Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
score to sound “resides.” Expressive meaning originating from this “passage” is inseparable from the sound which is created. 22 If the place of passage from score to actual sound resides in the interaction of a performer’s body with their instrument, the passage’s resultant sound then reaches beyond the performer to an active, listening audience. The passage which results in sound extends outside of a performer and their body to include the perceptive bodies of other listeners. The passage is only meaningfully initiated by the performer and originally resides in the interaction between performer and their instrument. The resulting sound must have a “place” beyond performer/instrument when an external audience is present. This interpretation of the “passage” necessarily goes beyond Merleau-Ponty’s text while building from his account. In playing alone, one also has oneself as an audience. Meaning emerges in the passage between the score’s signification and its audible expression, which, as an expression towards something, expresses to an audience even if it does not originally “reside” with them. From a Merleau-Ponty perspective, how might an external audience then be accounted for in the discussion of habit and the “passage?” Although Merleau-Ponty speaks to the spatial process of adjusting musical habits to a new organ’s stops, keys, or pedals, he does not discuss the process of reconfiguring habits in the presence of differing audiences. It does not suffice to say that Merleau-Ponty hastily used the organist as an example without ever considering the blatant issue of musical audiences. Elsewhere in the text, a similar external notion of the Other is elaborated upon, as one would expect in a phenomenological account. 23
22 Merleau-Ponty, 188. 23 For more, see: Merleau-Ponty, 364-379.
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