Articles & Essays Book Reviews Creative Writing
Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Volume 18 Number 1, April 2017
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Hodgkinson, Tim. Music and the myth of wholeness: toward a new aesthetic paradigm. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016. 264 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-03406-7 (hardcover).
Reviewed by
Valparaiso University
In any philosophical or semantic examination of music, there is always a unique perspective that results from a combination of education, experiences, and musical background. Such is the case with the author of this book, whose knowledge and experiences within ethnomusicology are mixed with social anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and personal music-making. In the preface, the author documents his own personal angst regarding music in his life, music as spiritual activity, music in the world at large, and music outside of the norms of traditional Western music. When cybernetics and theoretical biology readings are brought into the mix, an ontology of sorts is posited through which the author is able to guide the reader into various discourses in the book.
Three types of subjectivity are articulated for this activity: the locutionary, centered around language; the sintonic, based on sensory experience; and the oneiric, which involves dreams and dreaming. All three of these subjectivities play parts in symbols and rituals in human society, and Part I of this book (Chapters 2 to 10) moves through various discourses and discussions on these intersections. The author articulates various ethno-musical, shamanic, and ritual experiences to examine information (Chapter 2), semantics to imagination (Chapter 3), subjectivication (Chapter 4), dreams and the oneiric subject (Chapter 5), imagination space (Chapter 6), the topography of culture (Chapter 7), discourse as cultural phase (Chapter 8), the sacred as cultural phase (Chapter 9), and art as cultural phase (Chapter 10).
Part II of the book (Chapters 11 to 13) is a criticism of Lawrence Kramer’s idea of music as text and musical listening as an interpretation of that text. From the author’s point of view, the heart of the musical listening experience has nothing to do with interpretation but with a suspension of belief, more to do with ritual and participation than with understanding. Chapter 11 attempts to construct this “other” into a materialist ontology of art, while Chapter 12 is a number of essays on listening and listening experiences. Some of the titles of these essays are quite informative: “On the sensations of tone” “Your you versus your brain” “Hamburg, January 2010” “The fifteenth quartet” and “Ut at the Luminaire.” The book then focuses on three modern composers and their work in relation to this new aesthetic: John Cage and the wandering subject, Pierre Schaeffer and the sonorous object, and Helmut Lachenmann and the learning subject.
In the final chapter, the author reiterates the operative aspects of a new aesthetic and frames it within two discussions in different fields: the autonomy of art in other cultures as exemplified by the works of Steven Feld and Ted Levin, and within the relatively new field of embodied and enactive aesthetics. In the end, the author calls for artists to get away from focusing on product and to focus on process; of immersing themselves as humans in the sensory and ritualistic aspects of art- and music-making rather than some societal institution or by-product of the artistic experience.