A Critical Phenomenology of Music

“From a musician’s perspective, Rachel Elliott provides brilliant phenomenological descriptions of the ways listening to and playing music shape the habitual body and the body schema. In so doing she shows how the interplay of bodies and worlds through musical engagement is a creative endeavor that has social and political implications.”

—Helen A. Fielding, Professor, Philosophy/Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Western University, Canada

“This fascinating book explores mysteries at the edge of consciousness and our body through a phenomenology of music. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body schema emerges as central to music. Music in turn illuminates this vital concept. At stake are transformative possibilities for meaning making.”

—Cynthia Willett, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy, Emory University, author of Interspecies Ethics (2014)

“A Critical Phenomenology of Music makes an important contribution to the burgeoning fields of critical phenomenology and embodied music cognition. Elliott’s rich analysis of often-hidden connections between music, the lived body, power, and identity develops a novel framework for understanding how musical experiences shape our bodily engagement with the world. A vital read for those interested in the transformative power of music.”

—Joel Krueger, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Exeter, UK

Drawing a link between music and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the habit body – a quasi-transcendental structure at the heart of our perceptual, social, and agential being – this book helps articulate why music has the power to express as well as shape our existence at a fundamental level. Using phenomenology, research in the cognitive sciences, and first-person descriptions of musical experiences, this book addresses topics such as the relationship of music to identity, the capacity of music to be personally and socially transformative, the role of music in our perception of others, the connection between music and trauma, and the possibility of engendering we-experiences through shared musical time.

Rachel Elliott is a Doctoral Lecturer in Philosophy at CUNY, College of Staten Island, in New York City. This is her first book.