PHENOMENOLOGY OF MUSIC

Study Day, 18 February 2011

Room ST274/5 Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, WC1B 5DN

Institute of musical research

Music, Phenomenology and Time Consciousness:

Reflections after Husserl

David Clarke

Professor of Music, Newcastle University

As the founding father of modern phenomenology Edmund Husserl remains an important reference point for the field; even the most trenchant critiques of his work do not cancel it out. Husserl has especial salience for music studies, since he treats music as paradigmatic for our understanding of temporality, in turn the essence of consciousness and hence of our lived experience of the world. Thus Husserl’s corpus of writings on time consciousness – published in translation as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917) – represents as significant a starting point as any for an inquiry into music and phenomenology. Key to Husserl’s account of temporality is the concept of retention: a form of immediate memory, which simultaneously explains and problematises how the present is apprehended subjectively (as opposed to modeled mathematically as a durationless point on a line). The concept is defined differentially, being distinguished from (among other concepts) recollection, a more enactive kind of remembering or recalling. Much is at stake in the opposition between these terms, since Husserl attributes aprimordiality to retention that he associates with an irreducible transcendental subjectivity. It is this privileging and its attendant ‘metaphysics of presence’ that Derrida was famously keen to deconstruct and insert in its place the linguistically founded notion of différance. What might the study of music have to contribute to such debates (and vice-versa)? For one thing, it might investigate the role of recollection in a way that is missing in Husserl’s account, and show how this relates to a signifying dimension of music that he left insufficiently acknowledged. However, rather than necessarily corroborating Derrida’s notion of the differential movement of the signifier as the ultra-transcendental principle, this line of reasoning might instead underscore the distinction between retention and recollection, and with it the need to acknowledge the significance of a phenomenological dimension in musical experience that remains distinct from, even though intimately bound up with, the semiological. This, then, would point to phenomenology as a necessary element in the study of musical meaning.