Abstract
If music is not a thing, what is it and how can it be described? As performers and listeners, we know music as a feeling, an existential condition. But can we comprehend more fully, more literally these engagements? My project positions the music of Charles Ives as a set of models for confronting challenging concepts that lie at the controversial crossroads of phenomenology and theology and for plunging through this juncture so as to lead towards a new ontological definition of music. In its course, the dissertation explores the viability of employing both phenomenological ideas and terminology from Community Music Therapy for music analysis - in general and of Ives' music specifically. I use ideas and language from phenomenology, Guattari and Deleuze, Community Music (Therapy), Augustinian theology, studies on sound and affect, and work done in phenomenological and Guattarian-Deleuzian music analysis as a primary way-in to "The Harvest Home Chorales", "Central Park in the Dark", and "Tom Sails Away" (from 19 Songs). Then, I position these as situations for phenomenological description and thereby models for practicable engagement with philosophical ideas that have hitherto seemed the exclusive tasks of transcendent meditations or spiritual revelations.
It also seems that there is more in phenomenology proper (Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc.) that music analysis has yet to explore. With my dissertation, I hope to confront several of the most challenging philosophical areas (that remain hazy even within philosophical texts) with music as my model and hopefully shed some light - both for musicians and philosophers. Using music in this way has been very helpful for me when thinking about certain ideas like intersubjectivity, multiple ecstatic schema within unified temporality, dimensions of being, and the potential for existential transcendence (momentary or otherwise). Through this interdisciplinary exploration, I am left with a new definition of music that feels sincere.
It is important for me to engage phenomenological ideas in a non-subjective (communal) experience, and that's where music helps! The dissertation's conclusion features a brief positioning of the "Universe Symphony" to illustrate certain take-aways and draw the project back to its initial musicological objectives.