Merleau-Ponty on Music: Habit, Passage, and Audience
direction. Habit has been acquired when the body “allows itself to be penetrated by new signification, when it has assimilated a new meaningful core.” 29 These “cores” must contain a set of bodily gestures which we can call a habit, such as those involving musical performance on a particular instrument. The habits of musical performance, as a unified set of gestures, involve a variety of embodied behaviors. These enable the experienced performer to continually express their music in consistent technical manners across inconsistent expressive scenarios, which can include performance settings. The previously noted spatial process of adjusting to a new organ’s stops, pedals, and keys could then resemble the process of adjusting to different types of performance situations or demands. Once a performer has experienced an archetypal performance scenario enough, a motor habit responding to its demands is acquired. The body, having the fundamental power to “lend a bit of renewable action.” 30 to otherwise momentary movements, again enables the acquisition of these habits. For example, musicians who pursue performance opportunities outside of voluntary settings often audition in order to participate in select ensembles. Although the process of auditioning is unfamiliar (and perhaps frightening) at first, even to a musician with previously well-developed habits on their instrument, musicians frequently participate in these audition activities. By consistently using one’s body in this repeated performance scenario, a new “core” of experiences related to this specific setting will accumulate, eventually acquired as a habit of auditioning .
In my own auditions, I acquired a habitual process which prepared me to
29 Merleau-Ponty, 148. 30 Merleau-Ponty, 148.
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