The Experience of Profundity in Music

Abstract

If any generalization can be made about music (and I believe many can be made), surely the one articulated by Francis Sparshott would qualify as defining one of music's essential characteristics-"that it is more nearly true of music than it is of anything else that it offers an alternative reality and an alternative way of being."1 A compendium of claims that have been made for the power of music to alter the reality of human experience and to alter humans' way of being, as Sparshott believes it can, would fill several very large volumes, as would descriptions of instances in which music has done just that. Such volumes would include material from sociology, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, philosophy in most of its branches-including, of course, aesthetics-history, religion, linguistics, musicology, psychoanalysis, cognitive science as it has recently emerged, physiology, and no doubt numerous other fields from which insights could be gained. There is good reason for this remarkable breadth of thought relevant to the unusual power of music to transform human experience. This power reaches to the very roots of the human condition-that humans are conscious of their individual and collective existence in a world both including them and transcending them, on which they are dependent for life and meaning and to which they contribute life and meaning. Music is, in a certain sense, only one of a multitude of demonstrations of the subject-object interplay that characterizes human reality. But in another sense, music is a remarkably vivid and concentrated instance of the self-within-the-world human condition. Perhaps more fully than any other endeavor, music manifests selfness for the sheer sake of the human need to demonstrate