Music-making intentionality: I move, therefore the world sounds

Abstract

This article aims to carry out a phenomenological analysis of musical performance. The phenomenological method investigates how things appear to consciousness. In this sense, the study seeks to understand how the act that gives life to a musical work appears to consciousness. Music-making intentionality is complex and made up of other intentionalities. From the point of view of musical performance, the object is always intersensory, situated and experienced by the body itself and by the music-making self. Music-making intentionality encompasses tactile, motor, auditory (internal and external), visual and temporal intentions in a single unit. Husserl's phenomenological analysis of time helped to differentiate objective time, musical time and immanent time. The proposal for a phenomenological reduction highlighted musical intentionality together with the threefold aspect of immanent time, in its retention, primordial impression and protension. The starting point for the reduction was the piano. Each musical instrument has its own availability or handling, which requires other reductions. On the one hand, there is the infinite diversity of musical ideas (variable), on the other hand, in all musical performances, the music-manking intentionality is always a unity of auditory, temporal and tactile-motor intentions (invariable). “I move, therefore the world sounds” is a synthetic motto that applies to any musical instrument and any performance.