Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
component of shared musical experience. Music in the world is not merely present to the performer, meaning the “passage’s” resultant sound involves others who hear the music, even if their body is not the place where the passage from score to sound resides. 27 Performances for an external audience are not a unified category, even if the individual performer retains some consistent aims across their performances. High school bands, professional symphonies, solo auditions, chamber ensembles, street bands, and more all create music addressed to distinguished types of audiences who listen to these performances in unique spaces. Similarly, different musical systems make different cognitive demands within their respective sounds, received through different social and physical settings wherein that music comes into being. 28 The situation of playing the organ in a church service demands habitual adjustments and expectations which are not always alike to those of an organist’s concert recital program. The situation provides the organist playing with a choir, how much space there is between music, portions of the service focused on scripture, who is in the crowd and so on. Playing for a loved one, a famous music critic, or a congregation are not analogous to performance settings. How do the performers’ adjustments to their audience relate to Merleau-Ponty’s account of habit, then? Although he does not discuss the problem of an audience directly, the aforementioned, reworked version of the “passage” can address the problems that an external audience creates for Merleau-Ponty’s notion of habit. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty’s conclusion at the end of this section points the reader in a useful
27 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception , 379. 28 Duby, “The Place of Music,” 125.
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