The Experience of Music: Embodied, Holistic, and Intersubjective

This chapter examines how the pre-linguistic, mobile, animated body, which repeatedly enacts the sense of “I can,” lies at the root of higher-level capacities, even rational ones, as Sheets-Johnstone, Schutz, and Husserl recognize. For Cox, through the animated body we metaphorically describe music as “moving to a climax” or hitting “high” notes, and our bodies mimetically absorb music through passive syntheses. Besides bodiliness, the holism of experiencing music includes cognitive and emotional intentional apprehension, physiological changes and awarenesses, the passive synthesis of tones into patterns, one’s history and culture—leading to appreciation of the musical expression of emotion. The chapter develops the six features of the cognitive style of the musical province of meaning that includes withdrawal from pragmatic mastery, receptivity, and extended attention to the non-conceptual communication of others (composers or performers). Music exemplifies the mutual tuning-in at the root of We-relationships. Further, the mimetic, passive synthetic linkages occurring in musical communication parallel the pre-reflective interruption of the other evoking our Thou-orientation. Moreover, the multiple musical asymmetries in music, such as that I am better attuned to another than to myself and that another’s polythically unfolding stream of consciousness can never be adequately captured monothetically, find parallels in everyday intersubjectivity.