Some facets of making music are explored by combining arguments of Raffman's cognitivist explanation of ineffability with Merleau-Ponty's view of embodied perception. Behnke's approach to a phenomenology of playing a musical instrument serves as a further source. Focusing on the skilled performer-listener, several types of ineffable knowledge of performing music are identified: gesture feeling ineffability-the performer's sensorimotor knowledge of the gestures necessary to produce instrumental sounds is not exhaustively communicable via language; gesture nuance ineffability-the performer is aware of nuances of instrumental gestures, e.g., micro-variations of intensity or duration of musical gestures, but cannot perceptually, and consequently conceptually, categorize those fine-grained variations; and ineffabilities of intersubjectivity-the non-verbal interaction between performers that makes a performance a vibrant dialogue is similarly incommunicable. An attempt to identify some of the ineffable dimensions of this dialogue is proposed. Further ineffabilities relating the acoustical embedding of performing are identified.Probably one of the most puzzling properties of musical experience lies in the fact that parts of it, and often the deep, moving facets, are ineffable, i.e., we know what we are experiencing but we cannot put it into words adequately or exhaustively. This
Because imagination constitutes an indispensable tool of phenomenology, e.g., in understanding another author's description, in eidetic reduction, etc., the practicability of phenomenological method and its claim to objectivity ought to be reconsidered with regard to its dependence on imagination. Auditory imagery serves to illustrate problems involved in grasping and analyzing imaginative contents -loudness in this case. Similar to phonetic segmentation and classification, phenomenologists segment and classify mental acts and contents. Just as phoneticians rely on experts' evaluations of notations to reach valid results, phenomenologists may try to develop similar agreement procedures to escape the 'subjectivism' of their solitary first-person approach.Imagination constitutes an integral part of phenomenological method. Imagination is involved in understanding phenomenological descriptions of things not originally present to oneself, in distinguishing abstract parts from each other or from a whole, in generalizing abstraction, and in "eidetic intuition." However, acts of imagination are only indirectly observable. Thus they are apt to motivate suspicions about the objectivity of phenomenology. The practicability of (classical) phenomenological analysis and its claim to objectivity ("rigorous science," "apodicticity") ought to be reconsidered with regard to their dependence on imagination.In what follows I shall not try to scrutinize the whole of phenomenological method. I will confine myself to Husserlian phenomenology, i.e., to the dependence of Husserlian phenomenological method on imagination. The case of imaginary loudness will serve to illustrate one of the problems arising within this particular area; namely, the problem of auditory imagery, a problem which also concerns the practicability of the phenomenological analysis of this area and phenomenology in general. In the final section of the paper I will consider a possible remedy for "subjectivism," i.e., the threat of missing the validity or objectivity of phenomenology. This remedy could involve doing phenomenology cooperatively, taking as an example the agreement procedures in phonetics.
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