Joe Friedman

This essay investigates an established question in the philosophy of music: whether, and in what respect, music may express narratives. However, this essay departs in two essential respects from traditional treatments of the question. First, the jazz tradition instead of European art music is used as the primary source material. Second, instead of merely posing the question of whether music can harbor a narrative, this essay is oriented by what it argues is a common experience of “narrative flavor” in music – the feeling of having heard a story in non-representational sound. The essay seeks to account for the experiential givenness of “narrative flavor” with the assistance of contemporary philosophical work on narrative and musicological work on improvisation and musical motion. Working with a minimalist definition of narrative that requires the representation of two or more events that are temporally ordered and causally connected, music is found to be able to satisfy the second and third conditions. However, the questionable representation capacities of music lead to the conclusion that music cannot, in the strict sense, harbor a narrative. The experience of narrative flavor is explained with reference to J. David Velleman’s concept of emotional cadence, Brian Harker’s work on structural coherence in improvisation, and Patrick Shove and Bruno Repp’s work on the perception of musical motion. These sources are utilized to demonstrate that improvisations can be structured so as to give the listener the impression of having heard a story by initiating and carrying out an emotional cadence.

This dissertation engages the questions and methodologies of phenomenology, the philosophy of culture, the philosophy of music and ethnomusicology in order to investigate the significance of music in human life. The systematic orientation of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms provides the overarching framework that positions the approach in chapter one. Following Cassirer, art in general and music in particular are not regarded as enjoyable yet dispensable pastimes, but rather as fundamental ways of experiencing the world as intuitive forms and sensations. Establishing the ontological significance of music entails unpacking the sui generis experience of time, space and subjectivity that characterize the musical experience.Phenomenology, in particular the thought of Alfred Schütz, provides a point of departure for thinking more concretely about the musical experience. The turn to phenomenology is motivated both by its systematic consanguinuity [sic] with Cassirer’s project as well as its insistent focus on the details of lived experience. However, bolstered by what is argued to be a more holistic description of the musical experience gleaned from the work of ethnomusicologists, Schütz’s phenomenological account of the music is challenged on a number of key issues such as music’s ontological status and the tendency to equate “music” with “musical works.”Despite the blind spots of his writings on music, Schütz’s phenomenology of the social world proves to be a useful framework for thinking about the multiplicity of ways in which music is experienced as meaningful and how the equivocality of the concept of musical meaning brings the social nature of the musical experience into view. Sociality also figures into a discussion of improvisation, an important theme that has only relatively recently begun to receive philosophical attention. Arguing that an adequate philosophical treatment of music must account for both the variety of musical cultures as well as the variety of musical practices, a consideration of improvisation helps philosophy think outside of the work-paradigm that was critiqued in chapter two.