Alexander South
University of Glasgow
Playing With Merleau-Ponty:
Bodily Anticipation and Mutual Incorporation in Musical Interaction
In this paper I investigate ensemble music-making by a quartet of professionally trained classical musicians as an illuminating case of intersubjectivity in action, where the activities of individual players must be highly co-ordinated along a number of dimensions in order to successfully realize the musical score. I start from phenomenological description of rehearsals and performances of works written by British composer Matt Rogers, which contain a range of degrees and kinds of temporal synchronization presented in very pure form. This practical exploration of the various forms of synchronization is close to a Husserlian method of eidetic imaginative variation made actual, used here to study the anticipational structure which underlies the temporal co-ordination of corporeal intentionalities. My analysis of musical interaction is influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s description of linguistic interaction in which individual contributions are called forth by the situation, a case of collective being in which “we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity.” (Phenomenology of Perception). In the case of musical interaction the parallel can be extended through the application of Merleau-Ponty’s account of language as founded on bodily gestures, which sketch and form intentional objects only through the adjustment and overlap of the powers of the bodies of the participants involved, on their mutual incorporation (Fuchs & De Jaegher, 2009). I also draw on the notion of participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007) in order to support my claim that the emergent process of musical interaction has an autonomous existence which draws its moving and moved participants into what Merleau-Ponty refers to as “a space of expressiveness.”