We’re pleased to announce the next presenter for the Music History/Theory Workshop on November 22, 3:30pm, in the library seminar room, JRL 264. Mariusz Kozak, PhD candidate in Music History and Theory at the University of Chicago, will be presenting work from his dissertation.The pre-circulated chapter will be available  under the download tab. Please contact marycaldwell@uchicago.edu or aasheehy@uchicago.edu for the password, or find it in the announcement email.

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MOVING IN THE PRESENT:

HOW THE BODY SHAPES OUR EXPERIENCE OF MUSICAL TIME

Louis Andriessen’s De Tijd (1979-81) is essentially an extended meditation on the relationship between time and eternity. Written for a women’s choir and orchestra, the work presents a setting of a fragment from St. Augustine’s Confessions in which the author speculates about the differences between time and eternity, and laments mankind’s inability to “glimpse the splendor” of the latter. In my talk I explore how Andriessen creates a sonic environment in which listeners are invited to experience these two phenomena for themselves. In the process, I lay out a theory that pulls together ideas from phenomenology, ecological perception, and embodied cognition to account for listeners’ experience of musical time.

In particular, my approach draws on two strands of thought – musical gestures and embodied metaphor – to investigate how movement to music underlies the phenomenal experience and the conceptual understanding of musical time. I show, following Shaun Gallagher following Merleau-Ponty, that just as our spatial frame of reference is generated from our situated bodies, so these same bodies function as the “zero coordinates” of our temporal framework. This “here-now,” spatio-temporal origin is grounded in the experience of the subjective specious present, understood as the locus of the goals of our actions. Moreover, I suggest that because of this dual frame of references, the experience of time, as a foundation for concepts of time, can be extrapolated from these very actions.

I further propose that our actions, as they unfold in the present, already contain in them information about the past and the future, through the phenomenon of co-articulation. Specifically, every gestural goal is followed by a state of retraction, which is physically affected by the goal and already functions as a preparation for the next goal. In other words, our movements never occur outside the context of other movements, but instead they unfold in a continuous progression of reciprocal temporal and kinematic shaping. I suggest that co-articulation, with the past, the present, and the future encompassed within every gesture, offers a possibility of probabilistic causality, which in turn configures the trajectory of our subjective and intersubjective temporal experiences. Among other things, this approach is congruent with how time is conceptualized in the physical sciences, and I show how this feeds directly into the experience of eternity in De Tijd.

Those needing additional assistance to attend this event should contact one of the graduate coordinators, Mary Caldwell(marycaldwell@uchicago.edu) or August Sheehy (aasheehy@uchicago.edu)