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Item: Empathy, intersubjectivity, and the social world

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Year: 2022
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Article: Listening to Others: Music and the

Phenomenology of Hearning

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Empathy,
Intersubjectivity,
and the Social World

The Continued Relevance of Phenomenology.

Essays in Honour of Dermot Moran

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Anna Bortolan and Elisa Magri

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Felix 6 Murchadha
Listening to Others: Music and the
Phenomenology of Hearing
Abstract: This chapter explores listening through a phenomenological account of
sound and rhythm, showing a musical structure in experience. This structure fol­
lows the rhythm of a sequence, leading the listener through an event of meaning
that allows an other to appear as a self within a temporally constituted sequence
of sense. While subject to such relations, listening is constitutively directed to­
wards re-sensing, because we hear in terms of virtualities, whereby sense con­
tains the power of new and unheard of meaning in each moment of its appear­
ance. Such sense appears acoustically in an affective register between joy and
despair, forming affective atmospheres, in which emotions are expressed in a
manner irreducible to nanative context. The situation described here is charac­
terized by a certain rhythm in which awareness is directed not so much to the
corporeal boundaries of self and other but to the event of movement in which
each person finds themselves.

Being in the world is to be immersed in sound. Even the most silent moments
have aurcd rhythms. We hear the world around us before we listen to a particular
voice, a rustle of something light, the thud of a heavy object or the organic move­
ment of inhaling and exhaling. Prior to any particular content of the sound to
which we listen, be it the coming of a storm, the flight of a flock of swans, the
request of a friend, we hear things in the materiality of their sound. But the re­
lation to this materiality differs from that which we experience in vision and in
touch. In the latter, boundaries of inner and outer, self and other, are maintained
even in the act of transgressing them. While both sight and touch in different
ways tend toward keeping their objects at a distance, beyond the embodied
being of the self; through hearing phenomena penetrate into me, as I diffuse my­
self aurally in the world through voice and movement. The world of sound is dy­
namic, lacking clear boundaries.
The world of sound is not simply that which we hear through our aural sense
organs, it is a world which we feel, around us and within us, but one which is
characterized not by the solidity of things but by relations of temporal implica­
tion and change. This is possible because in sound the spatial relation is infused
with temporality. In hearing, 1 am aware of a coming to be (beginning) of sound,
the duration of a particular series of sounds (enduring), the fragility of this

https://doi.org/10.15a5/9783110698787-013
244 — Felix 6 Murchadha

sounding (decaying) and of the manner in which sound impacts on me and on

others (encountering). Sound comes to me spatially, i.e. as that which arises
elsewhere or from within, as when I feel the sound of my own breathing, but pre­
cisely in its diffuseness over space, in hearing I am subjected to the temporal
rhythms of sound and their becoming expressive as tone.
In this paper, I wish to look to music to help us reflect phenomenologically
on such worlds of sound. Music is being understood here as that human creation
which allows us to discover the world of tone and rhythm, music understood as
that artistic form which opens us to the musicality of nature and everyday life.
What is at issue here is the structure and logic of tone and rhythm that forms
the manner in which we hear the world, in which the world is audible to us.
In the context of such a world, then, the question will be how others are manifest
to a self for whom from the beginning tone overflows any barriers between it and
the world, such that it exists in a world tonally constitutive of it.
This chapter is divided into four parts. The first part will discuss in broad
terms the appeal to art in phenomenologically reflecting on phenomena, on
the phenomenological reduction as related to music and the relevance of this
to questions concerning empathy (1). The second part will then turn to sound (2).
The third part will deal with rhythm (3), followed by a short conclusion (4).

1 Art, Phenomenology and a Musical Reduction

It is striking that phenomenologists after Husserl have repeatedly had recourse to
art within their phenomenological reflections. It is not simply that they have
'done' a phenomenology of art; rather for each art in some way made possible
the bringing to appearance of the event of appearing more generally. Whether
with Heidegger's discussion of van Gogh's shoes or Merleau-Ponty's analysis
of Cezanne's paintings of Mont St. Victoire or Henry's reflections on Kandinsky's
move to abstraction - to name just the most prominent examples - art revealed
what remains hidden in normal experience.
Interestingly, in the cases of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Henry, the re­
course to art comes after their early major works, which have relatively little to
say about art (Being and Time, Phenomenology of Perception and the Essence
of Manifestation respectively). In the case of each, art is a way of returning to
the themes of these major works, to find a way of either deepening or transform­
ing their insights. The reason art can function like this is not hard to find. If phe­
nomenology begins with appearance, if its goal is to clarify the appearing of ap­
pearance, then the philosopher is coming late to territory already populated by
the artist. The artist works with the material of appearing, whether color, figure.
Listening to Others: Music and the Phenomenology of Hearing — 245

space, movement, time, sound, to produce a work or to perform an event in

which those very materials are brought thematically to appearance. Above all,
art breaks with the everyday, but does so in such a way as to allow the viewer,
the audience, the participant to reflect back onto the everyday, allowing the ev­
eryday to be de-constructed (Abbau) and rebuilt again. In phenomenological
terms, what it achieves is a phenomenological reduction. Art allows for both a
break with the everyday and a reflection on the constitution of appearance.
We see this being affirmed by Heidegger when he states that in the proximity
of the artwork we are suddenly somewhere unaccustomed (Heidegger 2002,
p. 15), by Merleau-Ponty who speaks of Cezanne's paintings as reducing the
world to the totality of frozen appearances (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 20) and by
Henry when he says of painting that it aiiows us to see "what is not seen and
caimot be seen" (Henry 2009, p. 11).
The artist works on certain material in order to produce the relationality of,
and to, the world in such a manner that we can perceive it. In so doing, the artist
performs a reduction in the very act of production. The history of art seems to
have involved - in the West at least - a separating out of the senses, such
that music has become the art of the sense of listening, while dance is that of
movement, and poetry of listening within the practice of reading. Painting has
become the art of sight, the reconstitution of the world on the basis of color
and figures.
Music produces a world of sound and in so doing brings the event of sound
to appearance. In music we enter a world primarily constituted by sound and
rhythm. Music works on sound, sound is its material. Art has the capacity to
work material sometimes against the grain, so as to produce on its basis that
which appears foreign to the material. Color and lines on canvas can produce
the representation of three dimensional figures in a two dimensional medium.
Sound is one dimensional - fundamentally temporal - yet it can represent (spa­
tially defined) entities, events, abstract ideas and emotions (Kivy 1991, p. 100).
Following Adam Smith, the musicologist Peter Kivy argues that part of the aes­
thetic quality of music is precisely the recalcitrance of its medium (Kivy 1991,
pp. 97-98). This has an interesting consequence: if art works with but also
against its material, it functions at once to reveal and to hide that materiai. In
a manner related to language, music employs sound to articulate the happening
of aural experience. What aiiows it to do this is in part what separates it from
language: while linguistic sounds have general meanings in the form of concep­
tual sense, music has emotional sense, awakens a primarily emotional response
(see Cooke 1962, p. 26). This is not to say that music has no intelligible sense, but
this sense does not relate directly to conceptual meaning defining an object. Ab­
stract ideas in music are ideas without objects, ideas expressed as feeling.
246 — Felix 6 Murchadha

The question then is what characterizes a world sensed, understood and

lived in, with a primary orientation to sound? Francis Wolff imagines a cave as
that of Plato's, except a cave of sound not vision. The prisoners in an aural
cave could only make their world comprehensible by an act of production: mak­
ing sound (Wolff 2015, p. 44). To understand the world of sound is not to see
through the eyes of the intellect, reflecting on the paradoxes of sense experience,
but rather it is to engage in the activity of making sound and rhythm, to engage
in a rudimentary fashion in the art of music making. In the absence of such ac­
tivity, there are sounds but these are indistinct, the relations of inner and outer
remain inarticulate, there is no distinction between the real and the imaginary.
As Wolff puts it: "[I]n the temporal sequence there is no point of reference which
would permit the individualization of events [of sound]" (Wolff 2015, p. 36) and
while color and form are immediate qualities of things, sounds are aural quali­
ties of events. It is only through an act of making sounds that these events can be
reproduced in an ordered manner, individuating the sounds and their relations
to each other. In this sense, music performs a reduction of the multiplicity of
aural impressions - the noise all around us - to the sounds which make them
up and orders them in tonal relations. This appears as a peculiar reduction, be­
cause it operates not actively, not by reflection, but rather by the production of
sound as tone (see 6 Murchadha 2018, pp. 185-7).
This reduction seems peculiar, however, only if we fail to take seriously Hus-
serl's repeated declaration that the reduction is something that needs to be per­
formed. The philosopher for Husserl performs it reflectively, in the sense that she
unnaturally reverses her view; the musician, on the other hand, is concerned
with moving forward. The phenomenological reduction in Husserl's terms is con­
cerned not with the production of sense as rather, so to speak, with the retracing
of that production, backwards to its origins. In this sense the reduction, is, as
Merleau-Ponty puts it, a stepping back "in order to see transcendences spring
forth" (Merleau-Ponty 2013, p. Ixxvii), which needs first to be lived. And what
music tells us in this living performance is that the object of aural perception
is not a thing but an event, not an entity but the (audible) expression of that en­
tity or a plurality of entities. For Plato's cave to account for sound, it is not
enough for images to be projected on a screen, there needs first to be music.
We think of the cave as a realm of illusion, and yet that which produces the il­
lusion is real. The illusion is not the image, but the taking of the image as real.
But in the case of aural perception, there is no place behind the backs of the pris­
oners which can count as real: nothing which happens behind the prisoners can
be less real than that which occurs before them. While the visual scene is a pro­
duction on the screen before them but is perceived as not being such a produc-
Listening to Others: Music and the Phenomenology of Hearing — 247

tion, the audible phenomenon is of necessity a production and can only be per­
ceived as such.
Music places sound beyond the level of the actual in the sense of physical
causation and brings it to a level of the imaginary or the virtual, where the rela­
tions of sounds to one another are no longer relations of simple physical conti­
guity, but are relations of sense in which the one sound 'motivates' the other.^ In
listening to a piece of music, I am not attending to the manner in which each
individual sotmd is caused by the instrument playing it, but rather am focused
on the way in which one sound causes or leads to another, that dynamic relation
of tones through which melody is formed. In Roger Scruton's words, we listen to
music by "attending to sounds without focusing on their material causes" (Scru-
ton, 2007, p. 229). In doing this, material causality is replaced with virtual cau­
sality, the objects in the world are displaced in favor of the melody, harmony
and rhythm of their coming to be as sounds. Both with respect to production
and reception there is here an intertwining of actual and virtual, perceptual
and imaginary, which makes the object of aural perception neither simply the
physical object nor an idea, but the physical object as idea or the object as ex­
pression.
We will return in more detail to questions of sound, tone and rhythm below,
but first it is important to show how such a musical reduction can be employed.
The crucial claim being made here is that music allows the materiality of sound
to come to appearance. When an other is heard, the sounds she makes are not
simply experienced as disturbances of the aural sphere, but rather as expressive
of herself as a being in relation to the perceiver. This is the case whether the
sounds are immediately voluntary or not. Clearly when someone speaks she is
willingly making sounds, when she walks or gestures with her hand she may
also make sounds which, though not immediately voluntary - she did not direct­
ly intend to make that particular sound -, are expressions of her willed bodily
movement. But the sounds she makes are expressions of her being that are be­
yond or rather below the level of volition: from accent to timbre to rhythm and
affective color, the sound of someone expresses her being in ways that are often
more apparent to others than to the person herself. They are habituated embod­
ied modes of being, which express a concrete orientation toward the world, be­
yond the specific content of particular spoken words or discrete gestures toward.
It is precisely this expressive world of the other to which empathetic sense at-

1 The relation of cause here is that which Husserl describes as the "lawfulness of the life of the
spirit", namely, 'motivation'. Understood as such, perception receives expression or rather "ex­
pression and expressed as a totality" in "concordant experience" (Husserl 1990, p. 245).
248 —— Felix 6 Murchadha

tends. As Elisa Magri puts it, "from a phenomenological point of view, empathy
implies that we attend not just to features of perception but also to ... the affec­
tive world of the other subject" (Magri 2019, p. 335). Music by bringing to bear a
reduction allows the elements that give aural expression to such an affective
world, to be reflectively brought to appearance.
It is the case that music, like any other art form, has a history and looking to
music for relations of appearance we are looking at a phenomenon embedded
contingently in certain sedimented practices. Within the Western tradition the
domain of music is generally restricted and compartmentalized, excluding poet­
ry and dance, distinguishing with varying degrees of sharpness between song
and instrumental music. This development broke with the original sense of mu-
sike in Greek culture. The musicologist, Thrasyboulos Georgiades, shows how the
original Greek sense of musike included not alone dance but language also, so
that the distinction of poetry and prose is already indicative of a breakdown
in its original sense (see Georgiades 1982, pp. 5-7). While I cannot go into
these issues in this paper, this insight is important for us in indicating the
wider sense of rhythm beyond what we would consider to be music, particularly
as it is manifest in speech, and also that music has a bodily sense manifest in
dance. With respect to language, Georgiades states that "the Greek verse line
was a linguistic and simultaneously a musical reality. The connecting element,
common to language and music, was rhythm." As he goes on to explain, in An­
cient Greek the "individual syllables could neither be extended nor abbreviated.
They were by nature long or short... The substantive concrete aspect of the an­
cient Greek language was its musically concreted rhythm" (Georgiades 1982,
p. 4). If there is a language of music, it is one which has separated from everyday
language and indeed through the employment of language in Christian ritual it
has been employed to mark that difference. While speech becomes more subjec­
tive in the sense of more liberated from musical rhythm, the performance of
speech in proclaiming the "word of god" needed to be fixed musically in
order to at once distance it from everyday speech and give sacred speech a
sense of inviolability (c.f. Georgiades 1982, pp. 7,10,16).
Music and language are two sides of the Greek musike, the inner unity of
which remains foreign to Western modernity. This manifests itself in respect to
language which for the Ancient Greek, Georgiades concludes, must have felt
more powerful than the speaker, each word having its own rhythmic sense,
such that it spoke things through the speaker (Georgiades 1958, p. 43).^ In speak-

2 Not acddently here, of course, we are reminded of Heidegger's dictum: "Die Sprache spricht
(language speaks)" (Heidegger 2001, p. 198).
Listening to others: Music and the Phenomenology of Hearing 249

ing about music, specifically about music as a phenomenological reduction, we

are speaking also about the power of language primordial to our sense of control
over our speech. That power of language, manifest in its inner musicality, is that
which resists us both in our speaking and our listening, is the materiality of
rhythm and soimd, traced in the linguistic utterances of the other and in that
which remains other to me in my own speech. This materiahty is made manifest
musically in a way that shows the pre-propositional address primordial to articu­
lated sense. Therein lies a level of expressivity, which cannot be captured con­
ceptually.

2 Sound
Before introducing his famous keyhole example, Sartre in discussing the gaze of
the other describes the other's appearance first in aural terms: "I apprehend im­
mediately when I hear the branches crackling behind me ... that I am vulnerable
... that I am seen" (Sartre 1992, p. 347 [my emphasis]).When he comes to the case
of the man disturbed in the act of spying through the keyhole, he states: "all of a
sudden 1 hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me" (Sartre 1992,
p. 349 [my emphasis]). I hear myself being seen, because it is through sound
that I am aware of a world as the limit of my perceptual consciousness, but a
world that already penetrates me. In hearing, 1 know myself as vulnerable to a
world in which I am always already exposed. Before being seen, 1 am summoned
by a sound which is coming from elsewhere, yet against which I can offer no pro­
tection.
Music produces sound and tone. Tone, as the musicologist, Victor Zuker-
kandl points out, is the only experience of our senses which belongs exclusively
to life, is peculiarly expressive of living beings. Non-living things have light,
color, sound, odor and taste, but "living beings, out of themselves, add tone
to the physical world that confronts them" (Zukerkandl 1969, p. 1). Tone is not
mere sound nor is it sound utilized to signify something else such as the tapping
of a Morse code on metal pipes. Rather, tone is the making expressive of sound
through its being produced as meaningful.What music produces through such a
productive reduction is not alone sound and tone, but the relation of tone to
tone, the relations which make an aural sense, in order to reduce the aural to
its constituent elements and show the iimer relations of those elements. The pro­
duction of sound in actual things is transferred to those things created for no
other reason than to create musical sound. The violin or the piano or the oboe
are made in terms of a range of tones, high and low, which they create. The
250 —" Felix 6 Murchadha

human body itself can be molded for the same purpose, specifically in the case
of the voice trained to sing.
As we have seen, music places sound beyond the level of the actual in the
sense of physical causation and brings it to a level of the imaginary or the virtu­
al, where the relations of sound to one another are no longer relations of simple
physical causation, but are relations of sense in which the one sound motivates
the other. In listening to a piece of music I am not attending to the maimer in
which each individual sound is caused by the instrument playing it, but rather
to the way in which one sound leads to another, that dynamic relation of tones
through which melody is formed. It is this totality of expression and expressed
toward which consciousness turns; it is that spiritual unity which draws con­
sciousness attentively to it. In the realm of sound this relation of motivation is
ontologically constitutive of the object itself. While a visual object can motivate
the perceiver in different ways - left or right, up or down, in or out, such that the
temporal relation of the perceiver's impressions is independent from the reality
of the thing - in the case of sound, to listen is to follow the irreversible motiva­
tional direction whereby one sound brings about the next, where the logic of the
present and future sound is contained virtually in the melody and musical struc­
ture of the sounds just past. Listening in this way is an awareness - not neces­
sarily attentive, it can be unconscious - of a meaningful pattern in sound that
operates protentially by a relation of waiting on the future sound, on the coming
climax of the piece, on the recurring theme of the sonata or movement (see Wis-
kus 2019, pp. 403- 4). But the necessity of these relations depends not on the dis­
crete physical causal actions whereby sounds are produced, but rather on an
imaginary web of relations. These relations receive their sense from a d3mamic
whereby one tone appears as an occurrence virtually suggested by the previous
one. Indeed, as Francis Wolff states, "to understand a piece of music is simply
and wholly to hear that imaginary causality" (Wolff 2015, p. 162). Such a causal­
ity is imaginary in the sense that it is not explainable in physical terms. This cau­
sality is rather such that one note contains virtually within itself the notes that
arise from it in the course of the melody, forming, as it were, an aural image
which is temporal rather than spatial, musical rather than pictorial.
The nature of a melody is to give a promise of meaning, which introduces a
tension that the melody resolves in its ending (see Zukerkandl 1969, p. 19). That
promise of meaning calls me to wait, while the piece endures in soimd, letting
me anticipate the course toward an ending in which each note opens up possible
futures (finite but plural), of which only one will be realized. In listening, there­
fore, I am subject, and must subject myself, to the sound itself as melody but
also as harmony, cadence, meter, rhythm, tempo, beat, pitch, as an aural pattern
of sense is set out. To hear a piece of music is to hear those imaginary relations
Listening to Others: Music and the Phenomenology of Hearing — 251

and to follow them. In following the piece, 1 am following an order of sound that
calls me to 'obedience' - obedience, i. e., submission to another, is a fundamen­
tally aural relation. This is suggested not simply by etymology (ob-audire), but
also by the fact that while seeing and touch immediately bring me into relations
of things with qualities (this red ball, that tall man, this smooth desk), hearing
does not relate me to things but rather to events of sound, in which the relations
are between sounds. I can perceive this only if I follow their imaginary relations
thereby giving myself over to the sense - the articulate intelligibility and above
all the directionality - of the sound relation. Crucial here is the dynamic nature
of musical meaning. Again to quote Zuckerkandl: "Musical tones are conveyors
of forces. Hearing music means hearing an action of forces" (Zuckerkandl 1969,
p. 37). To hear musical meaning is to follow the directionality of sense, anticipat­
ing the next tone guided by an aural understanding which hears meaning in the
notes being played. This is to say that in hearing 1 am attending to a particular
kind of incompleteness: while visually incompletion is overcome through addi­
tion - I walk around the desk so as to see it from every angle - aurally "what
is lacking must appear in place of what is given ... the auditory-incomplete
can become complete only by the fact that what is lacking succeeds to the
datiun." As such "to hear incompleteness is to hear time" (Zukerkandl 1969,
p. 253). While temporal duration is necessary to perceive visibly and tangibly,
in aural terms the objects themselves are temporal objects containing "temporal
extension in themselves", as Husserl states (Husserl 2019, p. 43).
In 'obedience' to that meaning and directionality of sense, I am already
drawn into the event of sound. Sound penetrates me, resonates through me,
bathes and - in certain cases - tortures me. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts: "Sound
... is not first 'intentioned': on the contrary, sound is what places its subject,
which has not preceded it with an aim, in tension or under tension" (Nancy
2007, p. 20). In listening, 1 am attentive to that which is outside of itself in
that to which I am listening: "something (itself) that identifies itself by resonat­
ing from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself, at once the
same as an other than itself, one in the echo of the other" (Nancy 2007, p. 9).
In listening to music, 1 am listening to nothing which can be given precise
conceptual form. Music is pre-conceptual: it is not possible to render a specific
scene musically in terms of its descriptive content or make an argument or even
describe feelings of love or hatred or sadness or joy directed at a particular ob­
ject. Following those musicologists who affirm the representational capacity of
music (and setting aside the issue of representing specific types of entities
252 — Felix 6 Murchadha

and events), it seems evident that music expresses emotion.^ But it expresses
emotion independently from the relation to particular objects. We can say of a
particular piece of music that it expresses sadness or joy or happiness or rage
or desire or anxiety or anguish, but it is difficult to find music which expresses
jealousy or pity or resentment or embarrassment. The more the emotion indi­
cates a general atmosphere or mood, the more clearly it can find musical expres­
sion; the more the emotion relates to specific objects, the less music can express
it (except, of course, vocally through the words of song). It makes sense to speak
of being sad or joyful or enraged or happy or desiring or anxious without the
sense of these emotions being dependent on specific objects, while resentment
or jealousy or pity or embarrassment are necessarily transitive, referring to an
object or a plurality of objects. The emotions music expresses, on the other
hand, form affective atmospheres, in which we can find emotions expressed in
a manner which is irreducible to a narrative context, i.e., it expresses something
essential about the emotion itself. It is in this sense that Felix Mendelssohn can
say that "the thoughts expressed by the music that 1 love are not too imprecise to
be put into words, but on the contrary too precise" (Mendelssohn 1867, p. 276;
see also Cooke 1962, p. 12 and Wolff 2015, p. 249). It is clear from his further dis­
cussion in this letter that what Mendelssohn means by 'thoughts' are feelings,
such as resignation, melancholy and praise of god. Such feelings are those
that the composer wishes to express and in listening to the music we hear it
well, when we apprehend that specific emotional expression. As the musicolo­
gist Deryck Cooke puts it, in listening to the funeral march in Beethoven's Eroica
symphony, the particular manner in which he employed the C minor key will
arouse "the listener's capacity for experiencing grief ...into feeling ... the person
grief of Beethoven made incarnate in that music" (Cooke 1961, p. 19). Note the
emphasis on the listener's capacity, which he parses as "sympathetic under­
standing" (Cooke 1961, p. 21, n. 1), i.e., the listener's empathetic capacity to
grasp the music as expressive of a particular emotional experience or, as
Cooke puts it, "the supreme expression of universal emotions, in an entirely per­
sonal way" (Cooke 1961, p. 32).
What happens in music is the particular expression of universal emotions,
expressing the emotion not in its relation to this or that object, but rather in itself
as pure feeling. In other words, in music there is the expression of emotion in­
dependent of both the actual feeling of the listener (who feels the grief of a fu-

3 This is not of course a universally held position amongst musicologists, particuiarly for those
of the formalist tradition for whom music is, in Eduard Hanslick's terms, "sounding form in mo­
tion [tonend bewegte Formen]" (Hanslick 1986, p. 74) For an account of the history of this debate
see Kerman 1998.
Listening to Others: Music and the Phenomenology of Hearing — 253

neral march without actually herself grieving) and any relation to a specific ob­
ject. In that sense in listening to a piece of music, we understand the world of the
piece in which we find ourselves as colored by the emotions expressed. This is
experienced independently of any emotional response the perceiver may have
to it: 1 can hear joy expressed in Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B Minor,
while feeling myself sad, or sadness expressed in Mozart's Sonata No. 8 in
A Minor, while feeling myself happy. Wolff refers to this as the climate, the "ton­
ality of the world" of the piece, in which I find myself while listening to it (Wolff
2015, p. 259). In listening to a piece of music a further reduction is achieved, a
reduction from the engaged emotions of the everyday to the affective situation
of a mood peculiar to the world of the singular piece of music, to which I am
listening. My attention is focused not on my feelings but on the feeling being ex­
pressed by the music. This is achieved musically through the use of major and
minor keys which supply the fundamental orientations of pleasure and pain
on which the emotional syntax of music is based. The interplay of major and
minor keys, the harmonizing effects of this interplay and the various expressive
affects of the tones on both the major and minor scales allow for the remarkable
emotional range of musical expression, which makes possible many variations of
emotional expression along the continuum of pleasure and pain. As Cooke
states, "a composer does not express pleasure or pain simply by using the
major or minor system, but by bringing forward and emphasizing certain ten­
sions in these systems" (Cooke 1964, p. 94).
In listening, I am hearing these resonating relations. I listen to sound struc­
tured meaningfully, musically, identifying the temporal flow of a particular imag­
inary relation of sounds, following its coming to be, awaiting its fulfilling mean­
ing, reveling in its expression of joy, awed at the somber tones of despair or
anguish. Such hearing is a following of imaginary causation, of hearing the ser­
ies of sounds in their inner relation to one another, as individual series of sounds
distinct from others around them, and as sense bearing or rather as sense traced
in the sound, the mix of sound and sense (see Nancy 2007, pp. 6-7). What music
thematizes here, is that which remains below my listening consciousness within
the context of everyday interactions. In attending to the content of their words
or the visible gestures of their bodies, I hear the melody of another's voice,
and therein a direction of sense irreducible to the meaning of their words,
I hear in short the materiality of their aural expression. In coming into a
room, I hear the intersubjective symphony of these voices and immediately un­
derstand the mood as joyful or somber, peaceful or enraged, hopeful or despair­
ing. On coming upon a conversation, I can hear the tone as friendly or hostile
before being able to make sense of the words - indeed, at times the words them­
selves are at odds with the tone I hear. It is in this tone that I hear something
254 — Felix 6 Murchadha

which is distinct from the expressed conceptual sense, but without which the lat­
ter cannot be said.
In listening to an other, I am hearing her in the musicality of her being when
1 follow in her singular expression the directedness of sense by which her sound
leads me. In doing so I follow the singular expression of love, of hate, of joy, of
despair. The joy, the despair, the sadness, the hope expressed in her voice has
sense for me because I can recognize and follow it. In that way, it is more or
less foreseeable for me, but 1 have no option but to wait upon it or to give up
on her expressive being. The direction of sense expressed by her being is one
that I cannot enact from my position because constitutive of it is its temporal
structure and hence its irreversibility. The other's sense is that which 1 caimot
hear all at once, but which demands of me that I attend to it, that I pay attention
to the event of its manifestation.
The affectivity which sounds in the other is not intentional in the sense of
being directed toward an intentional object. Of course, in understanding her
words I know that she is hopeful about her new job, she is despairing of her
country, she is j03^1 about a new love, she is sad about her friend's death,
but what I hear in her voice is the mood of hope, despair, joy or sadness.
Such moods can transcend the intentional objects and become the atmosphere
of her being. In hearing the other, as in hearing a piece of music, 1 am not per­
ceiving any thing.'* The qualities of tone, the melody of the voice of the other, the
manner in which those tones relate to one another, are for me qualities of the
sound itself. In following them, I hear the other in her gestural being. What mo­
tivates me in listening to her is not an aspect of her being drawing me toward
further aspects, but rather that which has no reality except in the manner in
which one tone gives way to another. While the meaning of her words can
allow me to picture her or some object of the theme of her discourse, her tone
is not the quality of anything other than a gesture of her being. Such a gesture
as the product of her body, depends on her physical self but, as expression, it is
the manifestation of her living body, which has reality for me not in its physical
continuity, but rather as an expressive movement of tone or of rhythm.

4 This distinction mirrors Heidegger's discussion of fundamental moods, which disclose the
world rather than particular entities in the world. On this question, see Held 1993.
Listening to Others: Music and the Phenomenology of Hearing —— 255

3 Rhythm
Rhythms are everywhere around us, things both animate and inanimate move
arotmd me and toward me in their own distinctive rhythms. Indeed, we may
go so far as saying that rhythm is a universal phenomenon, perceivable in the
manner in which things are in their modes of expression. We feei and hear, in­
deed even see rhythm in speech, in movement, in nature. More specifically,
rhythm seems to arise from life - musical rhythm is founded in imitations and
sympathetic variations on rates of heartbeat and breathing. As in hearing
sound 1 hear a directionality of sense, with rhythm 1 hear and feel a moving
force, a force which binds me to it in a relation of kinetic sympathy. In sensing
another in their expressive being, 1 can recognize the beat of their intonation, the
accent of their inflections, the tempo of their movements, in each case I recognize
general types - people who are heavy or light on their feet, melodious or flat in
their speaking, hurried or leisurely in their movements. These rhythms can be­
come national or regional stereotypes, can more concretely be incarnated in a
characteristic way in a particular person and situationally can vary, demonstrat­
ing changes in mood as someone 1 know betrays excitement or despondency in
their changes in rhythm. In all these ways we find time being embodied in an
other. This embodiment occurs as repetition, but also as taking leave from the
past and giving oneself over to a new rhythm. As Gadamer puts it, "the new
comes to be precisely by way of the old being remembered in its dissolution"
(Gadamer 1970, p. 351).
In rhythm we have a movement of to and fro, which in music becomes an
experience of waves, moving forward and back, in a movement whereby the fu­
ture is contained in the present and the present is only in relation to a still effica­
cious past. To quote Zukerkandl again, "the mere fact of temporal succession of
tones and nothing else ... produce[s] the distinction between to and fro ... the
wave is not an event in time but an event of time" (Zuckerkandl 1969, p. 184).
In the experience of rhythm, 1 experience time itself in the very specific sense
of a force of advance and recurrence, which produces its own effects in the
tones themselves. The future is already contained in the present, but only
through the action of time in the sense of rhythm, does that future emerge.
In living in a world of sound, 1 am in relation to a plurality of rhythms res­
onating with one another sometimes harmoniously, sometime as cross rhythms,
but in each case appearing as virtualities, virtual movements through and in
space enveloping and penetrating me. Listening to the rhythm in which others
appear to me, is to listen musically. Rhythm unites time and space; indeed, mu­
sical time is not conceivable without spatialization, but as a temporal expression
256 — Felix 6 Murchadha

of bodily motion apprehended acoustically (Lefebvre 2013, p. 60). To attend to

these rhythms requires a stepping outside of them; Lefebvre speaks in this con­
text of the "marvelous inventions of balconies" (Lefebvre 2015, p. 28) in allowing
him to observe the rhythms of a street. But that stepping outside is itself a kind
of phenomenological reduction - not an observation from outside, but an ob­
serving as if from inside, "to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped
by it", as Lefebvre puts it (Lefebvre 2015, p. 27). Being grasped by rhythm - but
to varying degrees and in differing ways - it is made possible for us to grasp it,
by focusing our attention toward the acoustical constitution itself in music.
Rhythm is a matter of repetition that sets up a pattern. This occurs through
accent, stress and tempo. Rhythm can only at a certain limit become homoge­
nous; its repetitions are of strong and weak beats, long and short times, silences,
intervals, resumptions, regularities of movement. As such, rhythm happens as
differentiated time, qualified durations (see Nancy 2007, p. 78). At its limit,
this reduces the other to the mechanical, as such predictable and manipulable.
In this case the expressive being of the other approaches the null point for us.
Yet, even where repetition occurs monotonously, we tend to hear the repetition
rhythmically. In so doing we tend interpretatively to form the mechanical into
the living, monotonous sound into the movement of dance or speech. What
we find in the roots of rhythm are two elementary tendencies, those of liveliness
and of mechanicity and alongside these two elementary forms of our being
rhythmic, those of speech and of dance. Attending to rhythm happens through
a sympathetic act of the body, a living of the rhythm in the body. Scruton refers
to rhythm as the "virtual energy that flows through the music and which causes
me to move with it in sympathy" (Scruton 2007, p. 231). Prior to music, pre-mu-
sically, this virtual energy guides and moves my attention, toward the world and
toward others in their expressive being. As Andy Hamilton puts it: "The experi­
ence of musical rhythm does not only involve experiencing music as behaving
like a human body; it also involves experiencing the human body as behav­
ing musically" (Hamilton 2007, p. 144). In speech and in dance the body lives
such rhythm: in these two primal modes of interacting, speaking to others
and ourselves, and gesturing toward each other in attitudes of welcome and re­
fusal, our meaning cannot be abstracted from a certain cadence, and step and a
tone, which places us in time with the world around us or appears untimely, out
of step, taking the wrong tone, making a false step.
The rhythm of such situations, in its twin modes of dance and speech, indi­
cates a struggle between liveliness and spontaneity, on the one hand, and me­
chanicity and automaticity on the other. Rhythm through its repetitions gives
way to measurement, meter, to the regular measure of a beat, but a mechanical
performance would be judged unmusical. This is not simply an aesthetic judge-
Listening to Others: Music and the Phenomenology of Hearing — 257

ment: it refers us to an underlying sense of rhythm and meter in our auto-affec­

tive and hetero-affective perceptions of movement. The mechanical is the adap­
tion to a regularity which knows no deviation, relentless and stubborn {ostinato)
- a single directedness which is characterized by a lack of responsiveness to the
other, which is manifest as a failure to grasp the new and take leave of the past.
But it is precisely that temporal capacity to begin which the musicologist Moritz
Hauptmann, in speaking of the metrical accent, calls "the energy of beginnings
(Energie des Anfangs)", in which a rhythm is projected onto the next note from
the previous note(s). Indeed, it is not so much that rhythm requires energy, as
that all energy seems to have a rhythmic structure (see Lefebvre 2015, p. 65).
In my relation with the other, there is a certain rhythmic economy of supply
and demand, give and take, do ut des.This powerful rhythm is one which Gaston
Bacherlard is referring to when he talks of the undulations of moral duality:
"Personality lives according to the rhythm of conciliation and aggression.... 1 re­
spect in order to be respected" (Bachelard 2016, p. 134). This moral economy is a
kind of dance, where I freely move toward the other in the understanding and
confidence that the other will move toward me. Schiller with reference to Eight­
eenth century English figure dancing described this as follows: "Everything has
been arranged so that the first has made room for the second before he arrives"
(quoted in Scruton 2007, p. 240). This rhythmic economy is vulnerable to disrup­
tion, however. In approaching the other 1 have to be receptive to her as a source
of her own energy of beginnings, and the musicality of that experience calls
upon me to be attentive to the rhythm, which may spontaneously emerge be­
tween us, but which is always liable to fall back into mechanicity through the
lack of musical sense for the "musicality of the everyday" (see Russon 2009,
pp. 16-22).

4 Conclusion
In listening to others, 1 hear the affectivity of their being and do so - to allude to
Mendelssohn - more precisely than any words can express. In hearing others in
their affective expression my focus is not so much on the prepositional and con­
ceptual content either of their own acts or of a third party description of them,
but rather on the tone and rhythm immanent in their expression of themselves.
In hearing this we recognize in the sound itself the peculiar intonation of affec­
tive response through which in hearing the other 1 hear the world of the other.
The world of the other is that world which I share with her, but which in this mo­
ment is given unique articulation through her. 1 hear in her tone and the rhythm
and melody of her lived body, sadness or joy or despair or rage as if for the first
258 — Felix 6 Murchadha

time: I recognize it in the imaginative relations of tone and rhythm that we share,
but I also hear it as her unique affective expression. The movement from tone to
tone, contained in the musicality of her expression, is one in which I sense the
affective expression of her being.
The situation in which I find myself with others - with all others - is char­
acterized by a certain rhythm and tone in which my awareness is directed not so
much at the corporeal botmdaries of self and other but to the event of to and fro,
of advance and return, a wave of movement in which each finds themselves in
accord or not. My relation to such movement is one of varying degrees of submis­
sion and self-forgetting. To be in a rhythm is to give oneself over to its action, to
be subject to the action of time through which my future movements are already
anticipated, but in which also new futures are opened up. Such a rhythm is nei­
ther in my power nor in any other's, rather the movement of respective bodies in
terms of such rhythm is itself a response to a way of being bodily, which happens
between us. In listening to others, I am hearing and feeling this tone and this
rhythm and within them the expressive being of myself and others in our
proto-musical life.

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