Music as episteme, text, sign & tool

Using as its major tool post-Husserlian phenomenology and poststructural theory, the first chapter attempts to redefine ‘music’ not as a thing to be examined and dissected, but a way of interfacing with what I define as “sensual knowledge”, functioning ultimately to influence how we experience reality. Music is more than this alone, and the chapters following the first attempt to come closer to individual performances. The major point of departure is viewing musical experience as a complex type of cultural sign; here a ‘sign’ is not necessarily a specified object or idea, but something which signifies (creates meaning) for someone. This musical sign is placed in a different light in each of these chapters, and the object of analysis moves from the static musical object to the dynamic process of musical performance; the significance of the musical sign is revealed to exist as much in its creation as its material form (as far as it has one). One of the major themes of the work is the investigation of the way ‘musicality’ can be experienced by all the senses. I define this as the ‘multimediality’ of musical processes and the ‘multisensoriality’ of human musical experience. Other major topics include the notion of the embedded and the embodied ‘musical sign’. Here the sign is considered in terms of its semiosis in an ‘embedded’ (fully contextualised) environment and in terms of its ‘embodiment’ in human physicality. The whole first section is devoted to the discussion of an epistemology based on a transferral from product- to process-based thinking, representing a realisation of the importance of the dynamics of a contextualised and embedded situation to all processes of human semiosis. This study is intended to criticise and suggest alternatives to existing approaches to musicality. It is not intended to present a single allencompassing solution to a problematic, restrictive paradigm stuck deeply in the confines of structuralism; it is rather intended to provide another set of options.