David L. Burrows& Eleanor Stubley

A Group C review…

David L. BurrowsBook: Sound, Speech, and Music

• KEY TERM: “SOUND” – the foundation for musical expression and thought

• KEY THOUGHT: “. . the distinctiveness of human beings as a species — in particular their capacity for free-wheeling and wide-ranging thought — is to a great extent an outgrowth of the distinctiveness of the way they use sound, itself distinctive in a number of ways among the senses."

HUMAN BODYis “center”

EVERYTHING ELSE is “periphery”

EVERYTHING ELSE is “periphery”

EVER

YTHI

NG EL

SE is

“per

ipher

y” EVERYTHING ELSE is “periphery”

Experiential fields of CENTER/PERIPHERY scheme

• FIELD 1 – Physical space; the material world in which the body resides

• FIELD 2 – Mental space; meta-sensory realm; opens “here & now” to “past/future”

• FIELD 3 – Spirit; sense of self; center is everywhere; mystical view

In other words….Field 1 – the view from here…

Field 2 – the view from anywhere you can imagine…

Field 3 – The view from everywhere…

SOUND• Sound makes human mental & spiritual life

possible

• Speech is the ideal vehicle for shaping mental life

But why sound and not sight?

Sight… vs… Sound

• Solid, distinct, objective, fixed, reliable

• Clear spatial location• Brings things from a

distance to ourselves• “Gives us facts”• Unambiguous• Separateness/duality

• Always changing, vague, unequivocal, mysterious

• All around us; like air• Not only reaches us, but

invades us; uninvited• “Gives us rumors”• Ambiguous• Connection/unity

Sound is more intimate• “Sight draws me out… sound finds

me here.”• “Seeing is like touching… hearing is

like being touched.”• Can be soothing OR unsettling, but

either way, it’s always invasive

Sound is more unifying• Sound contributes to our sense of

belonging in the world• Sight emphasizes “me/you,” “I/it,”

“here/there,” but sound breaks down these dualities of perception.

Sound is more human•Sound reaches us… “with some of the same surge and flux I know in myself. I am not alone in being under way, growing and fading, pausing, then starting up again, and I feel confirmed.”

“Sound sends the message that we are not alone”

“Music matters so much because of sound's immediacy… and inwardness: its capacity to touch the vital center of our being — who we are.”

VOICE• The threshold between self

& world, center & periphery• A “closed circuit” in which

“kinesthetic & auditory sensations confirm each other.”

Anybody HEAR themselves SPEAK lately?

Why do people enjoy humming?Why do people enjoy humming?

It provides "a sustaining sense of self-It provides "a sustaining sense of self-sufficiency and self-celebration.”sufficiency and self-celebration.”

““People who hum or whistle to themselves People who hum or whistle to themselves can achieve a temporary omniscience, since can achieve a temporary omniscience, since they are provisionally they are provisionally both self and otherboth self and other.”  .” 

Innocence LOSTInnocence LOSTThe The written wordwritten word “leaches the voice out of “leaches the voice out of

articulated thought.”articulated thought.”– It takes away It takes away spokenspoken words’ “sensuous words’ “sensuous

particularity,” and their attachment to the particularity,” and their attachment to the “personal world.”“personal world.”

Music scoresMusic scores, likewise, are selective and , likewise, are selective and partial, suppressing details offered by sound.partial, suppressing details offered by sound.

THE THE PROBLEMPROBLEM WITH WITH PHILOSOPHICAL DESCRIPTIONPHILOSOPHICAL DESCRIPTION

“Verbal accounts — the stuff of philosophy — endeavor to explore both music's acoustic and

experiential dimensions, yet encounter an immense gap when they encounter music's

dynamic, processual character. Music… is like "an ongoing experiment in pushing change as far

as it can coherently be taken": a fact that invariably frustrates the human need to fix and

locate things.”

Innocence FOUND!Innocence FOUND!The sound of music The sound of music (NOT the movie)(NOT the movie) offers offers

freedom from deterministic forces – the freedom from deterministic forces – the limits of books and scores (remember slide 6, limits of books and scores (remember slide 6, the contrast b/w sight and sound?)the contrast b/w sight and sound?)

QUOTE: “While we QUOTE: “While we talk talk our way out of our way out of innocence, we can innocence, we can singsing our way back in.” our way back in.”

Eleanor Stubley

• KEY TERM: “BODY” – music’s partner in the act of music-making

• KEY THOUGHT: “A true understanding of the significance of musical performance requires that we get inside the field where the action occurs, a field that is at once physical, mental, and spiritual.”

BODY• Source of movements which define a

musician’s self-awareness and sense of being

VOICE• Our way of “being in the sound.”

At the HEART of music…

• …is a sense of play which consists in a distinctive experience of self. Playing music is "an on-going tuning process in which the self is experienced as an identity in the making."

BODY and MUSIC inform each other in the act of music-making

• Performance is not just a physical feat where the body mechanically obeys the mind

• Performance isn’t just intellectual interpretation of the score.

• Players are “trying to get a sense of who they are in relationship to the music.”

Stubley emphasizes the importance of personal experience and argues for our BODIES as a central element in musical

experience…

…is there a term for this approach?

“PHENOMOLOGY”• From TWO Greek words:

– phainómenon, meaning "that which appears“

– lógos, meaning "study".

• Personal experience is what validates all truths - including those which purport to be “absolute” and “objective.”

•PHENOMOLOGY (grounded in personal experience) is the opposite of PHILOSOPHY which tries to argue “for everyone, everywhere, for all times.”

NOTE:

“PHENOMOLOGY”• But subjective doesn’t always mean “private.”

Phenomology studies reactions among all people in order to find commonalities.

• BUT no matter what, it is DETERMINED to “ground itself in firsthand musical experience.”

MARK JOHNSON:A phenomological philosopher

• Body isn’t just a container for the mind… rather, the body is in the mind

• QUOTE: "Our reality is shaped by the patterns of our bodily movement, the contours of our spatial and temporal orientation, and the forms of our interactions with objects. It is never merely a matter of abstract conceptualization…"

A stinging critique of the OBJECTIVIST approach

• “The objectivist ideal of a god's-eye view and an experience of reality that somehow avoids perspectival situatedness and partiality is not just a perverse piece of logic; it fails miserably to account for the richness and multivalence of meanings, and the importance of discovering or creating new ones. A knowledge without a knower would not be a human knowledge at all. Human knowledge is never a mirror image of some free-standing, 'external' reality, but something that is constantly being constructed and modified.”

So where does the BODY fit in?• The structure we find in abstract domains is only

meaningful because we experience structure in bodily movements and interactions with our environment.

• The body is no subjective contaminant of rationality, but the very thing that makes it possible… because of our imaginative ability to recognize and project into novel domains the basic structure of our bodily actions and experiences.

SENSE vs. REASON

• Such a dichotomy doesn’t exist for Stubley & Johnson because… “Sensory experience is not separable from rationality… Rationality is itself built from the image schemata derived from sensory experience.”

The importance of “PHENOMOLOGY”• Phenomology gives power to human experience

whereas objectivist approaches de-value personal experience.

• QUOTE: “Tactile, kinesthetic, gestural, and perhaps even gendered attributions assume a credibility denied them under objectivist accounts - where 'the notes' can mean nothing but themselves.”

THE END

“David L. Burrows& Eleanor Stubley”

A Group C review…

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