Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives. Eds by David Clarke & Eric Clarke (review)

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[Psychology of Music 41/4 (July 2013), 519-522]

David Clarke & Eric Clarke (eds.), Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011. xxiv + 384 pp. ISBN 9780-1-99553792.

Phenomenological, distributed, extended, embodied, proprioceptive, cross-modal, intersubjective, immanent, transcendental: this is the vocabulary of the Newest Musicology, which has turned to research in other disciplines in order to tease apart the fundamental ground for virtually all of our engagements with music: consciousness. The focus of Music and Consciousness is what consciousness is and does, and its twenty chapters consider many of the ways in which music, musical experience, and musicking are variously presented to consciousness, present in consciousness, and controlled by consciousness. The authors have paused long enough to contribute interesting and sometimes challenging chapters on such issues as Chopin, technology, psychoanalysis, free improvisation, meditation, Buddhism, North Indian classical music, empirical modelling in computing, musical gesture, drug taking, trance, political consciousness,

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and Monteverdi. Some of the chapters synthesise a large body of the latest research and seek to write in textbook mode. Other chapters seek to make a critical intervention into a particular local topic. In the latter camp a few stand-out chapters deserve particular note, and will remain valuable for some time: those by David Clarke, Michael Gallope, Ian Biddle, Bennett Hogg, Bethany Lowe, and Richard Elliott. There is a pragmatism and even an optimism to nearly all of the chapters. This is manifest in what might be described as a form of Pascal’s Wager in response to the Hard Problem of Consciousness: we are better off believing in consciousness and all the benefits that it might afford in musical experience than not believing in it. If this is the return of meaningful discourse about musical practice and of a certain kind of folk psychology, then this will be a good thing. At times the intensity of the rhetoric, particularly in the chapters discussing Western music, suggests that the subject of music and consciousness may yet come to eclipse all other subjects, to become the Ur-subject of musical study, and that earlier work simply got it wrong or was asking unhelpful questions. This is not to say that the subject of consciousness is the Emperor’s New Musicological Clothes, but rather that the obvious gains to be had from writing about music with respect to its relation to consciousness can sometimes slip into an unnecessarily territorial anthropomorphism. The absence of chapter groupings in the volume suggests that each chapter is too wide-ranging to be reduced to a single heading. The editors say as much in their Preface, noting potential groupings in terms of the relationship between listening and consciousness, the location of consciousness, the temporality of consciousness, and the different levels and modes of consciousness. There is a natural diversity to the volume, both as a whole and within each individual chapter, with lots of different assumptions about consciousness in play across the volume. Additional groupings are equally

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possible: ecology (chapters 11, 18, 19), control (chapters 4 & 5), description (chapters 5 & 6), outside Western canons (chapters 6, 7, 8, 15, 16, 19), escape from the quotidian (chapters 6, 15, 16, 17), language (chapters 9 & 10), the body (chapters 12, 13, 14). Perhaps the most interesting grouping of the chapters might be in terms of whether and how consciousness is configured, not just “as something we do, rather than have” (p. xxi) (one of the common assumptions of all chapters), but as a task. This is the idea that consciousness is something that emerges at certain points, rather than trickling along constantly, that there are instants or moments of consciousness rather than pre-given narrative totalities; after Daniel Dennett, the emphasis is on ‘multiple drafts’. This configuration of consciousness has a wider pedigree. As DeNora says, “There is a venerable tradition within social philosophy and sociological theory that understands consciousness as a pragmatic achievement. Consciousness is assembled.” (p. 309) One useful advantage of this configuration is that it affords the possibility of failure and faulty ‘performance’ in conscious musical action and allows consciousness to be properly grounded in the mechanics of human neuro-biology. It also suggests something quite interesting. What if the cases, ideas, issues, and discourses broached in the chapters by Jörg Fachner and Benny Shanon (which push this configuration the hardest simply because their subject matter is the complication of consciousness by chemical distraction) were not exceptions, marginal cases, or extreme examples, but the norm? What if ‘non-drugged’ musical experiences were in fact just a subset of ‘drugged’ experiences, and there were a continuum between the two rather than a dividing line? In a strict sense there is no pure, drug-free experience, no purely musical experience that does not involve chemical expenditure, firing of neural synapses, entropy, and the aging of the system: to have no chemicals ‘performing’ in the body is to be dead. Or, put more anecdotally: Mosche Feldenkrais to a student: “What’s the difference between

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consciousness and awareness?” Student reply: “A cup of coffee.” From this perspective, there can be seen to be numerous useful deep connections between the more empirical chapters in Music and Consciousness and the more critical, philosophical chapters – indeed, many chapters could be pigeon-holed as both. The idea that consciousness is done rather than owned is a manifestation of the performative turn, and comes on the back of the trouncing of analytic philosophy as the logical backbone of musicology, which, so the argument goes, falls down in its concern with only internal states of the brain (p. 45, n. 7). It certainly makes for a good starting point for much of the work exhibited in Music and Consciousness, albeit an anthropomorphic one that several chapters (and not just those considering nonWestern or non-Classical musics) go on to problematise in terms of the function of personal agency in (and as a result of) conscious action. There is a good deal of valuable material to be gleaned, both concerning what it is like to be a listener, with various references batted back to Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 essay, and concerning musical experience in general – philosophical, psychological, and cultural perspectives on music and consciousness, as the subtitle proposes. There is hardly anything on performing: a little in the chapters by Eugene Montague, Hogg, Meurig Beynon, Lawrence Zbikowski, Rolf Inge Godøy, and Shanon, a few passing comments in other chapters. One might counter that there is plenty on listening to performance, plenty on the performativity of listening, plenty on cultures of performance, plenty on proprioception, and plenty on the ‘performance’ of mirror neurons; but this is still only part the story. It is difficult to know what to make of this absence, beyond the acknowledgement that it is difficult methodologically and aesthetically to do fMRI scans in, say, the Wigmore Hall or a Buddhist temple. The proper study of performing can be of some value, surely, even if it is only used to shine an indirect light onto the role of consciousness in the act of

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listening and onto consciousness as a cultural phenomenon, even if the consciousness involved in performing is assumed to be merely a means of creating something that then gets its proper value from being presented to the listening consciousness. There is a certain irony in the general absence of performing from Music and Consciousness, given the necessarily central role in the volume of phenomenology, a method that treats its object as nothing if not constituted by an act of the transcendental ego that can be described both in a primary sense and vicariously as ‘performing’. For nearly all of the authors, phenomenology is the new analysis, and it provides many useful routes around the topic. Most of these, particularly in the first half of the volume, emerge on the back of broader reconsiderations of Husserl that have engaged with advances in cognitive science. While it might be true that “Phenomenology begins when, not content to ‘live’ or ‘relive’, we interrupt lived experience in order to signify it.” (Ricoeur 1981, p. 116, quoted p. 237), as Biddle, Gallope, and Tia DeNora are quick to point out, phenomenology as a method of enquiry has been not without its self-imposed problems and inherent limits. Thus this volume begins the process of using critique to invent effective phenomenological methods for investigating the relationship between music and consciousness. Montague, for example, notes that we need to move beyond conceptions of serial linear temporality, beyond the slices of time approach advocated in David Lewin’s classic (1986) essay in Music Perception, and beyond discussions of time in terms of duration. David Clarke and Tara Kini invoke Dennett’s concept of ‘hetero-phenomenology’. In general, there is a multiplicity, flexibility, and fluidity to the phenomenon of consciousness that emerges from within Music and Consciousness. It is far from the monolithic and centralised black box that it might once have seemed to be. To wit: it “runs off” and “slips away” (p. 34); it can be “modulated by focal attention” (p. 163);

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narratives about it “accompany, interpret, and sometimes intrude upon the flow of [...] listening” (p. 202); brain functions can be emphasised, amplified, and weakened (p. 264); “time judgements can distort, recalibrate, reverse, or have a range of resolutions depending on the stimulus and on the state of the viewer” (p. 270); and so on. It is less clear whether there is such a ‘thing’ as a specifically musical consciousness, this being a level or mode of consciousness (or perhaps a specific faculty of mind) that is devoted to processing and making sense of music, and where the term ‘musical consciousness’ means both the ‘consciousness of music’ and the ‘music of consciousness’. The first sense is obviously central to the volume, particularly the more empirical chapters, but several chapters also discuss and/or implicate the second sense. To give a few examples, the authors write of “the function of embodied cognition – of which music is a prime example – in the constitution of consciousness” (p. xxii); of music’s “special claim in debates about consciousness” (p. 1); of the Buddha’s choice of “musical practice as analogy for the development of consciousness” (p. 111); of sound being a “metaphor and actual vehicle” for consciousness (p. 151); of “the appropriateness of a musical analogy for consciousness” (p. 209); and so on. The editors summarise the details succinctly, writing of music’s grounds for its claim to a strong relationship to consciousness – based on the way that it combines social, conceptual technical, emotional, perceptual, and motor attributes; the way that it is distributed in/around societies; the high value that is placed upon it in at least some (perhaps many) cultures; the fact that it seems not to be the official medium of communication in any culture – and therefore perhaps escapes formalised social controls – and therefore perhaps escapes formalised social

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controls, arguably remaining closer to a less obviously ideologically regulated imprint / reflection of “what it is like to be a human.” (pp. xix-xx) More work is needed on this quite important second sense of ‘musical consciousness’ (the music of consciousness), which has been available since its classic articulation in Husserl’s work on time consciousness, for which the paradigm was famously musical melody. Quite a lot is riding on this, and much has already been invested in this volume in the idea that both senses of the term are always in play, on the basis that “What music is capable of providing, rather than communication, is communion – an intimately shared experience between listener and listener and between listener and performer.” (p. 245) There is not much discussion of the future of musical consciousness: such topics as the role of virtuality, the impact of prosthetics, and whether musical thought can survive without a body (the latter having been defined hitherto by its terrestrial existence). Elliott writes of political futures. DeNora writes of the way in which “Music offers us an ally for new or emerging values or action plans.” (p. 323) Both hark back to Jacques Attali a generation ago. Gallope and Biddle engage with the general conditions for consciousness in relation to technicity and humanity and question the anthropological function of consciousness. Other chapters seem to assume that the current neuro-biological embodiments of consciousness and its cultural representations will remain as they are forever. In conclusion, Music and Consciousness is a worthy and well constructed volume to add to the growing library of research into consciousness studies, and it deserves repeated reading. It presents work at the early stages of development of a subject area, so understandably there is a certain amount of theorising ab nihilo. When all is said and

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done, despite the sometimes legalistic desire for truth and objectivity, there remains plenty of space for a much needed sequel volume that will open up additional paths of enquiry and follow up threads understandably left hanging or cut short here. Consciousness still presents something of a mystery, and it remains not fully amenable to measurement and control; Heisenberg is its natural patron saint. Yet it also remains an inescapable part of life and musical practice, as this volume amply documents. With its massive and unavoidable pull over homo sapiens, we should probably ask whether consciousness even needs to exist for us to believe in it.

References Lewin, D. (1986). Music theory, phenomenology, and modes of perception. Music Perception, 3(4), 327-392. Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences: Essays on language, action and interpretation (John Thompson, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Anthony Gritten Royal Academy of Music, London, UK