This is a follow-up mini-essay that I wrote after a particularly interesting discussion in my Philosophies of Time and Process class in 2018. There’s a prompt below for a ‘part 2 coming soon’ which never materialized, perhaps it’s time to get back to it?
“…Dasein discovers the being-in-itself of the ‘true world’ with which Dasein as existing is always already together.” (BT, 104[1])
Throughout the text that leads up to this relevatory passage, Heidegger carefully develops two related points. The first has to do with what he means by distance, which has nothing to do with space (or time) in an ontical sense. That is, “over there” or “a half hour later” do not refer at all to precisely measurable or quantifiable distances. The second follows from this, which is that such ontical matters are “categorial determination[s] of beings unlike Dasein.” (102) De-distancing is an existential practice—that is, one that has everything to do with understanding how subjectivity is constituted—that involves relations and nearnesses in Heidegger’s ontological sense of the term; in other words, it marks a shift from ontical/categorial/ empirical kinds of relations and nearnesses to existential/ontological ones.
Another very important theme emerges in two spots in this passage. First, “the spatiality of being-in shows the character of de-distancing and directionality.” (102) Heidegger’s immediate focus is on the first term, but the second is equally important, referring to orientation with regard to one’s being-in-the-world. (Also note how these flesh out the more fundamental definition of “in”.) This is then picked up on the following page: “What is at hand in the surrounding world is, after all, not objectively present for an eternal spectator exempt from Dasein, but is encountered in the circumspect, heedful everydayness of Dasein.” (103) Why is this important? Not least because it prefigures what Donna Haraway criticizes as the “God-trick” of scientistic practices, of somehow observing from outside the context of that which is observed. (Both Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg make similar points about the impossibility of removing the observation-apparatus from that which is observed—see Barad 2006). Heidegger is suggesting that there is no eternal (or external) spectator, and therefore no such thing as pure objectivity. Similarly, on the next page he places conspicuous scare quotes around “subjective” and “subjectivity” in order to ward off potential critiques that suggest that, in eschewing objectivity, he is merely folding back around to a new kind of solipsism. This, again, is where phenomenology—as a practice—comes in.
So my question is, what is the relation between being-in-the-world, de-distancing, directionality, etc. (the whole complex bundle of Heideggerian concepts) and music analysis?
We might start with relationality and identity, particularly the kind of categorial identity that music analysis traffics in. We talked about this in Week 4: a given vertical sonority (say, an E minor triad in some particular registral and orchestral distribution, considered in/as a flash-frozen slice of time-space) has an ontical identity: each constituent pitch consisting of a constellation of air molecules bouncing against one another at a particular periodic rate, with a particular profile of resultant harmonics audible to varying degrees (thereby giving each sound its particular timbral character); these complex sounds interact in particular ways to create resultant periodicities. That any of this is analyzable as “sound” also requires a second-order relationality (or perhaps a first-order one: this is the old tree falling-in-forest conundrum), which is the apparatus of the human ear, which translates all of that geometric information, and concomitant vibrating matter, into what we all agree to call sound. But there is not just “sound”; there is only sound-for-me, as experienced. That is, the particular way in which all of that information becomes sound is contingent on the specific character of my own operating system: how my ear, assembling with perceived input, makes sound, for me. This is over-simple already, because it’s not just the ear that is involved and because the ear is extraordinarily complex to begin with (and because there are also all of the other mes—other Daseins—that I might encounter and that co-constitute my relational being-in-the-world). But that sound-for-me is constituted by a number of contingent contexts. First of all the operation of my own aural apparatus, which is a product of my own genealogy, impacted not least by the number of metal concerts I went to as a teenager and the number of salsa gigs I played in my 20s and 30s. But it is also a product of my now-ongoing directionality: where is sound coming from, in relation to the position of my ears? And of (ontic) spatiality: what is the shape, the size, the material of the room? What kinds of objects fill it? And on and on—context-constituted criteria proliferate wildly.
But back to that E minor chord. A next-level ontic description would be to simply call it that: an E-minor triad (as in jazz lead sheet notation), or even complexly as this given E-minor triad in this particular registral and orchestral distribution. That’s not what music theory does, of course—that barely amounts to taxonomy, much less analysis.
A tiny dip into the world of Heideggerian ontological world-constitution occurs when we start to consider what that E-minor triad is doing, in terms of where it’s coming from and where it’s going in its local musical context. A first, fairly simple but absolutely crucial moment is the move from ontic E-minor-triad identification to ontological “iv in B minor” or “vi in G major”—by ascribing a Roman numeral to a harmonic entity, we are already situating it in a kind of world by describing a bundle of relational connections to other entities-in-the-world like the tonic and other harmonies that, along with our E-minor triad, clarify the key as a relational nexus.
(NB this is very important: a (being-in-)key is a relational nexus; a world of sorts…)
We can then build out our relational world—other musical “objects”, other relationalities; just for example, local versus longer-range harmonic implications, the role that melodic-harmonic relations play (say, for example, there is an F# appoggiatura that impinges on that E-minor chord), rhythmic and metric implications, prolongational ones, and on and on. These of course are the traditional purview of music theory and analysis. An important part of this, which music theory needs to learn to better engage, is the plurality or ambiguity of these relationalities—how a harmonic gesture can, for example, express a plural genealogy as a “topic,” a “schema,” a harmonic function, a contrapuntal prolongation, etc.—again, all of this simply points to the fact that worlds, and beings-in-worlds, are messy and complicated. (Schenker understood this by the way, viz. his analyses of big symphonic works with what often appear to be contradictions between different structural levels.)
In some ways a re-engagement with the sonority’s E-minor-ness starts to open up avenues for considering other connections and relations. By turning to timbre and distribution—to how the chord is scored—we can easily start thinking about its material realization, which is to say who is playing it and who is listening to it. We can start to think about what an E5 sounds like if played by a clarinet or oboe or operatic voice or electric guitar, which in each case opens up proliferating flows from teachers and practice rooms to iconic recordings and exemplary practices to other pieces, other sonorities, other distributions. Is that E minor chord emerging in the middle of comparatively homogeneous brass chorale, or a product of Webernian Klangfarbenmelodie? All of these kinds of considerations assemble with functionally musical ones, which open hermeneutic questions like “how do I interpret this particular note (my contribution to the ensemble distribution) in light of what I understand its harmonic and melodic function to be in its local and long-range context, and in light of how I understand my instrument’s timbral possibilities, performance practices, intersectionalities with other sounds, and so on, and furthermore in light of historical trajectories, spatial contingencies (the where of where I am playing), meaning-constitutions, and on and on.
All of this relates directly back to de-distancing and directionality.
[part 2 coming soon…]
[1] Page numbers refer to the Stambaugh translation.