conclusion: Togetherness in Time as Protentional Negotiation 266 Work Cited 268 Appendix 284 vii LIST OF APPENDICES Appendix 1. Olivia by Katherine Peacock. Transcribed by Ali Berkok………………………..284 Introduction 1 Introduction: Which Music? Studying Musical Experience When undertaking a philosophy of music – asking about the centrality of music in human life – or the reverse – wondering what insight the medium of music might contain for philosophy in general – the all-important task is of selecting an appropriate exemplar. One way of selecting a musical quarry might be to observe the other hunters: what do others study who are interested in music? What Christopher Small observed in 1998 seems to be less true today: [W]hile scholars of music may disagree of any number of matters, there is one matter on which there is virtually unanimous agreement […] the essence of music and of whatever meanings it contains is to be found in those things called musical works - works, that is, of Western classical music. (Musicking 4) While musicologists and music theorists may set their sights primarily on Western classical music studied mainly according to the maxim that “only those who can read a score have access to the inner meanings of music” (Musicking 5), performance studies, improvisation studies, ethnomusicology, and other disciplines are now reconsidering the wisdom of approaching music as if it were an merely an object, and one existing independently of its enactment or reception.1 Small’s influential book Musicking puts an artifact-centered approach to the study of music, and the genres it privileges, into question. “The fundamental nature and meaning of music,” he writes, “lie not in objects, not in musical works at all, but in action, in what people do. It is only by 1 Johannes Brahms declined to attend a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni “saying he would sooner stay home and read it” (Musicking 5). To give a poetic example that suggests why reading might be preferable to listening: John Keats writes in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” as it appears in The Oxford Book of English Verse. ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch. 1919.: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone Introduction 2 understanding what people do as they take part in a musical act that we can hope to understand its nature and the function it fulfills in human life” (Musicking 8). Small is right to foreground the human behaviour involved in the creation, performance, preservation, and reception of music, rather than to accept scholarly priorities which privilege the Western classical style. For when we consider what music is and what it means, we cannot rightly avoid recognizing that we are wondering what music means for someone. The being or meaning of music cannot be taken as something freestanding independently of human interest. Therefore, in our study, we will bring our attention not to any musical repertoire or cannon as such, but rather to the human activity involved in experienced musical events. One corollary of this is that we cannot say in advance which genres, styles, forms, modes, or classes of music will figure in our study. Considering the vast array of contexts in which we find music occurring in the contemporary world - even within the horizon of a single life on a single day - pre-determining that only a particular type of music is of value to our study would be to remove much of the data available to us and limit the scope and impact of this work. Once we accept that studying music is to study musical experience, then phenomenological inquiry presents itself as the most appropriate method of approach. Phenomenology is the very description of experience. The basic method of phenomenology is to do what Edmund Husserl calls the phenomenological reduction, which involves putting our metaphysical assumptions about everyday reality out of play so that we can bring our attention to the presentation of experience as such. The reduction can be thought of as an intellectual operation that we apply to our thought processes, but it can also, arguably, be occasioned in an embodied way through artistic experience. This points to one of our motivations for developing an account of music based in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Introduction 3 Phenomenology of Perception: to understand more fully how art can prepare the way for philosophical insight2 This is a thesis which Merleau-Ponty develops in his later work, most centrally with regard to painting in Eye and Mind.