Musical Thought in the Zhuangzi: A Criticism of the Confucian Discourse on Ritual and Music

Musical thought in the Chinese tradition is frequently discussed in terms of the Confucian discourse on “ritual and music (lǐyuè 禮樂),” but how this Confucian discourse has been viewed by its critics has seldom been addressed. This paper aims to explore musical thought in the Zhuangzi as a serious critique of Confucian musical discourse. Zhuangzian thinkers doubt whether Confucian ritual music can avoid restricting music within a specific musical tradition, impeding the freedom to enjoy music, and distorting the nature of music. Unlike Confucian discourse, which emphasizes music’s external effects, Zhuangzian musical thought ultimately leads us to focus on the essential questions: how to cultivate one’s own sensibility toward musical harmony, how to open one’s mind to comprehend different musical sources, and how to eventually reach musical Dao.     

Jazz and Musical Works: Hypnotized by the Wrong Model

It is difficult to place jazz within a philosophy of music dominated by the concepts and practices of classical music. One key puzzle concerns the nature and role, if any, of musical works in jazz. I briefly describe the debate between those who deny that there are musical works in jazz (Andrew Kania) and those who affirm that there are such (Julian Dodd and others), and I distinguish between claiming that there are no musical works in the jazz tradition and the more provocative claim that they are not performed in jazz performances. I argue that each side of this debate is partially right and that the first step toward resolving the puzzle is to reject inappropriate concepts of a musical work. In particular, Kania's and Lydia Goehr's accounts, derived from classical music practice, are rejected as general accounts of musical works. I then contrast the norms governing work performance in classical music (the werktreue ideal) with the practices governing performances of works in jazz, which I call realization or staging. Finally, I propose a model of jazz appreciation that incorporates a role for jazz works and that fundamentally differs from the way that classical musical performances are appreciated.     

Natural Sounds and Musical Sounds: A Dual Distinction

In this article I consider the relationship between natural sounds and music. I evaluate two prominent accounts of this relationship. These accounts satisfy an important condition, the difference condition: musical sounds are different from natural sounds. However, they fail to meet an equally important condition, the interaction condition: musical sounds and natural sounds can interact in aesthetically important ways to create unified aesthetic objects. I then propose an alternative account of the relationship between natural sounds and music that meets both conditions. I argue that natural sounds are distinct from music in that they express a kind of alterity or “otherness,” which occurs in two ways. It occurs referentially, because the sources of natural sounds are natural objects rather than artifactual objects, such as instruments; it also occurs acoustically, because natural sounds tend to contain more microtones than macrotones. On my account, the distinction between music and natural sounds is both conventional and vague; it therefore allows music and natural sounds to come together.     

MUSIC OF THE SIKH DIASPORA: DEVOTIONAL SOUNDS,MUSICAL MEMORY AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

This paper explores the role of devotional music in the construction of Sikh identity in diasporic contexts. In particular, it examines a heterodox Sikh community in the UK and an orthodox Sikh community in Hong Kong from a comparative perspective, showing how music helps to clarify continuities and discontinuities in Sikhism worldwide. I provide ethnographic accounts of musical performances in different locales within gurdwara-s. Following a summary of current conventions in Sikh music performance and pedagogy, two ethnographic accounts are provided. The first is a musical ethnography of the Namdhari Gurdwara in Leicester where Hindustani classical music is performed alongside traditional ritual genres. The second site is a similar ethnographic study of the Khalsa Diwan Gurdwara in Hong Kong where the issues of diasporic identity and musical memory are foregrounded.     

音乐知觉期待的特征研究

音乐知觉期待是音乐存在的奉质特征,主要的表现是：知觉期待是构成音乐基本元素的心理基础,知觉期待是影响音乐记忆的薅要原因,音乐知觉的心理机制是由“传输激活”引起的期待,知觉期待影响音乐时间操作的心理过程。     

It's not what you play,it's how you play it: Timbre affects perception of emotion in music

Salient sensory experiences often have a strong emotional tone, but the neuropsychological relations between perceptual characteristics of sensory objects and the affective information they convey remain poorly defined. Here we addressed the relationship between sound identity and emotional information using music. In two experiments, we investigated whether perception of emotions is influenced by altering the musical instrument on which the music is played, independently of other musical features. In the first experiment, 40 novel melodies each representing one of four emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, or anger) were each recorded on four different instruments (an electronic synthesizer, a piano, a violin, and a trumpet), controlling for melody, tempo, and loudness between instruments. Healthy participants (23 young adults aged 18–30 years, 24 older adults aged 58–75 years) were asked to select which emotion they thought each musical stimulus represented in a four-alternative forced-choice task. Using a generalized linear mixed model we found a significant interaction between instrument and emotion judgement with a similar pattern in young and older adults (p < .0001 for each age group). The effect was not attributable to musical expertise. In the second experiment using the same melodies and experimental design, the interaction between timbre and perceived emotion was replicated (p < .05) in another group of young adults for novel synthetic timbres designed to incorporate timbral cues to particular emotions. Our findings show that timbre (instrument identity) independently affects the perception of emotions in music after controlling for other acoustic, cognitive, and performance factors.     

Dionysian Spirit as “The Social Self”: Alfred Schutz’s Insightful (Mis)use of Nietzsche

ABSTRACT

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.     

听觉线索与个体差异对音乐紧张感加工的影响

音乐无他, 张弛而已。音乐紧张感架起了客观音响与主观体验之间的桥梁, 是音乐情绪产生的前提和基础。音乐紧张感加工的影响因素主要来自客体与主体两方面。研究发现, 声学要素与调性结构是影响音乐紧张感诱发的声音线索, 而文化背景与音乐能力是影响听者对紧张感加工的个体因素。未来需要对时间结构与长时程调性结构诱发的紧张感及其机制进行深入探究, 这将有助于深化我们对音乐紧张感与情绪加工的认识。     

On the Petite Phrase of Proust and the Experience of Empathy: Exploring the Rhythmical Structure of Music

How does music (as Proust tells us) have the power to speak to us as if it were a living being, endowed with subjectivity? Do we empathize with music? Ordinarily we consider our perception of subjects as subjects, through empathy, to pertain to flesh-and-blood persons; this article asks how it is possible for us to empathize with the ordered movement of aural sensations in time. Drawing upon Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy together with Edmund Husserl’s work on Querintentionalität and Längsintentionalität in Husserliana X, I show, first of all, how the temporal structure of inner time-consciousness pertains to the ordered structure of musical expression; secondly, I investigate how the other as other is given with respect to retention and protention. My claim is that musical expression, insofar as it partakes of the potentiality of protention in particular, is creative and opens the possibility for that which is other-than-myself.     

Sequence Memory in Music Performance

Abstract— How do people remember and produce complex sequences like music or speech? Music provides an example of excellent sequence memory under fast performance conditions; novices as well as skilled musicians can perform memorized music rapidly, without making mistakes. In addition, musical pitches repeat often within a melodic sequence in different orders, yet people do not confuse the sequential ordering; temporal properties of musical pitches aid sequence memory. I describe a contextual model of sequence memory that is sensitive to the rate at which musical sequences are produced and to individual differences among performers. Age and musical experience differentiate adults' and children's memory for musical sequences during performance. Performers' memory for the sequential structure of one melody transfers or generalizes to other melodies in terms of the sequence of pitch events, their temporal properties, and their movements. Motion-analysis techniques provide further views of the time course of the cognitive processes that make sequence memory for music so accurate.     

“Singing for Our Lives”: Women's Music and Democratic Politics

Although democratic theorists often employ musical metaphors to describe their politics, musical practices are seldom analyzed as forms of political communication. In this article, I explore how the music of social movements, what is called “movement music,” supplements deliberative democrats' concept of public discourse as rational argument. Invoking energies, motions, and voices beyond established identities and institutions anticipates a different, more musical democracy. I argue that the “women's music” of Holly Near, founder of Redwood Records and Redwood Cultural Work, exemplifies this transformative power of musical sound.     

Cantus Planus in the Reformation

Abstract

This essay explores the reform of cantus planus (the medieval practice of plainchant) which lies at the core of the liturgical and musical Reformation though has not yet received due attention. The Renaissance humanists’ critique of cantus planus is based on their conception of ancient ecclesiastical chant built upon the union of music and speech, viz., the ‘modulated recitation‘. The syllabic declamation and the quantitative metres of ancient Greek music were of essential importance to the humanists’ reforming programme of cantus planus. This centred on the matter of the intelligibility of the text in liturgical music. The essay illustrates the humanist characteristic of the Reformation chants, examining ways in which the classical paradigm of music was reconfigured in the new chant compositions.     

GURBANI KIRTAN RENAISSANCE: REVIVING MUSICAL MEMORY,REFORMING SIKH IDENTITY

This article examines the modes of revival within the contemporary renaissance of traditional Gurbani Kirtan (Sikh devotional music) in an effort to differentiate historically operative practices from modern products being sold as tradition. Modern reformist tendencies have attempted to institutionalize a normative Sikh musical identity into one homogeneous ‘Gurmat Sangeet’ genre through codifying Sikh raga forms and promoting a particular Sikh musical orthopraxy and history. The process of institutionalization privileges written sources as authoritative, erasing the memory of operative practices passed down orally since the time of the Sikh Gurus through the Gurbani Kirtan parampara (tradition). In questioning how Sikh musical knowledge has been propagated and authenticated since modernity, I propose a reassessment of what values and musical modes are indelible to the fabric of Gurbani Kirtan, what aspects are modern derivatives, and what aspects are negotiable. I believe such an approach will not limit Sikh musical expression to a past identity subsumed by orthodox rigidity. Instead it will move toward a phenomenological epistemology that recognizes how orality and embodied experience are intrinsic to the Gurbani Kirtan parampara that remembers, practices, and teaches a particular methodology to embody the Bani as Guru for newly creative Sikh subjectivities.     

In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton

Abstract

Erasmus censures the musical practice of the medieval Church from ethical and rhetorical perspectives on music, and highlights decorum in delivery at the liturgical performance. His criticism of instrumental music echoes the patristic views of music, which are essentially logocentric and opposed to the use of musical instruments within the Church. The Erasmian ideal of church musicians lies in the classical model of the sacred-musical orator, with great emphasis on musicians’ moral status and intellectual ability. In relation to music (especially the Psalms) in the context of Christian worship, Erasmus regards music as a ‘spiritual sacrifice’ in which leading godly lives is combined with singing hymns and praises.     

Concatenationism and Anti‐architectonicism in Musical Understanding

This article discusses Jerrold Levinson's theory of concatenationism, which emphasizes the moment‐by‐moment character of musical listeners’ basic musical understanding, and the related project of anti‐architectonicism, which denies the influence of large‐scale music‐structural information on basic musical understanding. A reconstruction of Levinson's position reveals him to embrace a qualified architectonicism himself and shows that his remaining anti‐architectonicism is afflicted with several problems. While the conceptual distinction Levinson draws between a piece of music and its structure as well as his three “intuitions for concatenationism” all point toward important features of musical understanding, it is argued that none of them supports the anti‐architectonicist thesis in the intended manner. Furthermore, the way Levinson relates both musical understanding and musical value to a notion of aural cogency renders it difficult to see how one could understand music that one does not value or value music that one cannot understand. It is argued that the anti‐architectonicist focus of Levinson's project, together with the ensuing argumentative problems, follows from methodological commitments that might be overcome within disciplinary frameworks beyond philosophy. Suggestions are given for developing a positive concatenationism both in musicology and in philosophical aesthetics.     

What Can Experiments Reveal About the Origins of Music?

ABSTRACT— The origins of music have intrigued scholars for thousands of years. In this article I discuss the role of experiments in discussions of these issues. I argue that potentially useful kinds of evidence are those that address the innateness and the specificity of different components of musical behavior. At present there is some evidence for innate influences on music, but little evidence for capacities that are clearly specific to music. Although future experiments could potentially alter this picture, there is currently little unambiguous support for the notion that music is an adaptation.     

Fictionalism about musical works

The debate concerning the ontological status of musical works is perhaps the most animated debate in contemporary analytic philosophy of music. In my view, progress requires a piecemeal approach. So in this article I hone in on one particular musical work concept – that of the classical Western art musical work; that is, the work concept that regulates classical art-musical practice. I defend a fictionalist analysis – a strategy recently suggested by Andrew Kania as potentially fruitful – and I develop a version of such an analysis in line with a broad commitment to philosophical naturalism.     

Is a kantian Musical Formalism Possible?

In this article, I consider whether a suitably stripped‐down version of Kant's aesthetic theory could nevertheless provide philosophical foundations for musical formalism. I begin by distinguishing between formalism as a view about the nature of music and formalism as an approach to music criticism, arguing that Kant's aesthetics only rules out the former. Then, using an example from the work of musicologist and composer Edward T. Cone, I isolate the characteristics of formalist music criticism. With this characterization in mind, I conclude by showing that even if Kant's aesthetic theory is reduced to its most fundamental claims, the logic of formalist music criticism precludes its practice within even a kantian perspective.