Merleau-Ponty on Music: Habit, Passage, and Audience
Merleau-Ponty on Music: Habit, Passage, and Audience Allen Hale Vassar College ____________________________________________________________________ Abstract For Merleau-Ponty, the body is our means of “having” a world; its motor functions are expressive attempts to move “toward” the world. In developing his account of the body schema, Merleau-Ponty’s description of embodied habit utilizes a musical example: a pipe organist performing on an unfamiliar organ, which their habits adjust to. The “passage” from musical notation to its audible sound “resides” in the performer’s body and habits’ interaction with the instrument. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of musical habit does not describe what occurs in habit when the passage’s sound inevitably reaches external audiences. If motor functions are an expressive attempt of the body to move towards the world, including audiences, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of habits must account for innumerable performance scenarios. This paper then builds from Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the body schema and music’s “passage” in order to investigate the phenomenological relationship between habit, external audiences, and musical performance 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception , trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), 147. A cross the Phenomenology of Perception , Maurice Merleau-Ponty develops an account of embodied perception, wherein the body is our means of “having” a world. 1
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