Music and Philosophy Study Group Events in Vancouver
Amy Cimini
Hi everyone,
I hope you're all well. I write, this afternoon,
about our upcoming events in Vancouver.
On Thursday
evening, the MPSG will present a 2 hour
panel titled “Susanne Langer Reconsidered,” which will convene from 8-10pm in
Pavillion Ballroom A. Please find speakers, abstracts and a session summary
below.
On Friday evening, the MPSG will convene with
the SMT special interest group for a roundtable discussion of Peter Szendy’s Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies
(Fordham 2016). The discussion will focus on Chapters 1, 2, 6, 16,
and 17. (The chapters are not lengthy!) Write to bjpar...@usf.edu if you would like a copy of the
readings.
We hope to see you all in Vancouver!
Music and
Philosophy Study Group: Paper Session (2 hours)
Session Title: “Susanne Langer Reconsidered”
Participants:
Michael Gallope (University of Minnesota), Chair
Anne Pollok (University of South Carolina), Panelist
Bryan Parkhurst (University of South Florida), Panelist
Eldritch Priest (New York University), Panelist
Holly Watkins (Eastman School of Music), Respondent
Session Abstract:
Philosopher Susanne Langer’s work exerted a significant influence on the arts and aesthetic debates of mid-century. Figures as diverse as composer Elliott Carter, performance artist Allan Kaprow, music theorist Leonard Meyer, and more recently literary and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai have found significant resources in Langer’s writings. Notably, the affective impact of musical experience stands as a central theme in her thinking. In Philosophy in a New Key (1941) and Feeling and Form (1953), Langer argued that music was materially linked to feeling and expression at the same time that it required a minimal sense of structure that loosely resembled the workings of logic. In her view, music’s unique amalgam of the material and the ideal also gave it distinct affordances. It could resemble the patterned temporal flows of life while also conveying imprecise, ambivalent, and implicit content; for her, music was “peculiarly adapted to the explication of ‘unspeakable’ things.” The AMS Music and Philosophy Study Group has convened a session of three papers that revisit Langer’s writings on music in light of twenty-first century scholarly concerns. The papers cross the fields of musicology, music theory, philosophy, critical theory, and animal studies. Holly Watkins will serve as a respondent.
Anne Pollok (University of South Carolina) “To feel is not to say: Immediacy at the center of Langer’s theory of music as ‘living form’”
Do we know more about our feelings after going through a thorough music education? As a Langerian I say: no. In spite of the underlying cognitivism in her aesthetics, Langer never claims that exposure to music makes us more knowledgeable about our emotional life. What she advocates, rather, is that music education offers the cognitive benefit of an intuitive grasp of the organic form of feeling. This intuitive grasp, as it were, is not readily translatable into concepts (hence our intellectual disappointment), but stays firmly within the limits of genuinely aesthetic experience. This is due to an implicit, but fundamental notion of Langer’s aesthetics: immediacy, stressing both the unity of form and content, as well as of experience and meaning in a work of art.
In this paper, I aim to account for this notion of immediacy that underlies the presentational function in aesthetic experience, and to explain why it is best achieved through music. To this end, I will reconstruct Langer’s account on how a musical piece is functionally related to the “form” of a feeling, and how it can ever be rendered as “alive.” With a return to Langer’s roots in Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy, I will further show how experience understood as “contemplation” allows to see aesthetically presented emotions as “transparent” both in their intuitive force as well as their formal constituents. We may not be able to conceptually express what we feel, but we can rationally account for the formal presuppositions of an emotion conveyed.
Bryan Parkhurst (University of South Florida) “Right and Left Formalism”
The basic contention of Susanne Langer’s theory of musical symbolism is that there is a “connotative relationship between music and subjective experience, a certain similarity of logical form.” “Logical form” should here be understood not in the sense of argumentative or syllogistic form, but instead in one of the primary senses of the Greek “logos,” i.e. “ratio,” “proportion,” or “organizing principle.” For Langer, that is to say, the immanent patterns of music and of our emotional lives are homologous (homo + logos): there is a structure-preserving mapping from one to the other. Whereas Langer sees in music’s formal properties an affinity with the constitution of our affective selves, such Marxian theorists as Adorno, Bloch, Maróthy, and Knepler see music’s constitutive patterns as having a social correspondent or homologue. Adorno, for instance, apprehends in the structure of organically unified music the same reciprocal accommodation and reconciliation of part to part and part to whole that must characterize the relations of individual subjects to one another and to the social totality within a non-alienated society. We are thus confronted by a distinction between what we could call “right formalism” and “left formalism”: views which agree that abstract structure is the fundamental datum for musical aesthetics, but which have starkly divergent positions on the ultimate significance or referent of this structure. In this paper, I will be interested in how Langer’s carefully worked-out account of music-emotion homology can help to illuminate the sometimes less explicit homology claims of the left formalists.
Eldritch Priest (Music, New York University), “Do Animals Get Earworms?”
Late in her career Susanne Langer developed an incredibly nuanced and highly original philosophy of mind in which human and animal mentality part ways not according to a capacity for abstraction, but to what is done with this capacity. For Langer, “All sensitivity bears the stamp of mentality” insofar as the latter is a phase of vital activity in its mode of being felt abstractly, which is to say, being felt as thought. Thus, where animals use their ability to feel vital activity abstractly as a pragmatic value, humans use it to feel a symbolic sense (i.e., meaning). But Langer’s focus on human mentality caused her to overlook some of the more radical insights she made into the nature of abstraction and animal thought. A particular case in point is her near heretical hypothesis that vocal acts “were probably not purposive in their origin, but purely autistic, spontaneous acts of self-enlargement.” This implies that before they are used to extend an organism’s exterior milieu—to communicate—vocal sounds are made to swell its intensive world. In other words, vocalization is an affective abstraction. The “peculiar emotive character” of audition—a property that musical techniques arguably take to its highest degree of expression—is in this respect a felt abstraction that suggests an animal's autogenic sounds are immediately doubled with value and sense. In this paper I assume Langer’s heresy and draw from Brian Massumi’s recent work on animal play a line of speculation that asks: If animals are able to feel vital activities abstractly can they get earworms? If so, can the abstractions that distinguish a “musical” from a “linguistic” expression, or value from symbol, be understood to mark not the human stock’s departure from its animality but rather its return?
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Assistant Professor of Music
University of California San Diego
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