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 3 Music and society – a preliminary theoretical outline A brief phenomenology of music Looking back at the centuries-old discussions about an understanding of music, Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden (1962) makes a curtly but fundamental shift in the theorizing approach towards music. Rather than engrossing the mind in long reflections about the aesthetic value of music, either in itself or in comparison with other forms of artistic expressions, Ingarden proposes to look, first and foremost, at the ontological structure of music, its mode of being, and the relations this being is founded in. Musical sounds, it can be argued in line with Ingarden’s approach, occur in two basic realms: (1) in the physical realms of the material world, where waves of oscillating pressure generate audible phenomena and where living organisms perceive these phenomena, produce and play with them by breathing, singing, whistling, speaking, moaning, screaming, by beating on membranes, blowing air through holes, plucking strings, and by potentially every movement and action they do; and (2) in the mental realms of the processes in the mind, where a constant stream of consciousness restructures the perceptions of the physical world and its sounds and orders, enriches and manipulates these perceptions with emotions, thoughts, memories and imaginations.1 This somewhat blunt dualism between world and mind and the places sounds occupy in it raises the question exactly where, and how, these sounds are then organized into a form recognized as music. For a sound by itself – whether 1 Of course, this division of (musical) matter and (musical) mind baldly invokes the materialist’s critical exclamation. Rather than trying to introduce any sort of Cartesian music-dualism, I use this division to emphasize the distinctiveness of sounds outside the mind and sounds inside the mind. Whether mental qualities are (ir)reducible to physical qualities (or not) is not at stake here. Chapter 3: Music and society 21 actualized as a physical phenomenon or as a mental occurrence in the streams of mind – does not make any music yet. A brief answer is that, in physical realms, sound occurrences are organized into a form recognized as music when people sing, clap, whistle, play instruments , perform concerts, record albums etc. In mental realms, the organization takes place within the processes and acts of consciousness in which, on the one hand, perceived sound occurrences (of singing, clapping, whistling, the play of an instrument, a concert, record etc., as well as “natural” sounds like, e.g. a bird’s “singing”) are recognized and labeled as music. On the other hand, sound occurrences may as well be thought of or imagined in acts of consciousness, which subsequently may then again lead to a creative act of material organization of sound occurrences (by e.g. singing the imagined sounds or by or playing them on an instrument). In other words, we can do music, we can perceive music, and we can imagine music. By stating that sounds become music when people play music or when people perceive or imagine sounds as music, this short answer risks, on the one hand, to fall into tautologies. On the other hand, it fails to explain the link between the physical and the mental realms. Ingarden (1962: 104) provides a more profound answer. By assigning music an “intentional existence” (my transl.) he argues that music simultaneously combines both realms while it also transcends them. Music cannot be identified solely with its material components (e.g. the individual sound event, the lives, times and acts of performers and listeners, the particular instrument, concert, record etc.), nor with its “mental concretisation” (ibid.: 103; my transl.) formed in the perceptions of its respective performers and listeners. Music is, in this way, more than the sum of its (material and mental) parts, for its respective parts are linked by yet another element: Intentionality. Intentionality, in turn, is not a mere mental act. It necessitates a phenomenon it can be directed at and enabled by, in this case – sounds. Following Edmund Husserl’s paths, Ingarden thus extends the critique of the representational theory of mind (in which mental acts are understood as mere representations of the physical world) to musical realms. Music is not a mere object of the physical world, in which we have sounds, musicians, composers, listeners, instruments, concerts, records etc. A sound by itself does not make any music yet, nor does a musician, an instrument, concert, record etc. Neither is music a mere adjusted consciousness of the physical world, in which we have...

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