In the last post I introduced the extremely basic concept of temporality as experienced by human being, what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called Dasein. In this post I want now to turn to this concept as applied to the experience of music. It is Heidegger’s wish that we return “to the things themselves.” A rudimentary understanding of phenomenology – the method used by Heidegger to uncover the nature of being – is that it claims we too often miss what is right in front of our noses. In this case not a set of keys we’re looking for, but the very nature of our experiences. His ultimate goal was to uncover the nature of being, but not by any active means, but by letting being disclose itself to us. The process of phenomenology is one of letting things speak to us as they are in themselves. Being, as simultaneously highly abstract and yet ever-present, is extremely difficult to attend to for precisely those reasons. It is my claim, then, that at least this temporal aspect of being – that of the past and future as immanent in the present – is most easily disclosed in our experience of music.
Let’s think about an example. Imagine listening to a piece of music, or playing one yourself. Whether you’re familiar with the piece or the tradition your ears attend to it as its patterned sound reaches you. (I’m assuming here that you’re listening to it as music, and as such you’re assuming that it is intentional and patterned.) You note as many aspects as you can, sounds, timbres, rhythms, phrases, anything that might be recognizable as an entity. When you find it you note it mentally. As you build an inventory of object in the sound you have a database against which you can reference the sound of the present, and given the successions heard in the past you hear new sounds and make guesses about where the music is going, what a phrase will do, how a rhythm will end. Thus, even in our brief example we see how, in listening to music, our experience may remain in the present – it can’t do otherwise – but our attention is split between the past and the future. The past gives the present meaning, tells us what we’re hearing, and allows us to listen for the future. But the future remains always unsure – at least until the piece ends – and thus we keep guessing what will come of our present.
The usefulness of this aesthetic attention to music, then, is that is listening to music and letting our temporal experience of music speak to us, we gain insight into the way Dasein always already is. We are better attuned to how our lives are always in the present, but always constituted by the past, and oriented toward a future. Just as music is a pleasing tension between the known and the unknown, ever on a knifes edge, so is our being at once sure and unsure. Perhaps music lets us hear our being more clearly.
