Music and Musical Prayer

Rationalism, Empiricism, Idealism

• Rationalism - Reasoning is the source of truth. 

• Empiricism - Knowledge comes from the senses. 

• Idealism - art is ultimately a product of the mind. 

Referentialism

Music's value comes from what the music points to rather than the music itself.

Formalism ("Absolute Formalism")

• Music's value likes within the music itself, and that it's primarily intellectual. 

Expressionism (Expressivism)

• Music can express the composer's, performer's, and/or audience's emotions.

• Music may inherently express an emotion based on how it's put together. 

Symbolism

• Music's importance comes from what it could symbolize beyond itself. 

• Susanne Langer - "music can reveal the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach." [music can serve as an auditory semblance of a feeling, text]

• Jean-Jacques Nattiez - "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined--which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely consensus."

Phenomenology

• Focusing on the lived, bodily, in-the-moment experiences of engaging with music.

Pragmatism - "practical consequences"

• One might think of this as the "scientific method" in our everyday lives.

• "Thus, it is still in the human body that music becomes incarnate, but in a body disciplined by the instrument, obliged to submit to long training in order to become the instrument of an instrument." (Mikel Dufrenne)

• Thomas Clifton

  • Music time is felt time, not clock time, it's temporality creates its own bodily lived experience of time. 

  • Music space is inseparable from time. 

  • Feeling is at the core of musical experiences and involves full possession and absorption into the musical experience. At the same time, there is a constant relationship between feeling and reflective understanding.

• Eleanor Stubley

  • Listening to music is not necessarily the most important way to experience music. 

Social Philosophy

• Music's value comes from how various cultures create and/or interpret it.

• Music helps us perceive and (eventually) understand the social and political world around us. 

Postmodernism

• There is no one pervasive truth... about anything. 

• "Whose reality do you mean?" 

• "Which truth do you  mean?"