Enacting Musical Time The Bodily Experience of New Music

What is musical time? Where is it manifested? How does it enter into our experience, and how do we capture it in our analyses? A compelling approach among works on temporality, phenomenology, and the ecologies of the new sound worlds, Enacting Musical Time argues that musical time is itself the site of the interaction between musical sounds and a situated, embodied listener, created by the moving bodies of participants engaged in musical activities. Author Mariusz Kozak describes musical time as something that emerges when the listener enacts her implicit knowledge about "how music goes," from deliberate inactivity, to such simple actions as tapping her foot in time with the beat, to dancing in a way that engages her entire body.

Kozak explores this idea in the context of modernist and postmodernist musical styles, where composers create unfamiliar and idiosyncratic temporal experiences, blur the line between spectatorship and participation, and challenge conventional notions of form. Basing his discussion on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and on the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson, Kozak examines different aspects of musical structure through the lens of embodied cognition and what phenomenologists call "lived time." A bold new theory derived from an unprecedented fusion of research perspectives, Enacting Musical Time will engage scholars across a range of disciplines, from music theory, music cognition, cognitive science, continental philosophy, and social anthropology.

Mariusz Kozak is an Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University. His research focuses on the emergence of musical meaning in contemporary art music, the development and cognitive bases of musical experience, and the phenomenology of bodily interactions in musical behavior. In his work, he bridges experimental approaches from embodied cognition with phenomenology and music analysis, in particular using motion-capture technology to study the movements of performers and listeners. His articles have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum and Music Theory Online, among others.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Lines
Music and Time
Enacting Musical Time

1. MEANING
Musical Objects
Objective Time
Lived Time
Significance
Affordances

2. AFFORDANCES
Breathing
Becoming Music (Behave So Strangely)
Musical Affordances
Situation Semantics
Cultural Information
Situation Semantics and Musical Affordances
Temporal Affordances
Musical Affordances of Breath

3. BODY
Embodied Cognition
Temporal Bodies
Kinesthetic Knowledge
Kinesthetic Knowledge in Music Analysis

4. FLESH
The Body's "I Can"
From "I Can" to Time
The Flesh of Time
Temporal Objects and the Flesh of Music

5. AFFECTIVITY
Auto-Affection
Enacting Lived Time
Louis Andriessen's De Tijd
Eternity in Augustine's Confessions
Temporal and Affective Dynamics of Movement
Enacting Chronal Anxiety

6. VERTICALITY
Vertical Time
Eternal Return
Affect
Hosokawa's Vertical Time
Malleable Musical Form

Works Cited
Index