Phenomenology is explored as a way of helping students and educators open up to music as a creative and transformative experience. I begin by introducing a simple exercise in experimental phenomenology involving multi-stable visual phenomena that can be explored without the use of complex terminology. Here, I discuss how the “phenomenological attitude” may foster a deeper appreciation of the structure of consciousness, as well as the central role the body plays in how we experience and form understandings of the worlds (...) we inhabit. I then explore how the phenomenological attitude may serve as a starting point for students and teachers as they begin to reflect on their involvement with music as co-investigators. Here I draw on my teaching practice as a percussion and drum kit instructor, with a special focus on multi-stable musical phenomena. To conclude, I briefly consider how the phenomenological approach might be developed beyond the practice room to examine music’s relationship to the experience of culture, imagination and “self.”. (shrink)

Phenomenology of music has been a perspective trend of phenomenological aesthetics for more than a hundred years. The topic of the paper is fixation the main problems and vectors of development of phenomenology of music. The authors execute an analysis of Roman Ingarden’s position in the discussions concerning the methodological and ontological problems of phenomenology of music. The paper aims at revealing succession in Roman Ingarden’s solutions to the phenomenology of music problems. The other aim is reflection on the originality (...) of Ingarden’s ideas in the context of phenomenological interpretations of music in 20th and 21st centuries. The solution to these tasks allows the authors to fix key problems and identify the principal positions of phenomenology of music. The main sources of the comparative and historical analysis are the studies carried out by Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Clifton, and Ihde. The most important ontological problems of phenomenology of music are: spatiotemporal constitution of music, reduction of a work of music to its performance, and ontological status of a work of music. The analysis of Ingarden’s position on these problems allows us to characterize it as something different from the existing versions. According to the conception, the time of music is a special type of time, that is, quasi-time. A piece of music is a purely intentional, heteronomous, and intersubjective object. There are a number of methodological specificities of Ingarden’s approach: a refusal of reduction of musical theoretical data, a tendency for independence of a piece of music from conscious and mental processes, and an interpretation of a piece of music as a non-sounding phenomenon. In conclusion, the authors demonstrate how the originality and radical nature of Ingarden’s conclusions made his position defenseless against critique and simultaneously marked the tendency in the contemporary phenomenological studies of music. (shrink)

The present study is a theoretical discussion concerning some of the important processes that characterize human perception, which is understood as a fundamental structure of consciousness. The aim is to acquire new insights for a better comprehension of the human experience in the world and the way individual subjects become familiar with their environment. To accomplish this task, the experience of listening to music is analysed due to the widespread acceptance of music as an important aspect of human life. With (...) reference to a various research studies and hypothesis focused on the way listeners understand music, principles of perceptual organization which allow immediate awareness of music are investigated. Particular attention is given to studies in the field of music perception and cognition. Through an analysis of the main mental processes involved, the goal is to describe several relevant aspects of how listeners understand music at the perceptual level and constitute musical meanings in a subjective manner. This constitution results in a listener’s ability to become immediately aware of their auditory experience as having a specific meaning – that of being, first of all, a musical experience. Focusing on everyday experience and exposure to music, expectation and anticipation are presented as fundamental principles that contribute to the knowledge of the auditory environment and the meaning which acoustic events acquire for a subject. An in-depth analysis of their specific features will show the different influence expectation and anticipation have on a listener’s basic perceptual comprehension of music and in the constitution of musical meanings that are subjectively characterized. Within the framework of a theoretical investigation into human processes of musical knowledge acquisition, the additional objective is to create a dialogue between empirical research results in the field of music cognition and phenomenological descriptions of the structures of human consciousness. In particular, through clarification of the specific terminology that characterizes these two fields of research, the intent is to go beyond the historical gap which has existed between them. This combination of perspectives may increase our understanding of the way human beings know the world and learn how to react to the events which they encounter. (shrink)