Merleau-Ponty on Music: Habit, Passage, and Audience
without place for memory of the organ’s components, as the organist does not play music within objective space. 17 If all bodily gestures contain an amount of signification, what is signified in the expressive space of musical performance habits? Merleau-Ponty’s notion of expressive space here will complicate the earlier description of habit and the body schema. 18 As previously noted, motor functions of the body are expressions aimed at particular goals. In the following description of the “passage,” Merleau-Ponty explains that “The body is eminently an expressive space.” 19 As an extension of the body’s expressive space, the pipe organ is an instrument by which the body’s expressive performance goals “can be accomplished.” 20 Expression must always then be an expression to something as part of our body schema’s movement towards the world. More generally, expressive performances are also characterized by their audiences to a musician performs for , or what their expressive motor functions move towards in the world. What bodily gestures move towards in the world may be innumerable in nature, regarding individuals’ performance goals among differing audiences. As the way(s) in which we live and “carry ourselves” through embodied, expressive gestures, “habit is more than mere routine” assigned to memorization. 21 Across a variety of performance scenarios, habits’ expressive gestures would necessarily contain an immense variety of signification related to specific audiences and their reasons for attendance.
The audience complicates an earlier notion about where the passage from
17 Marc Duby, “‘A Unique Way of Being’: The Place of Music in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” in Performance Phenomenology: To The Thing Itself , ed. Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly- Renaudie, and Matthew Wagner (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 111-112; Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception , 147.
18 Merleau-Ponty, xxxii. 19 Merleau-Ponty, 147. 20 Kearney, “The Phenomenology of the Pipe Organ,” 29. 21 Kearney, 29.
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