Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
play, including: sitting rather than standing, adjusting my chair and music stand to avoid eye contact with the adjudicator, using distinct warmups, and concluding with deep breathing before I play (in this order). After auditioning enough times, this generalized, conscious routine became an ingrained, embodied habit which responded to a particular audience (i.e., the adjudicator). Like the organist “settling” into a new organ space, I found it increasingly easy to “settle” into new audition rooms, even as I played different audition pieces with unique purposes each time. If habit expresses the body’s ability to dilate our being in its incorporation of new instruments, the incorporation of new performance scenarios also seems possible, 31 especially as those scenarios rely upon other pre-acquired musical habits. Even with innumerable performance scenarios, associations conducive to habit may be drawn between related “types” of performances that occur in similar settings—like a church or a concert hall. Familiarizing oneself with the expressive meaning an audience listens for (think of the difference between a sermon’s musical experience for worshippers and an audition’s purpose) enables habits to be built as a response to distinct performance scenarios. Performers’ acquired habits enable their music to express particular significations to particular audiences. As a result, it is possible to use Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the “passage” to address the problem of external audiences in varying performance scenarios. Although the passage is only described as residing in the performer’s body and their instrument, the sound it creates can reach other listening bodies in an audience. Here, Merleau-Ponty’s other philosophical conclusions enable one to
31 Merleau-Ponty, 145.
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