Acousmatic Experience and Musical Movement: A Pluralistic Conception

Abstract

This thesis attempts to reconcile the intuition that musical experience involves physical movement, such as bowing movement, with the acousmatic thesis. The first intuition is part of what I call the Datum. The acousmatic thesis, most notably defended by Roger Scruton (1999; 2009), holds that musical sounds are heard as detached from their sources of production. While the acousmatic thesis has conceptual force, it seems unable to honour the Datum. Chapter 1 sets out in more details this apparent dichotomy between the Datum and the acousmatic thesis defended by Scruton. Chapter 2 draws on points of historical interest – from Aristotle, Newton, Leibniz, and Descartes – that may help to explain what conception of musical movement we hold. Chapter 3 is pivotal to illustrate some of the points raised in previous chapters as well as to shed light on the complexity of musical movement (in particular melodic and sound-producing movement), and various forms of acousmatic experience. The acousmatic thesis that I gesture at at the end of the thesis elaborates upon the descriptive phenomenology of the beginning of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and Ligeti’s Atmosphères. Chapter 4 critically engages with the debate on the nature of melodic movement, while Chapter 5 examines how we can perceive, through audition, sound-producing movement. In Chapter 6, I argue that Scruton’s acousmatic thesis can accommodate the perception and aesthetic significance of some kinds of sound-producing movements. However, his view faces certain limitations, which leads me to suggest a modified acousmatic thesis. Chapter 7 seeks to finesse this modified acousmatic thesis, focusing on the spatiality of music and on the combination of melodic and sound-producing movement in the listening experience (Rachmaninoff’s concerto). The notion of imbrication is, I think, a promising avenue to make sense of this fusion of two kinds of movement.