In a book on music and consciousness, the Danish bassoonist, Peter Bastian writes
The experience that the music plays itself is well-known to many musicians […] Do you know those Golden Moments when it suddenly takes off? You are standing there looking at the carrots [fingers] sprinting up and down the fingerboard. Dammit, I can’t play like that, but that is what’s happening. Who is playing, can you tell me that? (Bastian 1987, 160–1)
What is going in the mind of a musician who, in a moment of performance asks “who is playing?”. And returning to Frederik Øland’s concentrated studio practice, why wasn’t he interrupted by his fellow student’s loud intrusion? If we take these two questions to be more than just random occurrences or overly romantic bragging, they point in the direction of a more philosophical question, namely what kind of self is present when the musician is intensely absorbed in his music? Is it the case, as the founder of Flow theory, Csikszentmihalyi says, that “the violinist must be extremely aware of every movement of her fingers” (1990, 64)? Or is the philosopher Dreyfus right in writing that “the coper [musician for instance] does not need to be aware of himself even in some minimal way” (2007b, 374)? The tension between being “extremely aware” and not “aware of himself even in some minimal way” is a recurrent paradox among classical musicians who recount that intense musical absorption is experienced as being “both less conscious and a lot more conscious” or as being both like “a ragdoll unconsciously wobbling in sound” and “a spirit that can control physical matter around it” (Asbjørn Nørgaard, violist).
In this book, I want to answer the question, “who is playing?”. And I want to understand the nature of the above experience that musicians undergo and which scholars such as Csikszentmihalyi and Dreyfus theorize about. To do so, I develop “a phenomenology of musical absorption”.
I say “develop” because there to the best of my knowledge is no thorough phenomenological work on the experience of playing music on which I can rely.1 With no adequate academic sources to inform my investigation, I develop this phenomenology as a dialectic between, on the one hand, several series of interviews with the Danish String Quartet (DSQ) and, on the other hand, analyses of relevant ideas and theories, primarily from phenomenology and philosophy of mind and to a lesser extent from psychology of music, aesthetics, sleep science, and psychiatry. This particular combination of research fields effectively makes this contribution one of cognitive science. Yet it is first and foremost a work in phenomenology, understood as the philosophical tradition initiated by Husserl that investigates experience, its structure, and conditions of possibility. More specifically, it is inspired by contemporary phenomenologists such as Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi , who combine ideas advanced primarily by Husserl , Merleau-Ponty , and Sartre with current discussions in fields such as psychology, psychiatry, cognitive science, and neuroscience.
The first step in any phenomenological account is a thorough description. Phenomenology, unlike most sciences, takes pride in withholding judgment, looking for explanations and forming hypotheses, at least until it has provided a thorough description that grasps a given phenomenon in its experienced totality. Such withholding or intellectual modesty is in phenomenological methodology called an “Epoché ”,2 which in Greek means a “bracketing”. In line with this bracketing, I devote much attention to simply describing the kinds of experiences the DSQ undergo while practicing and performing. The first and most general interest of this work, is then summed up in the question: “what is the general phenomenology of musical absorption?”. Through my interviews, I generate a “topography of absorption” to answer this question and show that musical absorption spans a wide range of different experiences, from thinking about where to go for beers after the performance, to worrying whether one’s facial expression looks interesting to the audience, to enjoying the fact that the playing seems to be unfolding smoothly, and finally to an intense forms of absorption in which one experiences deep-seated transformations of consciousness.
Besides “phenomenology” this investigation concerns “musical absorption”. I use this as a cover term for almost any experience of playing an instrument undergone by an experienced musician, to refer to that person’s engagement with playing music . I reserve the term “intense” absorption, to distinguish it from those ordinary instances of absorption that do not involve a significantly changed sense of self. I am not particularly interested in the question of how much of an expert one has to be to experience musical absorption. On my definition, almost any level of playing would meet the broad criteria, but I do think that the more intense form is reserved for experts. Phenomenologically considered, those forms are certainly the more interesting, and that is why it makes sense to engage with musicians of the highest caliber, who live and breathe music day in and day out.
From the general description of different kinds of absorption in the topography, we obtain an adequate foundation upon which we can press on to the more specific question of the self in absorption. Even if more specific, this is a wide question of essential importance to phenomenology. I parse it into three overlapping themes to be developed throughout the book: (1) the absorbed minimal self , (2) the absorbed reflective self, and (3) the absorbed body.
- 1.The absorbed minimal self takes its point of departure in a fact about consciousness repeated by the classical phenomenologists, but highlighted by Zahavi as a “Minimal Self ” (Zahavi 1999, 2005, 2014), which states that no act of consciousness can exist without an embedded act of self-consciousness. Whenever you think about, perceive, remember, or imagine something, you are also always already aware that you are the one doing the thinking, perceiving, remembering, or imagining. Though, it is called a “self”, the minimal self is not to be understood as a thing, substance, or a kind of content of consciousness. Further, even if it is a process or structure of consciousness it has no independent reality apart from the flow of our mental stream. I particularly like Henry’s formulation of this phenomenological given: “Self-manifestation is the essence of manifestation” (Henry 1963, 173). Noting can manifest, unless it manifests to someone. No experience can exist, unless it is given to an experiencer. The aforementioned thinker Dreyfus , however, disputes this and claims that in the absorbed flow of various athletes, there is no awareness and no minimal self (Dreyfus 2007b). From Asbjørn Nørgaard’s initial description above of being a “ragdoll unconsciously wobbling in sound”, his claim seems justified. My investigation of the phenomenology of musical absorption maneuvers in the tension between Dreyfus and Zahavi and holds the promise of enlightening this debate further: From the perspective of intense absorption one can ask in earnest “who is playing?”, because such absorption is a self-transforming experience accompanied by either a strengthened sense of self or a seeming lack of sense of self. In other words, a musician can sensibly ask “who is playing?” because his ordinary sense of self is different from that in intense absorption. To answer the question of what the nature of the absorbed minimal self is, I draw on a Husserlian analysis of a normally unnoticed sphere of experience known as “passive synthesis ”, which, briefly put, concerns the way in which experience is not only something we do or initiate, but something that happens to us and to which we are subjected, in line with Bastian’s utterance that “the music plays itself”. Using Bastian’s formulation as an experiential musical counterpoint to Husserlian passivity becomes an alternative route around the question of reflection in absorption.
- 2.The absorbed reflective self. A centraly received notion of expertise found both in philosophy and psychology is that after thousands of hours of practice in a particular domain, one becomes so skilled that one no longer needs to think about or pay attention to the skill in question as one is exercising it. There is, however, disagreement as to whether or not it is advisable to reflect on one’s actions during performance. Scholars such as Dreyfus emphatically argue that reflection is detrimental to the unfolding of expertise , which he labels “absorbed coping ” (Dreyfus 2013). Opposing this position, we find scholars such as John Sutton , who claims that reflection and coping, or intelligence and reflexes form a harmonious coexistence in expertise and Barbara Montero , who claims that thinking is indispensable to the development of expertise. My interviews bring out that reflection is indeed not an enemy of coping, but also that trying to grasp expertise , at least in its musically absorbed instantiation, through the question of reflection overly reduces the phenomenon and fails to account for essential elements of absorption , such as the role of affectivity , emotion s, and the body .
- 3.The absorbed body. Since its inception, phenomenology has been concerned with “how the body shapes the mind” (Gallagher 2005), or with what and how we think is structured by how our body is structured by our bodily capacities (Zahavi 2003; Taipale 2014). In the phenomenological investigation of the body, the “body schema ” is especially important to understand and I bring it up recurrently throughout the book. For now it suffices to say that it, among other things, is a dimension of the body that allows us to carry out habitual actions successfully without paying attention to them and which allows us to use habituated objects—be it a walking stick or a pair of chopsticks—as natural extensions of our body. A recent trend in cognitive science, often building on the classical phenomenologists, is to conceive of cognition in terms of 4E s: Embodied, Extended, Embed...