Merleau-Ponty on Music: Habit, Passage, and Audience
Rather, the organist's example is taken to be representative of his general theory of embodied habit without an elaboration on performance adjustments occurring as habits themselves. The concern here regards the lack of discussion between varying performance scenarios—which contain distinct audiences in unique spaces—and the audience’s impact on a “passage” between score and sound. For a phenomenological account, the problem of an audience as an Other must be addressed, as the sound necessarily reaches them and expresses something towards them. Our own body, whether as performer or audience member, is not merely one expressive space among all others; instead, it serves as the origin of all others. Music invites other perceptive bodies into a shared space of reception, one in which music’s passage from score to aural realization “takes place” in the performer’s body and their instrument; again, sound is then perceived by the bodies of the audience. Our body, as a general means of having a world, necessarily involves having a world with other bodies in these performances. 24 The music is heard as much by the audience as it is by the performer, although it is received in subjectively distinct ways by each group and between individual audience members. Still, there is an intersubjective common ground between performers and audiences where music is perceived by their bodily capacities. 25 Music offers an embodied experience of shared meaning that binds its participants both audiences and performers together. 26 As a permanent field or dimension of existence, the social realm is something subjects cannot cease to be situated in relation to, necessarily a
24 Merleau-Ponty, 147. 25 Duby, “The Place of Music,” 120. 26 Kearney, “The Phenomenology of the Pipe Organ,” 32.
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