Musical Subjectivities

For many people, music constitutes one of the most richly fulfilling and psychologically important domains of their subjective and intersubjective experience. Music has a powerful capacity to express, construct, project and represent human subjectivity, and in doing so, it affords powerful insights into other subjectivities - different in time or place, real or imagined. Music is found in every human culture, and in the great majority of those cultures it is closely associated with powerful experiences of heightened or transformed subjectivity and intersubjectivity: music is frequently the focus of, or channel for, religious experiences, communal dancing, outpourings of public grief and festival/celebration, 'deep listening' (to use the ethnomusicologist Judith Becker's term), and trance. Equally, subjectivity - the 'first-person' character of human experience - is a central topic in philosophical writing on the aesthetics of music from the late eighteenth century onwards, and more recently in the work of a number of musicologists. This constitutes a rich and diverse body of writing, focusing largely on music in the Western Art Music tradition, and framed in terms of semiotics, hermeneutics, gender, and critical theory. Overwhelmingly, however, the literature has adopted a listening perspective, paying much less attention to issues of subjectivity from the perspectives of performance, improvisation and composition, and leaving unexamined a multitude of questions about the possible psychological mechanisms and processes by which music and human subjectivity engage.

The aim of this research is to complete a book, to be entitled 'Musical Subjectivities', that will bring together musicological and philosophical perspectives on musical subjectivity with psychological and neuroscientific theories and findings, so as to present a synthesis that tackles a wide range of music from both cultural and broadly scientific perspectives. As with much of my previous work, an important aim is to argue for the conceptual gains - and intellectual energy - that an interdisciplinary approach, crossing the sciences and the humanities, can generate. The book will build upon and develop the ecological approach, deriving from the work of the psychologist James Gibson, that informed my previous book 'Ways of Listening' (OUP, 2005), extending it into more culturally embedded and historically specific domains, and tackling what have been regarded as unassailably private experiences. The book arises out of a lecture series delivered at the British Library between November 2008 and March 2009, and will incorporate an explicitly psychological perspective, situating subjectivity in relation to a number of neighbouring concepts - consciousness, identity, embodiment and agency. It will enquire into the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that are involved in subjective engagement with music in a variety of circumstances - as listeners, performers, improvisers, composers - using ecological theory to develop a more explicit understanding of music's 'virtual subjectivities' - subjectivities that are perceived in, or attributed to, inanimate musical materials. Equally, the theory will be used to explore the relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the light of music's overwhelmingly social character. An important aspect of the book will be the broad range of musical repertories addressed - including areas of popular music for which studio production methods are important in the construction of musical subjectivities. In this, and other ways it will acknowledge the cultural and historical specificity of musical subjectivities, and conclude by considering the future of subjectivity: Are we living in, or approaching a 'post-subjective' age? What part does music play in this historical process? And how might research into subjectivity and intersubjectivity in music and more generally - develop in the future?