Word usage and behavior show that most people think of music as a distinct category of valuable experience, yet music lovers are known to have widely different ideas of what music offers. Some love its power to express or arouse emotions; some love the immediate sensuous-kinetic pleasure of tone and beat; some find a compelling sense of individual or communal identity in it; some are caught by the puzzle-solving interest of its compositional designs. Most will agree, nonetheless, that music is (...) wonderful in a musical way—an expresser of emotions not interchangeable with other expressive means, a source of pleasure not interchangeable with other sources, and so on—which seems to indicate that an essential musicality.. (shrink)

Recent publications on Alfred Schutz suggest the importance of his musical thought for understanding his general viewpoint on intersubjectivity. Developing this proposition further, my article focuses on one aspect of Schutz’s writings on music: his attempts to amalgamate the aesthetic oppositions of the Dionysian/Apollonian by Friedrich Nietzsche and inner duration/spatialized time by Henri Bergson. Despite the seeming distortion of the initial meaning of the Dionysian impulse, I suggest that Schutz’s employment remains faithful to the aesthetic and cognitive theory of early (...) Nietzsche. To substantiate this, I draw a link between Nietzsche’s early theory of aesthetic cognition and the neurophysiology of the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, the way Schutz applied the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition to the problem of musical communication made his musical thought prefigure some neuro-scientifically inspired discussions of the present-day, like the one on joint attention. Schutz tackled the key paradox: why the experience of music can be shared but not directly communicated. (shrink)