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Ineffabilities of making music: an exploratory study.

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ABSTRACT

Some facets of making music are explored by combining arguments of Raffman's cognitivist explanation of ineffability with Merleau-Ponty's view of embodied perception. Behnke's approach to a phenomenology of playing a musical instrument serves as a further source. Focusing on the skilled performer-listener, several types of ineffable knowledge of performing music are identified: gesture feeling ineffability--the performer's sensorimotor knowledge of the gestures necessary to produce instrumental sounds is not exhaustively communicable via language; gesture nuance ineffability--the performer is aware of nuances of instrumental gestures, e.g., micro-variations of intensity or duration of musical gestures, but cannot perceptually, and consequently conceptually, categorize those fine-grained variations; and ineffabilities of inter-subjectivity--the non-verbal interaction between performers that makes a performance a vibrant dialogue is similarly incommunicable. An attempt to identify some of the ineffable dimensions of this dialogue is proposed. Further ineffabilities relating the acoustical embedding of performing are identified.

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Probably one of the most puzzling properties of musical experience lies in the fact that parts of it, and often the deep, moving facets, are ineffable, i.e., we know what we are experiencing but we cannot put it into words adequately or exhaustively. This paper is an essay in a few of these limits of our conceptual understanding. I will approach musical ineffabilities from a Merleau-Pontian view of perception and from Diana Raffman's study on musical ineffabilities. Raffman has been, to my knowledge, the first philosopher to try to give a systematic account of musical ineffability that is based on experimental evidence. In her Language, Music, and Mind, (1) Raffman develops a cognitivist explanation of three types of ineffable musical knowledge. Raffman emphasizes that she does not pretend to give an exhaustive catalogue or explanation of musical ineffabilities. (2) Taking up this hint I will try, in this paper, to explore further ineffable musical knowledge, though I neither pretend that the types of ineffability I will offer exhaust the field. Further, while Raffman limits her explorations to auditory perception and memory, I will focus on the performer's experience and will shift the emphasis to the embodied knowledge of the skilled performer-listener, i.e., anybody who plays an instrument skillfully enough to know, at least broadly, how it feels to play an instrument, no matter whether to play herself or to listen "passively" to music made by others. (3) Although there are far less proficient performer-listeners than people who simply "listen to the music", the shift to the former group is justified by the simple fact that the kinaesthetic experiencing of making music is still a neglected area of phenomenology (less so of music cognition research), (4) though, at the same time, it is a rewarding object, which is particularly susceptible of Merleau-Ponty's theory of the phenomenal body and embedded perception. (Moreover, it is possible that the "stronger" case of skilled persons can serve as a heuristic device to explore what is going on in the "weaker" case of listeners without comparable skills). Further, it is of no importance, for my argument, to which tradition, culture, style etc. the music belongs that a performer-listener plays. So, while Raffman's study is limited to artworks belonging to the Western classical tonal music, the proposed explorations refer to all kinds of music that are played by human subjects. (5) Equally, what I am going to argue for applies as much to "reproducing" musical compositions as to improvising music. (6)

Finally a shift will be made from Raffman's classical cognitivist theory to a phenomenological view of embodied experience. I will not criticize Raffman's groundbreaking study for her theoretical framework. This would not be quite fair since, as Raffman repeatedly stresses, her outcomes are not essentially dependent on the specifics of the cognitivist picture of the mind that frame her explorations. And this is the reason why her pivotal ideas are compatible with the Merleau-Pontian framework. The classical cognitivist theory of the human mind has already become the target of critiques from various fields within and outside of philosophy. As those controversies do not affect my argument I suppress any discussion relating those debates.

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Before we enter our phenomenological exploration some remarks concerning the concept of ineffability are in order. I will use 'ineffability' in the sense Raffman understands this term. (7) Raffman stresses the fact that musical ineffability is 'a property of (some of) our knowledge: ineffable knowledge will be conscious knowledge that cannot be communicated (or communicated exhaustively) in words'. (8) Thus the expressions 'ineffable (knowledge)', 'ineffability' refer to situations in which the performer-listener has an often clear knowledge (perception, feeling) of something but cannot put this into words in a way that is detailed enough so that another person could pick out this something out of a range of similar stimuli. According to Raffman's study, the perceptual experience of music exhibits three major types of ineffable knowledge. (1) Structural ineffability, i.e., although listeners have representations of the musical structures of what they are listening to, can reflect this representational content and...

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