Sound and the Aesthetics of Play: A Musical Ontology of Constructed Emotions

133 Pages·2018·1.33 MB·English

by  Justin Christensen (auth.)

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN SOUND
Series Editor: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
SOUND AND
THE AESTHETICS
OF PLAY
A Musical Ontology of
Constructed Emotions
Justin Christensen
Palgrave Studies in Sound
Series editor
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Palgrave Studies in Sound is an interdisciplinary series devoted to the topic
of sound with each volume framing and focusing on sound as it is concep-
tualized in a specific context or field. In its broad reach, Studies in Sound
aims to illuminate not only the diversity and complexity of our under-
standing and experience of sound but also the myriad ways in which sound
is conceptualized and utilized in diverse domains. The series is edited by
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, The Obel Professor of Music at Aalborg
University, and is curated by members of the university’s Music and Sound
Knowledge Group.
Editorial Board: Editorial Committee:
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Michael Bull
(series editor) Barry Truax
Martin Knakkergaard Trevor Cox
Mads Walther-Hansen Karen Collins
Kristine Ringsager
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/series/15081
Justin Christensen
Sound and the
Aesthetics of Play
A Musical Ontology of Constructed Emotions
Justin Christensen
Music & Sound Knowledge Group
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Palgrave Studies in Sound
ISBN 978-3-319-66898-7 ISBN 978-3-319-66899-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66899-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962129
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A
cknowledgements
Following the spirit of Gadamer’s development of ideas through dia-
logue, this book has developed through many discussions and dia-
logues, with insights gained from colleagues, friends, and family. As a
result, I owe a great deal of thanks to many people for helping make
this possible. First of all, I would like to thank my interviewees
Cassandra Miller, Miguelángel Clerc, and Steve Potter, whose ideas on
their compositional practice have not only provided me with concreti-
zations of many of the abstract concepts explored in this book, but
their ideas on their practices have helped me to better express some of
the ideas in this book.
Next, I would like to thank Mark Grimshaw for asking me to write this
book as part of his sound series. Furthermore, I would like to thank Mark
and my other colleagues at the Music and Sound Knowledge (MaSK)
Group at Aalborg University, who have been a great support during my
past three years in the department. These members of MaSK include
Martin Knakkergaard, Mads Walther-Hansen, Hans-Peter Gasselseder,
Kristine Ringsager, Maria Kallionpaa, and Jonathan Weinel.
There are also a number of others at Aalborg University that I need to
thank. I would like to thank Brian Bemman for his thoughtful comments
and help. I would also like to thank David Meredith and Gissel Velarde in
the Music Informatics and Cognition Group for their stimulating discus-
sions on music cognition. Similarly, I would like to thank the Centre for
Cultural Psychology and their kitchen seminar for their valuable feedback
and stimulating discussion.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As these ideas have been percolating for some time, I would like to
thank a number of friends for their valuable input over the years. This
includes Emlyn Stam (who has kindly read and given comments to numer-
ous papers of mine over the years), Graham Flett, Elliot Simpson, Ezequiel
Menalled, and Christian Karlsen, among many others. Finally, I have to
thank my parents and my family in general for their support over so many
years.
c
ontents
1 T he Aesthetics of Play 1
2 Musical Emotions 39
3 The Dynamic Autonomous Artwork 67
4 Modes of Affective and Aesthetic Experience 89
5 Conclusions 119
Index 125
vii
CHAPTER 1
The Aesthetics of Play
Abstract In this chapter, I present an introduction to Gadamer’s aesthet-
ics, a leading approach to aesthetics in the phenomenological tradition.
Influenced by Heidegger, Gadamer is interested in how art impacts our
experiences in the world, through mutually dependent disclosures and
hiddennesses. These disclosures not only disclose themselves but also
reveal the presence of the hidden or unfathomable, which draw us into the
game of the aesthetic experience. This awareness of the hidden requests an
active participation from us as listeners, and asks that we submit to the
proposed rules of the game. It also further asks for an immersion into the
game of the aesthetic experience that our consciousness does not control
nor fully anticipate, allowing us to be potentially changed by the game.
Keywords Phenomenology • Gadamer • Hermeneutics • Primacy of
play • Aesthetic experience
1.1 Play
Through history, play has generally found legitimation in being a place for
“kids to be kids”, and as an antidote to the goal-driven doing (praxis) and
making (poesis) that is often seen as a purpose for life. As a result, other than
the hedonic value that it offers in making learning more enjoyable, play has
been frequently presented as having no utility on its own. One of the defi-
nitions of Play in the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED) is that play
© The Author(s) 2018 1
J. Christensen, Sound and the Aesthetics of Play, Palgrave Studies in
Sound, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66899-4_1
2 J. CHRISTENSEN
is of the “[s]enses relating to recreation, pleasure, and enjoyment”, having
sub-entries of play as “[t]o engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation
rather than for a serious or practical purpose; to amuse or divert oneself”
and “[t]o pretend to be, represent, or imitate as a game or for fun” (2017).
Although views on play have been changing through the past century,
numerous thinkers through history have suggested that play is merely care-
free phantasy and frivolous nonsense, an escape from reality, or an interrup-
tion from the continuity of our purposive lives (Fink et al. 1968).
As the major motivating factor for play is the intrinsic motivation of
play itself, it quickly contrasts itself from other human activities whose
goals are external to themselves. It is likely this stark contrast from work
that has relegated play to its limited role in life as a periodic antithesis. I
will argue here that this is a misunderstanding of the ontology of play, and
that play performs a major role in both childhood and social development.
Similarly, I will propose later in this chapter that aesthetic play (a back and
forth of presentation and reception between a performance and an audi-
ence) has potentials for self-unconcealment, the disclosure of aspects of
one’s own being that occurs while the art event presents itself. Throughout
our life, aesthetic play also generally resists against the fading of our expe-
riences into habituated action, a forgetting of our being. Selectively fight-
ing against this forgetting of being is important in that it allows us to
adapt to new situations and to understand novel stimuli.
Huizinga has proposed that through history “a certain play-factor was
extremely active all through the cultural process and … it produces many
of the fundamental forms of social life” (2009, 173), concluding that civi-
lization “does not come from play like a babe detaching itself from the
womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it” (2009, 173; emphasis
in original).
Another definition of play in the OED is that play is of the “[s]enses
relating to movement, exercise, and activity”, with sub-entries of play as
“[t]o exercise or occupy oneself, to be engaged with some activity”, or
“[o]f a living being: to move about swiftly, with a lively, irregular, or capri-
cious motion”, or “[t]o move, revolve, or oscillate freely, esp. within a
definite space”, or “[o]f a thing: to move briskly or lightly, esp. with alter-
nating or irregular motion” (2017). Similarly, the etymology of play likely
comes from pleyen, which means “to dance, leap for joy, rejoice, be glad”
(2017). Related to this, play is crucial in the juvenile development of most
mammals and birds, and continues into adulthood in a few species such as
primates, elephants, cetaceans, and parrots (Behncke 2015). As these spe-