Abstract How is it that, at moments of music listening, we might experience the sense of a living subject arising out of the movement of melody? Rather than seek the origin of this phenomenon in an imagined encounter with the person of a composer or performer, this article focuses on the temporal unfolding of melody, reading Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy together with Edmund Husserl’s...
Abstract Building from case studies on the Black gospel tradition, biblical chant in contemporary Judaism, and a variety of Islamic traditions, this chapter shows how musical sound’s combination of phenomenal intensity and transformational capacity makes it an ideal instrument for organizing interpersonal and interworldly experience. The first section engages with the practice of “tuning up,”...
Abstract This chapter introduces Edmund Husserl’s crucial notion of “intentionality” as it pertains to music. It develops a sense of the possibilities of phenomenological intentionality by focusing on applications in some significant early twentieth-century writings on music. The first section gives a broad overview of the notion, indicating how it might support novel theorizations of one’s...