Phenomenology and the Arts: Five Themes Through Music
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Phenomenology, performance psychology, performing arts health, relational musicology, creativity, embodiment, identity, relatedness, reverberation, psychotherapy On Saturday, 2 November, 2019 the Society for Existential Analysis hosted an interdisciplinary seminar on phenomenology and the arts in the Department of Music of King’s College London. In collaboration with Daniel Leech- Wilkinson, Professor of Music at King’s College, we delved into the question of art and phenomenology through the vault of music. What does it mean to say that ‘all art aspires toward the condition of music’ (Pater, 1888)? Like our senses, all the arts are interconnected and music is the ‘trans- sensorial’ (Bruford, 2019) connection, the affective interplay between form and process and substratum of all meaning and communication. In the words of the philosopher Michel Serres (1985): Music, which comes from all the Muses, cannot be held to be only an art, it is the summation of all the arts. Without music, not one of them can achieve its goals, music watches over them all, it is the condition of their existence. Without it, poetry is at best pedestrian, architecture, a pile of stones, sculpture, inert matter, and prose, mere noise. Eloquence deprived of rhythm and the modulation of singing evocation collapses into gibberish and boredom…There is no single Muse devoted to music…What a fit of jealous rage there would be, between those who found themselves deprived and isolated from music…music resides in their midst, constitutes their milieu, intersection and comingAbstract
This article brings phenomenology in dialogue with the performing arts and shows how it can offer new ways of working with intractable problems that negatively affect the health of performers and the vitality of performance. It is based on a paper I presented at the Society for Existential Analysis Seminar on Phenomenology and the Arts held at King’s College London in collaboration with the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine and Professor Daniel Leech-Wilkinson in November 2019.
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Published
2020-01-01
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