phenomenology
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Lessons From Italo Calvino’s “Reading A Wave”
If I were a fictionalist, I would write in the analytical-introspective manner of Italo Calvino (1923-1985). In Calvino’s novel Mr. Palomar, we follow one man’s attempts to increase his inner awareness by increasing his consciousness of his surroundings. Mr. Palomar is a practicing phenomenologist who tries to understand the world through all of its perceived details Continue reading
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Owning The Phenomenal World: Jeong Kwan On Creativity
“Creativity and ego cannot go together. If you free yourself from the comparing and jealous mind, your creativity opens up endlessly. Just as water springs from a fountain, creativity springs from every moment. You must not be your own obstacle. You must not be owned by the environment you are in. You must own Continue reading
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On Resonant Thoughts: Sarah Bakewell’s “At The Existentialist Cafe”
“This experiential music is the one I can speak about with certainty.” – Sarah Bakewell, At The Existentialist Cafe, p. 41. “If I want to tell you about a heart-rending piece of music, phenomenology enables me to describe it as a moving piece of music, rather than as a set of string vibrations and mathematical Continue reading
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Merleau-Ponty On The Organist
In his treatise on phenomenology, Phenomenology of Perception, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes compellingly on the role of our bodies in our experience of the world. Merleau-Ponty touches on musical experience here and there, so of course I blazed through the book in search of those heres and theres to see what he had Continue reading
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On Peter Mendelsund’s “What We See When We Read”
Peter Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read: A Phenomenology With Illustrations is a remarkable study of perception in the experience of reading. Just his book’s title suggests, Mendelsund explores what exactly it is that we “see” in our minds eye when we read. It’s an interesting question or set of questions really–What do we Continue reading
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On Presence And Perception
“When I look at the world now, my posture is not one of focus but rather of attention.” – Robert Irwin At the heart of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name Of the Thing One Sees (1982/2009), Lawrence Weschler’s biography of the artist Robert Irwin, are two intertwined and reoccurring ideas: presence and perception. Irwin (1928-), Continue reading
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Notes On Another Kind of Wonder: A Phenomenology Of Remixing
“I confronted the tradition directly as a sound form and kinesthetic activity, and made it my own in an act of appropriation that transformed me, my self, into something I hadn’t been before, a person capable of playing in this tradition with at least minimal competence.” – Timothy Rice, “Toward a Mediation of Field Methods and Continue reading
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On Leanne Shapton’s “Swimming Studies”
“Swimming is my disembodied youth, yet I am rapidly becoming the embodied present.” — Swimming Studies, (187) Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton is one of the more poetically precise and evocative non-fiction books I’ve read in a while. It’s a meditative memoir consisting of a series of autobiographical vignettes, illustrations, and photographs that explore the author’s experience Continue reading
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Real/Fake Drumming On A Fake/Real Keyboard: Thinking About Virtual Musicianship
The photo is me–playing a percussion part on the keyboard. This is one of the stranger wonders of the digital turn in music over the past quarter century: triggering sounds with instruments or controllers that themselves have nothing to do with those sounds. I don’t mind playing drums on the keyboard though. In fact, I’ve Continue reading
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Intangible Things: On Victor L. Wooten’s “The Music Lesson”
New Age : “an eclectic group of cultural attitudes arising in late 20th century Western society that are adapted from those of a variety of ancient and modern cultures, that emphasize beliefs (as reincarnation, holism, pantheism, and occultism) outside the mainstream, and that advance alternative approaches to spirituality, right living, and health” Victor L. Wooten’s Continue reading
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