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This book presents a detailed analysis of what it means to be absorbed in playing music. Based on interviews with one of the world's leading classical ensembles, "The Danish String Quartet" (DSQ), it debunks the myth that experts cannot reflect while performing, but also shows that intense absorption is not something that can be achieved through will, intention, prediction or planning - it remains something individuals have to be receptive to. Based in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as well as of Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher, it lays out the conditions and essential structures of musical absorption. Employing the lived experience of the DSQ members, it also engages and challenges core ideas in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, enactivism, expertise studies, musical psychology, flow theory, aesthetics, dream and sleep studies, psychopathology and social ontology, and proposes a method that integrates phenomenology and cognitive science.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Part I: Meeting the Danish String Quartet.- Chapter 2. How Should We Study Musical Absorption? The Phenomenological Interview.- Chapter 3. From Ragdoll to Battle Commander: The Experience of Musical Absorption.- Chapter 4. A Topography of Muscial Absorption.- Part II: Comparative Perspectives.- Chapter 5. Expertise, Mind Wandering, and Amnesia.- Chapter 6. Artistic and Aesthetic Experience.- Chapter 7. Flow.- Chapter 8. Dreaming and Sleeping.- Chapter 9. Schizophrenia and Ipseity Disturbances.- Part III. Phenomenological Underpinnings of the Musically Extended Mind.- Chapter 10. Performative Passivity.- Chapter 11. The Hive Mind: Playing Together.- Chapter 12.Conclusions.
About the author
Simon Høffding is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, Norway. He obtained his PhD in 2015 at the Centre for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and has since held positions at the Interactive Minds Centre, University of Aarhus, and at the Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen. His interests span phenomenology, philosophy of mind, enactivism, music, self-awareness, bodily awareness, expertise, aesthetics and cross-disciplinary methodologies. His work has been published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Musicae Scientiae and Topoi as well as in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy.
Summary
This book presents a detailed analysis of what it means to be absorbed in playing music. Based on interviews with one of the world’s leading classical ensembles, “The Danish String Quartet” (DSQ), it debunks the myth that experts cannot reflect while performing, but also shows that intense absorption is not something that can be achieved through will, intention, prediction or planning – it remains something individuals have to be receptive to. Based in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as well as of Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher, it lays out the conditions and essential structures of musical absorption. Employing the lived experience of the DSQ members, it also engages and challenges core ideas in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, enactivism, expertise studies, musical psychology, flow theory, aesthetics, dream and sleep studies, psychopathology and social ontology, and proposes a method that integrates phenomenology and cognitive science.
