Fifth International Conference
Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts
June 15-17, 2013, Lincoln, UK
Keynote
Newcastle University
Music and consciousness – high and low
What is it that understanding music can most distinctively offer to understanding consciousness? One way to answer this might be to re-phrase the question as a hypothesis: that to know music is, in some distinctive way, to know being – which resonates with the notion that to be conscious is to know being.
This is one register in which the issue can be broached – the grand philosophical narratives of ontology and phenomenology (in which figures such as Heidegger are salient). On the other hand there’s also the thought that for human beings being is social; and that music might also invoke – and help us re-imagine – a consciousness of the everyday.
What if one is interested in both of these registers? In this talk, I want to explore such polarities, and the possible ironies that emerge from them. Some of my examples come from the later works of British twentieth-century composer Michael Tippett, for whom, in true Romantic fashion, the transcendental and the ironic often went hand in hand. Like him, I’ll consider whether music (and sound) might afford an opening on to a deeper consciousness – a deeper knowing of being. And, in a spirit akin to his own, I’ll consider a popular song or two, asking, along with Peggy Lee, ‘Is that all there is?’
All of this begs the question of consciousness studies’ relations with the academy, which might (to some extent understandably) tend to limit inquiry to a safe middleground. On the one hand, there is a tendency to be wary of the full ontological implications of the meaning of consciousness – a caution around discourses that might invoke the spiritual. On the other hand, consciousness studies linked to music and the arts might tend to favour the ‘higher’ practices – ‘art music’, ‘literature’, ‘fine art’ – marginalising their vernacular incarnations and their different attitudes to being. It is perhaps by maintaining rather than dissolving these tensions within aesthetic and disciplinary registers that the most productive way forward lies. Or, failing that, it may just be interesting to juxtapose some divergent objects of inquiry for a period and see what transpires.