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Ostension: Tracing a Path to a Communicative Music

Research Proposal for Dissertation (Option 1)


William Pearson
Order of Contents

Statement of Purpose 1
Project Background 2
Literature Review 4

Research Gaps 10
Research Objectives 12
Research Methodology 13

Timeline 15
Chapter Outline 17
Significance of Project 18

Bibliography 19
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Statement of Purpose

How can music be genuinely communicative? My dissertation (option one) is geared

towards articulating one such waya view defined by ostension and its role in infant language

acquisitionand subsequently defending and demonstrating its artistic, and especially musical,

utility. To do this, I will begin by summarizing some recent defenses of the communicative across

diverse artistic media, drawing on a large and interdisciplinary swath of literature, and making

connections between literary theory, visual art criticism, film theory, analytic philosophy, and

aesthetics. A focused investigation of the dialectic surrounding music in particular will follow,

revealing how the musical art form raises unique communicative issues for composers,

performers, listeners, music theorists, and philosophers of music. Ostension (and auxiliary

concepts like joint presence and enactive perception), I will then argue, provides a particularly promising

answer to these uniquely musical issues, in part because it involves the embodiment of human

intentions (fundamental to communication) in physical movement (fundamental to musical

performance). If ostension is powerful enough to allow infants to enter into language for the first

time, it should also be a promising tool for artistic communicators, especially within those art

forms, like music, to which physical movement is ubiquitous. Finally, having laid out a case for

and the possibilities of an ostension-based view of communicative music, I will use this view to

describe my own compositional practice, and to analyze selections from Helmut Lachenmanns

Ein Kinderspiel and Gyrgy Kurtgs Jatekok.

Project Background

A communicative view of art requires sufficiently robust expressive and interpretive junctures.

That is, a communicative artwork must be able to retain the expressed intentions of the artist in
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such a way that they might be successfully recovered, and subsequently interpreted, by a

beholder. Debates regarding the possibility or desirability of recovering artistic intention in

artworks are centuries old, but recent books from visual art historians and critics Todd Cronan

and Michael Fried articulate similarly shaped defenses of the necessity of these robust

communicative junctures in visual artworks. Both Cronan and Fried take aim at artworks which

aspire to a mechanistic or causal relationship with the beholder and both prescribe similar

remedies that function to grant a degree of autonomy to the artwork, allowing for the possibility

of a genuine understanding or misunderstanding the artwork by the beholder. Many worries, however,

spring from such a view, especially a concern that in eschewing affect, Cronan and Fried neglect

something crucial about the experience of artworks. This basic problemthe difficulty of

imagining communicative artworks which are sufficiently open to experience and understandingis

especially exacerbated, I will argue, by the idiosyncrasies of the musical art-form, leading to a

turn away from the communicative in music.

For example, instead of a focus on the interpretive or expressive dimensions of artworks,

musical debates in the last century have been particularly fixated on an ontological view of

artworks. In the last decade or so, analytic philosophers of music like Julian Dodd, Jerrold

Levinson, and Ben Caplan, have been having vibrant debates explicitly regarding issues of

musical work ontology. In the realm of music theory, Dimitri Tymoczko and Fred Lerdahl have

also tended to approach musical works as objects, either by seeking causally relevant

explanations1 of musical mechanism, or by attempting to create theoretical constructs which

model the cognitive structures underlying musical perception.2 Such an ontological focus has

1 Dimitri Tymoczko, Basket Cases, Music Theory Spectrum 34.1 (2012): 153-154.
2 Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, The capacity for music: What is it, and whats special about it? Cognition 100.1
(2006): 33-72.
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not been confined to theorists, either, but can be seen as central to many of the most prominently

articulated contemporary compositional practices: the sonic object of the electroacoustic

tradition, Milton Babbitts view of the composer-specialist, spectral analysis, and the relatively

new musical genre of sonification. Even some practices which appear to be oriented toward

interpretive or expressive dimensionsSteve Reichs gradual process or John Cages Zen-influenced

non-intentionalismare, I will argue, also ontologically oriented at heart.

That so many recent musical conversations are dominated by the ontological orientation

is due, I believe, to certain idiosyncrasies of the musical art form itself. I will define four such

idiosyncrasies: musics many communicative junctures (composer to score, score to performer,

performer to instrument, sound to audience, etc.), the unique pull of abstraction in music, musics

passive listener problem, and finally, musics unique relationship to conventional and syntactical views of

language. These four musical idiosyncrasies all contribute, I will argue, to a deep skepticism in

music regarding the possibility of artistic communication, and thus encourage a turn toward the

ontological, an orientation disconnected from communicating subjects. To reiterate, the

prevalence of ontological orientations in music can be understood as the result of an acutely felt

failure to address general communicative problems. As one example, consider how musics many

communicative junctures make the task of reliably carrying the intentions of the composer through

each of these juncturesfrom the composers mind, to written score, to performer, to audience

incredibly difficult. Furthermore, imagine that, in light of this difficulty, a composer were to

turn to language for an answer, rightfully thinking that language is our most secure method of

reliable communication across media. When this turn to language also failsas it does, I will

argue, in two ways: conventionally and syntacticallythe stasis and tangibility of the ontological

category becomes all the more attractive.


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All of this is to say that the task of the contemporary composer wishing to communicate

with her music is especially daunting, as is that of the performer or audience member hoping to

interpret such a communicative act. In fact, the composers and the interpreters tenuous position is

analogous, I will argue, to that of the pre-linguistic infant who must find her way into language

for the first time, an achievement both staggering and ubiquitous. This analogy, along with a defense

of its deep musical utility, lies at the very center of my dissertation. My argument will be that the

same powerful toolostensionwhich allows the infant to accomplish this incredible task can

also be invaluable for musical communication and, by extension, for musical analysis.

Literature Review

In his book Against Affective Formalism, Todd Cronan, using Henri Matisses creative life as a

guide, investigates how works of art are meaningful and how that meaning might be conveyed.3

At the heart of Cronan's book is a critique of affective or beholder response theories, under which the

experience of the beholder of the work is identical to the works meaning. Instead, Cronan favors

a theory centered on artist intentions. (A view similar to the kind Cronan criticizes has been put

forward in musical terms by both Stephen Davies and Eric Shouse. The former argues that

musical expression is dependent on listener response,4 while the latter claims music as

exemplary of explicitly non-communicative, affective 5 transmission.) For Cronan, artistic

communication is not possible under anti-intentional or affective theories, as it is the artistic object,

not the artist, which interacts with the beholder under such views. This critique of object-oriented

3 Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
4Stephen Davies, "On Defining Music, Monist 95.4 (2012): 535-55 and Stephen Davies, Musical Works and
Performances (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001).
5 Eric Shouse, "Feeling, Emotion, Affect, M/C Journal 8.6 (2005).
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ontological in my formulationtheories of art is echoed in art critic and historian Michael

Frieds work on the visual arts, particularly in his seminal essay Art and Objecthood.6

Frank Farrell makes a similar argument regarding artistic meaning in his book, Why Does

Literature Matter? Farrells concern lies not with affective formalism, but with the linguistic turn, a

philosophical orientation which regards texts as meaningful only in how they relate to other texts.

Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson, Farrell argues that meaning in literature

and poetry requires a more complex triangulation of relationshipsbetween self, text, and the

external worldthan the linguistic-centered view allows. As with Cronan, the upshot of Farrells

argument is the preservation and enrichment of meaning in intentionally-saturated artistic

communication, contrasted with a flattening out of meaning which occurs when artworks are

detached from subjects or from the world, and seen merely as an intertextual web.7

In the last two decades there has been a marked resurgence of analytic philosophy of

music. One frequent contributor to this literature is Julian Dodd, who, in his book Works of Music:

An Essay in Ontology and many related journal articles, has defended musical Platonism.8 (Peter

Kivy also defends a version of musical Platonism.)9 Dodds Platonism is motivated by the

problem of multiplicity in musical performance. The problem of multiplicity can be described in

this way: there have been countless performances of Beethovens Eroica, each of them are

different, and so no single performance can simply be the work. Furthermore, it seems strange to

say that only the score is the work, or that the work is some amalgamation of performances and/

or scores. Dodds platonism solves the multiplicity problem by positing musical works as eternal,

6 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
7 Frank Farrell, Why Does Literature Matter? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
8Julian Dodd, Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Julian Dodd,
Confessions of an Unrepentant Timbral Sonicist, The British Journal of Aesthetics 50.1 (2009): 33-52.
9 Peter Kivy, Music, Language, and Cognition (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007).
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abstract types which can be instantiated in multiple varied tokens, like scores or

performances. The problem of multiplicity is nearly identical to what I have described as the

distinctly musical problem of many communicative junctures.

Other analytic philosophers have taken issue with Dodds platonism, preferring instead

creationist views which see works of art as necessarily tied to their creators. Some creationists view

musical works as abstract indicated types,10 other nominalist views see musical works as

concrete particulars,11 while still other action theorists see musical works as compositional

actions.12 While the vocabulary and methodology of analytic philosophy is unique, the rift

between creationism and platonism mirrors the arguments Cronan and Farrell are involved in:

between views which place special value in the expressive dimension (creationism, Cronans

intentionalism, Farrells non-linguistic meaning), and those which do not (affective formalism, the

linguistic turn, platonism).

The ontological focus of much of the recent analytic philosophy of music has also been

criticized from within that tradition as a psuedo-problem,13 a change of subject,14 and as

orthogonal to more pressing concerns.15 In the continental tradition, the philosopher Andrew

Bowie has also offered strong rebukes of an ontological approach in philosophy generally, and in

10 Jerrold Levinson, Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006).


11Andrew Kania, "Platonism vs. Nominalism in Contemporary Musical Ontology, in Art and Abstract Objects
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Stefano Predelli, "Against Musical Platonism, The British Journal of
Aesthetics 35.4 (1995): 338-50.
12David Davies, "The Primacy of Practice in the Ontology of Art, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67.2
(2009): 159-71. and David Davies, "Dodd on the 'Audibility' of Musical Works, The British Journal of Aesthetics 49.2
(2009): 99-108.
13James O. Young, The Ontology of Musical Works: A Philosophical Psuedo-Problem, Frontiers of Philosophy in
China 6.2 (2011): 284-297.
14 David Davies, Art as performance (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004).
15 Aaron Ridley, Against Musical Ontology, The Journal of Philosophy 100.4 (2003): 203-220.
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philosophy of music in particular. Drawing on his scholarship of German Idealist and Early

Romantic philosophy, Bowie suggests, that philosophy is actually not very good at establishing

the real nature of things and that, musics meaning might lie precisely in the fact that we

cannot say in words what it means.16 Robert Pippin, another scholar of German philosophy, has

suggested something similar regarding the mediums of film and painting, which he describes as

affording us a distinctive mode of pictorial self-understanding which is both irreducible to causal,

mechanistic explanations and irreplaceable by deferred (flattened, in Farrells terminology)

linguistic formulations.17 I will argue that ostension, itself pre-linguistic and yet firmly

communicative, offers a potential way of fleshing out the uncomfortably inarticulable

philosophical space both Bowie and Pippin point towards.

The most important piece of literature to this dissertation is Chad Engellands Ostension:

Word Learning and the Embodied Mind, which examines the difficult question of how infants learn

their very first words and the broad philosophical repercussions of understanding communication

in light of ostension.18 Drawing primarily on Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Augustine and

Aristotle, Engelland describes the crucial role that physical movement plays in conveying

intentions to pre-linguistic infants. Ostension, the embodiment of intention in movement, creates a

triangulation between infant, adult, and the objects in their shared environment which allows for

a joint presence necessary for language acquisition. The social nature of language acquisition

has been famously explicated by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in his Philosophical Investigations

described language as use, as grounded in the way we navigate our environment.19 Since then,

16 Andrew Bowie, Music, philosophy, and modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009).
17Robert B. Pippin, After the beautiful: Hegel and the philosophy of pictorial modernism (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 2015).
18 Chad Engelland, Ostension (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
19 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967).
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many philosophers have since picked up this language-as-use thread, including Donald

Davidson (who plays a large role in both Engellands and Farrells work), and more recently Barry

Stroud, who has attempted to elucidate the commonalities between Wittgenstein's and Davidsons

views, including explicit discussion on the role of ostension.20

Ostension has also been studied by cognitive scientists and psychologists. Several cognitive

scientists working at Lausanne University in Switzerland have conducted studies tracking self-

referential behaviors in pre-linguistic infants. They argue that the very first steps towards

acquiring language consist of ostensions toward oneself, which are made possible only in the

presence of others.21 Psychologist Adam Croom also argues for a Wittgensteinian view of

language acquisition which takes place within a socio-linguistic community. 22 Crooms work is

bolstered by several psychological studies, some involving infant word acquisition, others

involving perceptual learning, and still others measuring the effects of culture on the aesthetic

views of children. Developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasellos large body

of work on both infant language acquisition and great ape cognition will also contribute to the

psychological literature on ostension, providing insight into the differences between humans

linguistically-oriented physical movements and the non-linguistic physical/social activities of our

primate cousins.23 Andrea Schiavio and Simon Hffding, though they have not explicitly dealt

with ostension, have studied what they call interactive intentionality in musical performance by

20Barry Stroud, "Ostension and the Social Character of Thought, Philos Phenomenol Res Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 67.3 (2003): 667-74.
21
Christiane Moro, Virginie Dupertuis, Sandrine Fardel, and Olivia Piguet, "Investigating the Development of
Consciousness through Ostensions toward Oneself, Cognitive Development 36 (2015): 150-60.
22Adam M. Croom, "Aesthetic Concepts, Perceptual Learning, and Linguistic Enculturation, Integrative Psychological
and Behavioral Science 46.1 (2011): 90-117.
23 Michael Tomasello, Cultural Learning Redux, Child Development 87.3 (2016): 643-653.
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conducting qualitative interviews with the Danish String Quartet.24 Their findings lead them to

challenge current theories of Joint Musical Attention which suggest that interaction between

performers can best be understood as cognitive, as reducible to something happening in the

head. Schiavio and Hffding instead favor a theory which privileges the concrete (inter)actions

of the performers and their external surroundings.

Schiavio and Hffdings study, being so focused on intentionality and movement, has a

clear relationship to ostension. But the authors do not use this term, instead speaking of an

enactive account. The connection between ostension and enactive approaches can also be seen

in Alva Nos Action in Perception, a book which again involves a criticism of overly in-the-head or

mentalistic explanations of perception in favor of what he terms enactive perception. While

ostension has to do with how intentions are conveyed in movement, No argues that perception is

also predicated on movement. For No, perception is something one achieves, something one

does, not something that happens to or within someone.25 Nos and Engellands books both share

a debt to Maurice Merleau-Pontys, particularly his Phenomenology of Perception.26 For Engelland, it

is Merleau-Pontys concept of embodiment which is crucial, by which intentions are embodied in

movement, not merely inferred. For No, it is the importance of the body in Merleau-Ponty's

theory of perception that is crucial, particularly Merleau-Pontys famous observation that vision

is palpation with the look, that vision is much more like touch than is normally supposed as both

are predicated on sensorimotor knowledge. John McDowells work on the conceptual articulation

of perceptual experience also appears both in Nos and Engellands books, as well as playing a

24Andrea Schiavio, and Simon Hffding. "Playing Together without Communicating?" Musicae Scientiae 19.4 (2015):
366-88.
25 Alva No, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
26 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962).
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role in Farrells and Pippins.27 This will aid in connecting Nos enactive account back to the

broader artistic concerns broached at the beginning of this dissertation. Along those same lines,

No has also more recently written a book on art, positing that artworks are strange tools

which interrupt and reorganize our lives. 28 He sees art-making as akin to philosophy, as

preoccupied with the ways we are organized and with the possibility of reorganizing ourselves.

Embedding his artistic ontology within a lived context, Nos project is indebted to John Deweys

Art as Experience, in which he describes art as an interaction of an organic self with the world. 29

Research Gaps

As I see it, there are three gaps which exist in the current research surrounding my topic.

The first is the gap between the literature of recent analytic philosophy of music and the

literature which typically emanates from musicians and musical scholars. When musicians

interface with philosophy or aesthetics, they tend to look mostly to well-known continental

philosophers (Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida, etc.), and largely ignore recent analytic philosophy. I

hope to bridge this gap in my dissertation by demonstrating that, despite their very different

vocabularies and methodologies, analytic philosophers of music, continental philosophers, and

musicologists/music theorists are often making similar arguments regarding the nature of

musical works and how those works relate to composers and interpreters.

If, as I will argue, the art-form of music does indeed raise unique concerns regarding

artistic communication, it follows that we ought to be asking how one might go about

communicating with music. It seems reasonable to turn to the study of language for such

27 John Henry McDowell, Mind and World: with a new introduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
28 Alva No, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015).
29 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934).
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answers, and indeed, promising answers come in the form of ostension (the embodiment of

intention in physical movement) and auxiliary concepts like joint attention (how the world is shared

intersubjectively), and enactive perception (a theory that perception is also predicated on physical

movement). What makes ostension and these related concepts so promising as compositional

tools is threefold. First, ostension is potentially relevant to each of the many junctures of

communicative transfer found in musical performance: from the composers mind to the page,

from the page to the performer, from one performer to another, and from the performance to the

audience. Second, and relatedly, the substrate of ostensionphysical movementis native to

musical performance. Third, ostension is amphibious, fusing the causal (movement) with the

rational (intention), and allowing for the genuinely expressive or interpretive interactions in music

which are so often ignored in the ontologically-dominated musical discourse. This application of

ostension (and related concepts) to musical communication is the second research gap. Ostension

has been widely studied in regards to childhood language acquisition, but has not been discussed

at all, as far as I can tell, in relationship to musical communication or posited as a compositional

tool. Theories of enactive perception have been fleetingly discussed in terms of performers

interactions with each other, but never as equally relevant to other musical junctures, those

involving compositional expression or the active, interpretive achievement of the listener.

The third research gap follows from the second. Because ostension and its related

concepts have never been investigated as compositional tools, they have also never been used as

lenses for music-theoretical analysis. In the final section of my dissertation I plan to fill this gap by

describing ostension-based compositional strategies in my own work, and analyzing particular

works by Helmut Lachenmann and Gyrgy Kurtg in light of ostension.


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Research Objectives

My project thus has three research objectives. The first goal is to organize a large and

diverse swath of literature regarding the nature of art, to condense and clarify disparate

vocabularies found within that literature, to categorize schools of thought across different

disciplines, to excavate the various general views of subject-object interaction contained therein,

and to attempt to explain why literature about music in particular takes the shape it does. I will

address the following questions: What are the prominent dialectical fault-lines shared by analytic

philosophy of music, continental philosophy, aesthetics, art criticism, music theory, musicology,

etc.? To what extent can the vocabulary of these disparate disciplines be condensed and clarified?

Which broader views of subject-object interaction are these different views consistent with? What

are the distinguishing features of the conversation surrounding music in particular? What

accounts for these musical idiosyncrasies?

The second goal of my project is to describe and defend the musical relevance of

ostension. This will involve elucidating ostensions role in language acquisition and defending

enactive perception against contrasting mental-representational views. It will also involve

applying ostension to the unique problems of musical communication, and then re-examining

recent compositional in light of ostension. Relevant questions include: How does Ostension allow

the pre-linguistic infant to enter language? To what extent is perception predicated on movement

(or sensorimotor knowledge)? What role can ostension play in the many communicative junctures

of music? How does an ostensive approach to communication differ from a conventional or

syntactical approach? How do the roles of composer/performer/listener change in light of an

ostension-oriented view of communication? What other musical problems does the use of an

ostension-based communicative account in music solve, and how?


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My third and final goal is to apply ostension and its subsidiary concepts to analysis. This

will involve first detailing how I have introduced these concepts into my own compositional

thinking. Then, I will analyze particular pieces of music by Helmut Lachenmann and Gyrgy

Kurtg, and describe how the ostension-based approach differs from other traditional analytic

approaches. I will address these questions: How have I implemented these ideas in my own

music, and what have the challenges been? What is Lachenmanns relationship to movement in

his music? How can Lachenmanns use of performer movement be described as ostensive or

enactive? What is Kurtgs relationship to movement in his music? How does Kurtgs concept of

the trace relate to ostension? How does an ostension-shaped analytical strategy differ from

traditional theoretical approaches?

Research Methodology

Fulfilling my first goal will entail identifying a representative cross-section of literature

and summarizing this literature in order to extract relevant arguments. This literature will come

from the following categories: recent analytic philosophy of music, visual art criticism (drawn

from the work of Michael Fried and Todd Cronan), continental philosophy (with an emphasis on

work related to Merleau-Ponty), literary criticism and philosophy (especially as related to the

linguistic turn as described by Frank Farrell), and musicology and music theory. I choose these

categories (and the particular names attached to them) in part because they constitute a fairly

representative cross-section of artistic media, but also because they deal very directly with issues

the question of authorial intention, for examplewhich can be kept in play during subsequent

discussions surrounding ostension and enactive perception.


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In fulfilling my second goal, I will rely heavily on Chad Engellands Ostension and Alva

Nos Action in Perception and Strange Tools to define and defend those two intertwined concepts of

ostension and enactive perception, and how they can be construed musically. Several of

Engellands and Nos most important sources will also be investigated, including the work of

many names (Merleau-Ponty, Davidson, Wittgenstein) familiar from the literature review above.

In addition to these books, a selection of articles from cognitive science and psychology will be

brought in to flesh-out quantitatively the role of movement in language learning and in

perception.30 A study by Andrea Schiavio and Simon Hffding will also be referenced to

determine the extent to which movement is crucial to interactions between performing

musicians. 31

As my final goal is oriented towards analysis, primary sources will come into play in the

form of musical scores and composer interviews. Lachenmanns and Kurtgs words will be

assessed for ostensive or enactive language, and their notational practices will be compared in

light of this language.32 More specifically, Lachenmanns focus on movement in performance and

Kurtgs focus on movement in pre-compositional notation will be contrasted. With this contrast

in mind, I have selected Lachenmanns Ein Kinderspiel and Kurtgs Jatekok (Games) for analysis33.

Both of these works are for piano, making a comparative analysis of performative physicality

more feasible than one involving disparate instrumentations would be. Furthermore, both works

contain complicated and nuanced expressions of a child-like relationship to music, and thus point

30Moro, "Investigating the Development of Consciousness through Ostensions toward Oneself, 150-60 and
Croom, "Aesthetic Concepts, Perceptual Learning, and Linguistic Enculturation, 90-117.
31 Schiavio, "Playing Together without Communicating? 366-88.
32David Ryan and Helmut Lachenmann, Composer in Interview: Helmut Lachenmann, Tempo 210 (1999): 2024,
and Blint Andrs Varga, Gyrgy Kurtg: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages, Rochester: U of Rochester Press, 2009.
33Gyrgy Kurtg, Jatekok (Budapest: Edito Musica Budapest, 1979) and Helmut Lachenmann, Ein Kinderspiel
(Leipzig: Edition Breitkopf, 1980).
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strongly toward the core analogy of this entire project: that of the composer (and performer, and

audience member) as pre-linguistic child.

Timeline

I plan on defending my dissertation in the Spring of 2018 with the bulk of my research

and writing taking place during the Fall and Winter of the 2017-18 academic year. Both of my

Qualifying Exams have been passed; my Preliminary Exam will take place in September 2017.

At this point (September 2017) I have assembled an extensive bibliography. As my

dissertation involves culling a large swath of literature, there is quite a bit of reading involved,

and the lions share of this has been done. All of the books, articles, and essays that I need to

begin writing are already in my possession, and a copious amount of notes have been taken. I

have also written a number of papers over the last few years that are relevant to my topic. These

include a paper I wrote for philosophy professor Dan Korman debunking Julian Dodds musical

platonism, a presentation on Music and the Everyday which compares photographys and

musics relationships to the external world through Wittgenstinian and ostensive lenses, a paper

and a subsequent presentation on John Cages musical ontology, a paper on the music of Gyrgy

Kurtg involving both Michael Frieds and Todd Cronans critique of objecthood as well as Frank

Farrells critique of the linguistic turn, and a paper and presentation regarding how

eschatology fuels a connection between art-making and worldview.

The three sections of my paper reconciling diverse literatures on music, positing

ostension and enactive perception as musical tools, and analyzing music using these tools build

on each other, so I plan on writing my paper more or less in order and in three distinct phases.
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The first phase is currently in motion and will continue through the Fall of 2017. During

this time I have been rereading secondary literature in analytic philosophy, aesthetics, art

criticism and musicology, extracting and categorizing the views contained therein, and gradually

honing in on how the music-specific literature relates to the dialectic as a whole.

The second phase will take place during the winter of 2017, and will involve rereading

the literature regarding ostension and enactive perception, explaining these concepts, and then

defending a view that, in the context of musical performance, the composer, the performer, and

indeed the audience can be productively seen as analogous to the pre-linguistic infant. Ostension

and enactive perception will thus have to be redescribed in musical terms, and a practical

vocabulary will be developed for the compositional use of these concepts.

Finally, the third phase, taking place in the early months of 2018, will entail an analysis

of musical works by myself, Lachenmann, and Kurtg using the vocabulary developed in the

previous section. The words of these two composers will also be contextualized through primary

sources during this phase. As in the other phases, I have already begun work on this analysis as it

was included in my second Qualifying Exam last year. If time allows, I will also write a short

postscript suggesting how this view of the musical relevance of ostension has the potential to

shape artistic pedagogy as well as artistic political involvement.


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Chapter Outline

I. The Communicative in Art


A. Attempts at recovery
1. Cronan on Affect / Fried on Theatricality
2. Farrell on Phenomenological Literature
3. Pippin on Pictorial Understanding
4. Abbott on Cinematic Absorption
B. What does communicative art look like?
1. Pippin on (special) Aesthetic Understanding
2. No on Art as Strange Tool

II. Music and Communication


A. Four Musical Idiosyncrasies and the Exacerbation of Communicative Problems
1. The Many Communicative Junctures
2. The Failure of Conventional/Syntactical Linguistic Analogies
3. The Passive Listener Problem
4. The Pull of Abstraction
B. The lure of the ontological
1. In Music Theory
2. In Philosophy of Music
3. In Compositional Practice
C. Resistance to the Ontological
1. In Analytic Philosophy
2. Tiger Roholts Groove
3. Andrew Bowie and Alva No on Philosophical Art

III. The promise of Ostension


A. What is ostension?
1. Embodiment or Inference?
2. Joint Presence or Triangulation?
3. Ostension and Enactive Perception
B. Applying ostension to the Four Musical Idiosyncrasies
1. Physicality as substrate though Many Junctures
2. Amphibiousness instead of Abstraction
3. Communication without Convention/Syntax
4. Overcoming Passive Perception
C. Humility, Community, Learning and the metaphor of the pre-linguistic child

IV. Ostension as a Compositional and Analytical tool


A. Ostension as Compositional Tool
1. William Pearsons The Young Son
a) The lure of the ontological in Clepsydra
b) Sociality in tristis
c) Non-inferential communication in Half of My Life/Love
d) Joint Presence in a shadow is reading, In the corner over there
e) Embracing the metaphor in the young son and childrens piece #1
B. Ostension as Analytical Lens
1. Gyorgy Kurtags Jatekok
2. Helmut Lachenmanns Ein Kinderspiel

V. (Possible) Postscript on Pedagogy and Political Art


"18

Significance of the Project

First, it is my hope that this dissertation will provide a way for analytic philosophers of

music to better interface with musicians and scholars of music. Sadly, recent analytic literature on

philosophy of musicwith very few exceptionslacks meaningful connections with bonafide

musical practice. Likewise, musicians will also be provided with a way to connect with an oft-

ignored literature relevant to their practice.

Its also important to me that the musical contextualization of ostension has value apart

from its novelty, that ostension is not merely a helicoptered-in buzzword, but addresses a

fundamental musical issue with a solution native to the practice of music. When fashioned as a

musical tool, ostension provides a promising mode of inquiry into fundamental difficulties in

music composition, performance, and reception. Furthermore, it does so through the use of a

common substratephysical movementwhich is fundamental to musical performance already. Using

ostension as a compositional or analytic tool is thus as organic as it is radically unconventional.

Finally, as alluded to above, I believe that the communicative view afforded by ostension

has the potential to positively shape us not just as composers/performers/theoreticians, but as

pedagogues and as citizens. Pedagogically, ostension reminds us that learning is activeas Karl

Popper put it, knowledge is not a fluid that can poured from person to personand that it is

never-endingthere is no place of perfect knowledge that our students or that we will ever reach.

Like the grasping pre-linguistic child, we teachers should be curious, humble, and determined.

Wrought politically, ostension exists at the nexus of two extremes: conversation and violence.

There are nuances in between, of course, but the difference is stark, and there may be nothing

more consequential to the health of our polis than how we come to understand, and then

navigate, that difference. I believe that music can play a role in providing such understanding.
"19

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"20

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"21

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Musicology / Music Theory

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"22

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"23

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