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Music and consciousness: A continuing project

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DOI: 10.1177/1474022213514796

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Article
Arts & Humanities in Higher Education
2014, Vol. 13(1–2) 77–87
Music and consciousness: ! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1474022213514796
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David Clarke
International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University, UK

Eric Clarke
Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, UK

Abstract
If there is a topic on which the humanities might make a distinctive claim, it is that of
consciousness—an essential aspect of human being. And within the humanities, music
might make its own claims in relation to both consciousness and being human. To
investigate this connection, David Clarke and Eric Clarke brought together a wide
variety of contributors in the book Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological,
and Cultural Perspectives (OUP, 2011). The collection contributes to debates in con-
sciousness studies at large, but also maps out areas peculiar to music and consciousness.
Additionally, it lays bare the sheer multiplicity of discourses that emerges when con-
sciousness is approached from even a single field of inquiry, such as music. If this poses a
challenge for arriving at any agreed notion of consciousness (in relation to music or
otherwise), this instability is something that might be best embraced rather than
‘resolved’. While the study of music and consciousness affirms the importance of the
humanities, this is not to foreclose dialogue with scientific disciplines, even as this means
maintaining awareness of how the different discursive formations of the humanities and
sciences may connote different—and frequently incommensurable—sensibilities and
values.

Keywords
consciousness, culture, discourse, humanities, music, multidisciplinarity, neuroscience,
philosophy, psychology, science

*This paper is an updated adaptation of the Preface to Clarke and Clarke (2011).
Corresponding author:
David Clarke, International Centre for Music Studies, School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University,
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
Email: d.i.clarke@newcastle.ac.uk

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78 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 13(1–2)

Contexts
If ever there was a topic in which the humanities had a critical stake, it would be
that experience which is essential to being human, indeed which is ultimately syn-
onymous with humans’ knowing themselves: in a word, consciousness. And as if
that were not already a problematic enough concept, we have chosen to investigate
it through the lens of a discipline whose subject is no less elusive, and no less
definitive of humanity: music. Does this encounter promise stimulating new
debates and insights, or simply open up a Pandora’s box of further complication
and disagreement? While consciousness studies has become recognized as a legit-
imate academic discipline (evidenced by the establishment of such bodies as the
University of Arizona’s Center for Consciousness Studies and the Association for
the Scientific Study of Consciousness), it is one that is marked, maybe even defined,
by a remarkable degree of non-consensus. The jury seems still to be out regarding
even a basic definition of the term (to which fact a special issue of Journal of
Consciousness Studies entitled ‘Defining consciousness’ (Nunn, 2009) bears wit-
ness). Does consciousness mean something more than mere awareness? Does it
connote an awareness of self in the process (being aware of being aware), and
therefore should it be seen as distinct from sub-, non-, or unconscious mental
activity? Is it simply an attribute of mind, or is its material embodiment the
thing that really matters? More radically, does consciousness as we think we
know it actually exist in conformity with our most cherished intuitions about it?
Could it be that our experience and understandings of music might offer some
timely contribution to these unresolved debates—and perhaps suggest ways to
reorientate them? And equally might thinking about consciousness also suggest
new ways of thinking about music?
There would be a certain irony if the role of the arts and humanities in these
debates were merely to react to an agenda set by the scientific study of conscious-
ness, since the empirical sciences have been the most recent to arrive at the table.
Nevertheless, developments in the latter field have undoubtedly been responsible
for the recent resurgence of scholarly (and indeed popular) preoccupation with the
subject, which has in turn stimulated its growth as a major area of interdisciplinary
study—this at a time of increasing initiatives bent on exploring possible interfaces
between the arts and sciences. There is, then, a backstory here, one that broadly
defines the historical confluence from which our own, musically orientated, project
emerges, and one that is worth briefly rehearsing as a way of understanding the
project’s potential pertinence.
Where to pick up this story remains moot, but Güven Güzeldere (1997: 11–21)
helpfully indicates some milestones in the history of the term consciousness in
Western philosophy and psychology. Descartes’ early modern account of mind
as something distinct from body (res cogitans as opposed to res extensa) could
be viewed as foundational for modern formulations of consciousness, and for its
vicissitudes. William James’s radical-empiricist writings on consciousness around
the turn of the 20th-century, including his questioning of the concept—as in his
1904 essay, ‘Does consciousness exist? (published as James, 1912)—would be

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Clarke and Clarke 79

another touchstone. And a further salient historical moment could be located in the
early 1960s around the demise of behaviourism and its embargo on the category of
the mental, as something known only as private, subjective experience, and there-
fore not amenable to scientific inquiry. By contrast, the rise of cognitive psychology
in the 1960s was predicated on the possibility and necessity of writing subjective
experience back into the scientific study of the mind, establishing experimental
methods and theoretical models by which to understand the hidden mental appar-
atus of human perception, cognition, and action (e.g. Neisser, 1976; Miller et al.,
1960). Thus it became possible once again to talk legitimately about consciousness
within a scientific framework. Advances in neuroscience have marked another turn
in the consciousness debate, with technical developments in scanning (PET, fMRI,
MEG) providing increasingly sophisticated representations of what goes on in an
individual’s brain as they actually have an experience, taking the field one small
step nearer to that holy grail of being able to describe the brain states that are
coterminous with conscious experience—the so-called neural correlates of
consciousness.
Realizing such an aspiration depends not only on the technical challenges of
capturing the appropriate data, but also an appropriate epistemological framework
through which to interpret them. Not least among the existing theoretical problems
that neuroscientific approaches have made even more urgent is how to resolve the
dualism of brain and mind. Models variously put forward by philosophically
informed neuroscientists and psychologists (and neuroscientifically and psycho-
logically informed philosophers) such as Daniel Dennett, Antonio Damasio, and
Jeffrey Gray have posed important challenges to received assumptions about both
the status of consciousness and of the self that allegedly experiences it. Not all have
found these explanations persuasive or palatable; and the fact that even some at the
harder end of the scientific spectrum (e.g. Popper and Eccles, 1977) have been
reluctant to relinquish versions of dualistic thinking demonstrates that you do
not have to be a mysterian to believe that explanations of consciousness cannot
be reduced to accounts of neural processes alone.
Viewing these matters from a different discursive space, a cultural historian
might see them as pointing to a late phase in a crisis around materialism (or
physicalism) that has been on the cards at least since the enlightenment. To para-
phrase John Searle (1984) and others, what is alluring about studying the mind
(and consciousness in particular) is exactly the qualitative discrepancy between the
squishy grey matter of the brain and the fact this supports human lived experience
in its infinite variety—including, of course, the many modes of enjoyment offered
by music. But this dichotomy is also a source of anxiety—on all sides. For the
rigorous empiricist, any explanation of mind that is not grounded in matter would
smack of metaphysics: there must be nothing more. For others, any explanation of
mind that limits the richness of lived experience—knowable as such only from a
first-person, subjective perspective—to description in purely neurophysiological
terms would be unthinkably reductionist: there must be something more. The anx-
iety, then, revolves around the question of whether consciousness—the very

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80 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 13(1–2)

phenomenon in which our being as human subjects would seem to inhere—can be

considered in the same way as any other material object of investigation in the
world. Can we treat the apparent source of our selfhood in this way without losing
the very concept of what it is to be human? Moreover, should brains and minds in
any case be the only, or even the key, terms of reference as we seek to understand
consciousness?

Music, culture, and consciousness

What if we were to approach these problems from another perspective—one that
encompassed collective human experiences of doing, making, and signifying, and
their associated states of consciousness? This would be the space of culture, a space
of activity and production as real and material as any other facet of the universe.
What if we refused to consider consciousness as existing outside these conditions,
and therefore chose to roll them into the inquiry? This would mean a refusal of
the reductionist path, without necessarily cutting loose from a materialist
account—but invoking a more extended, more humanizing understanding of
materialism. More radically still, this might move the terms of the debate
beyond the binary opposition of physicalism vs. idealism, perhaps deconstructing
it, perhaps even prompting the revaluation of notions repressed under the sign of
Western post-Enlightenment Reason—especially if this also meant an openness to
cultural formations other than Western. It is from this space that those working in
the arts and humanities have much to offer the study of consciousness.
If these were true of culture(s) in general, what is it that music in particular has
to offer in this context? Does music simply offer an insight into consciousness—in
principle no better or worse than a whole range of other human activities and
interests (e.g. gardening or golf), though certainly of interest to musicians—or
does it have a special claim in this respect that may be of broader significance?
Those seeking to advance the latter strong claim might choose to emphasize
music’s ontological grounding in sound and time—as has Laird Addis (1999: 69)
in his assertion that ‘music represents possible states of consciousness’. Addis’s
point about the temporal determination of both suggests a salutary corrective to
the habitual preoccupation with non-temporal visual perception in certain quarters
of consciousness studies (most notoriously the fixation on the colour red in the
qualia debate) that has perhaps generated as much heat as light. Paying due atten-
tion to the structured temporality of music, then, might help bring a much needed
focus to the key dimension of time in the constitution of consciousness.
Music might have further grounds for its claim to a strong relationship to con-
sciousness—based on the way that it combines social, conceptual, technical, emo-
tional, perceptual and motor attributes; the way that it is distributed in/around
societies; the high value that is placed upon it in many cultures; the fact that it
seems not to be the official medium of communication in any culture—and there-
fore perhaps escapes formalized social controls, arguably remaining closer to a less
obviously ideologically regulated imprint/reflection of ‘what it is like to be a

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Clarke and Clarke 81

human’ (in the spirit of Thomas Nagel’s (1974) essay, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’).
Moreover, philosophers, psychologists and musicologists from many very different
perspectives have argued that music has the capacity both to reflect human sub-
jectivity and to be a powerful element in constituting it. These points indicate a
prima facie case for music as offering significant insights into consciousness—with
a further important complementary perspective on that relationship. If music has a
special relationship to consciousness, we might also ask: What can we discover,
explore or claim about the specific nature of musical consciousness? What kinds of
musical consciousness are there? How do they come about? What do they mean—
what is their significance? Is there even such a thing as ‘musical consciousness’?

Music and consciousness: A project outlined

This, then, begins to mark out some of the terrain that would define the study of
music and consciousness, and it was with just such an intent that we convened the
first International Conference on Music and Consciousness in July 2006. Jointly
organized by Sheffield University Music Department and Newcastle University’s
International Centre for Music Studies, the event proved to be an energetic dia-
logue between an eclectic range of positions—in many ways a model of the kind of
inter- (or multi-)disciplinarity that consciousness studies promises. In the wake of
this conference, we determined to extend its findings in what became a major edited
book, Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural
Perspectives (Clarke and Clarke, 2011), drawing together a number of papers
from the conference, asking contributors to develop their ideas further, and invit-
ing additional perspectives from other authors. To the best of our knowledge, this
represents the first book-length collaboration devoted solely to music and con-
sciousness. Considered as a whole, the collection both acknowledges and contrib-
utes to debates in consciousness studies at large, but it also maps out areas that
could be seen as peculiar to music and consciousness. Some of the larger issues
discussed above are addressed, others remain relatively unexplored (and hence
particularly open to future discussion—as discussed below), while yet further ques-
tions are raised. Our volume’s subtitle, ‘Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural
Perspectives’, announces the broad conceptual categories into which our authors’
contributions fall. As well as crediting our collaborators’ role in this venture, the
following outline of the volume’s narrative threads illuminates the astonishing
breadth of approaches that results from one discipline within the arts and huma-
nities reaching out to others.
Given the intensity of debates around first-person experience in consciousness
studies, and with this a resurgence of interest in phenomenology, it is appropriate
that Edmund Husserl makes several appearances. David Clarke and Eugene
Montague offer complementary takes on temporality as a fundamental and recur-
rent link between music and consciousness. Montague, in his essay
‘Phenomenology and the ‘‘hard problem’’ of consciousness and music’, points
out that music has its own version of the issue that has loomed large in recent

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82 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 13(1–2)

philosophical and scientific studies—the relationship between subjective and

objective perspectives on experience. Montague explores the physical gestures of
the performer, and embodied cognition in general, as a fruitful way to approach
that ‘hard problem’. David Clarke, in ‘Music, phenomenology, time consciousness:
meditations after Husserl’, examines the complex relationship between phenom-
enological and semiological understandings of music and consciousness through
the window of time. He also explores the polar tension between Husserl’s phenom-
enology and Derrida’s critique of it, considering what the experience of music
might have to offer in response to the critical question of what is most primordial
or essential to consciousness: the unceasing, differential movement of meaning, or
some pure flow of subjectivity that underpins all our experience. These core epis-
temological issues are also at the heart of Michael Gallope’s deconstructivist
approach to the phenomenology of consciousness: ‘Technicity, consciousness,
and musical objects’. Invoking both Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Gallope fore-
grounds technicity as a synthesis of technology and inscription that puts the history
and materiality of music in the critical spotlight and that articulates a decidedly
post-Husserlian, and arguably post-humanist, position. In related fashion, Ian
Biddle (in ‘Listening, consciousness, and the charm of the universal: what it feels
like for a Lacanian’) critiques phenomenological approaches for the assumptions
they bring to listening—not least under the Husserl-inspired notion of ‘reduced
listening’ propounded by Pierre Schaeffer. Drawing on a track by Madonna, and
the writing of Lacan and Žižek, Biddle casts doubt on the idea of ‘pure’ conscious-
ness and the apparently universalizing assumptions behind it, as well as the eclipse
of the particular, and indeed the vernacular, that this has historically entailed.
Bennett Hogg (in ‘Enactive consciousness, intertextuality, and musical free impro-
visation: deconstructing mythologies and finding connections’) also argues for con-
sciousness as culturally and historically situated, and for ‘sonic intertexuality’ as
operative at every moment in the practice of musical improvisation. Derrida is
again invoked here in a critique of attitudes that assume improvisation to
emerge from some originary, ‘natural’ or pre-cultural space. If Hogg in effect
still argues for the pertinence of phenomenology, this is a phenomenology con-
strued, after Francisco Varela and others, as thoroughly enactive—consciousness
as something we do, rather than have.
That notion—of consciousness in practice—also lies at the heart of accounts that
consider music and consciousness from Eastern perspectives. From the standpoints
of their respective Buddhist traditions, Bethany Lowe and Ansuman Biswas under-
score how meditation is above all a practical pathway for developing consciousness.
From his particular standpoint as a multidisciplinary artist, and not least an impro-
viser (like Hogg), Biswas (in ‘The music of what happens: mind, meditation, and
music as movement’) offers a richly personal account of music and consciousness
that is at every stage informed by the practice and principles of Vipassana medita-
tion. Lowe’s essay —‘‘‘In the heard, only the heard . . . ’’: music, consciousness, and
Buddhism’—further explores some of the key aspects of Buddhist thought, espe-
cially the place of sound and music in its accounts of consciousness, going on to

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Clarke and Clarke 83

consider the place of Buddhist notions of consciousness in the work of a number of

Western composers. In complementary fashion, but this time within a Hindu philo-
sophical framework, David Clarke and Tara Kini take an ethnographic and philo-
sophical approach to one of the oldest styles still practiced in Hindustani music. In
‘North Indian classical music and its links with consciousness: the case of dhrupad’,
they show how this vocal tradition both emanates from and is able to instil deep
states of consciousness. While all these studies foreground cultural perspectives on
music and consciousness, their perspectives are no more or less ‘cultural’ than any
other account in the book, and they make as strong a claim as any to its philosoph-
ical strand. Not least, they confront Western mind–body dualisms with altogether
different formulations of the relationship between matter, mind, and consciousness;
and by insisting on philosophy as at once an intellectual and practical activity (read-
ily absorbable into all aspects of life, including musical life), they recover notions of
the spiritual as a legitimate topic of inquiry.
The critical scrutiny of conventional dualisms—as well as a concern for the
experiential dimension of performance—also obtains in Meurig Beynon’s essay,
‘From formalism to experience: a Jamesian perspective on music, computing, and
consciousness’. Here the philosophical tenor shifts to the American pragmatic
tradition, and in particular to James’s radical empiricism. Beynon draws on ‘empir-
ical modelling’ techniques from computer science to explore issues in the modelling
of musical consciousness, and in doing so signals a turn to a series of psychological
perspectives. In the first of these, Lawrence Zbikowski (in ‘Music, language, and
kinds of consciousness’) foregrounds questions of corporeality and memory struc-
ture as he considers a variety of ways in which the kind of consciousness that is
associated with attending to music differs from the kind of consciousness asso-
ciated with attending to language. Eric Clarke, in ‘Music perception and musical
consciousness’, uses ideas from James Gibson’s ecological approach to perception,
Gerald Edelman’s distinction between primary and higher-order consciousness,
and Daniel Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts’ model, to explore the consequences for
consciousness of the reciprocal relationship between musical materials and percep-
tual processes. Alicia Peñalba Acitores (in ‘Towards a theory of proprioception as
a bodily basis for consciousness in music’), Rolf Inge Godøy (in ‘Sound-action
awareness in music’), and Andy McGuiness and Katie Overy (in ‘Music, conscious-
ness, and the brain: music as shared experience of an embodied present’) take a
variety of approaches to a central question for both music and consciousness: the
embodied character of human experience, and the function of embodied cogni-
tion—of which music is a prime example—in the constitution of consciousness.
These accounts, which further deconstruct entrenched mind–body dualisms, draw
upon studies ranging across aesthetics, phenomenology, the philosophy of mind,
and neuroscience. Extending these psychological perspectives are investigations
that explore people’s experiences of music in more and less ‘extraordinary’
and ‘ordinary’ states of consciousness: strikingly altered states of musical
experience induced by drugs, as discussed by Jörg Fachner (‘Drugs, altered
states, and musical consciousness: reframing time and space’) and Benny Shanon

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84 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 13(1–2)

(‘Music and ayahuasca’); and an entire gamut of conscious states revealed by the
experience of music in people’s everyday lives, as discussed with great vividness by
Ruth Herbert (‘Consciousness and everyday music listening: trancing, dissociation,
and absorption’).
One of music’s strongest claims to a voice in the more general field of conscious-
ness studies is its extraordinary reach and cultural diversity. Tia DeNora (in
‘Practical consciousness and social relation in MusEcological perspective’) focuses
on consciousness formation in the pragmatic circumstances of a mental health con-
text in which music plays a seminal role, presenting musical consciousness as a
medium for social relation, regulation, and self-presentation. Taking the social con-
text of Latin American political song, Richard Elliott (in ‘Public consciousness,
political conscience, and memory in Latin American nueva canción’) adapts ideas
from Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain how music can articulate a collective con-
sciousness in moments of socio-political trauma. In the process, he draws attention
to the claim (arguably under-explored in scientific and philosophical studies) that
consciousness (at least its distinctively human form) has a strongly public dimen-
sion—a perspective that connects his analysis with that of DeNora’s. Analogously,
Jeffrey Kurtzman, in ‘The psychic disintegration of a demi-god: conscious and
unconscious in Striggio and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo’, offers a corrective to ‘presentist’
tendencies, by showing us how, as far back as the early 17th-century, a work such as
Striggio and Monteverdi’s opera offered an aesthetic exploration of the relationship
between conscious and unconscious in the human psyche. Kurtzman’s deployment
of early-20th-century Jungian concepts in a discussion of early-17th-century music
and drama reminds us not only that history entails a dialogue between past and
present, but also that psychoanalysis (itself an historically occasioned and condi-
tioned movement) offers its own models for understanding consciousness.
As well as spinning out these several narrative threads, our volume also threw
several recurring themes into significant relief; and these will surely be avenues for
further inquiry. One such is the relationship between listening and consciousness. A
second might be encapsulated in the question: Where is consciousness? Should
consciousness only be identified with a narrow and brain-bound notion of mind,
or might we imagine it as a more extended, and in some sense public, agency of our
own and others’ bodies, artefacts, and performances—in short as a distributed
property of brain/mind, body, and world? A third theme picks up the central
question of the relationship between temporality and consciousness. And a
fourth articulates the ways in which music makes manifest different levels and
modes of consciousness: primary (or ‘core’) and higher order; present and
retentional or recollective; everyday and beyond/behind the everyday; captured-
in-language and evading language.

Consciousness as discourse
On the one hand, then, this overview demonstrates continuities and connections,
and on the other it lays bare the sheer discursive multiplicity generated by

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Clarke and Clarke 85

considering music and consciousness in conjunction. If this makes it impossible to

distil any single thesis, it might instead point to epistemic diversity as one of the
volume’s more salutary implications. Critical and cultural theory offers conscious-
ness studies the insight that the instability of a term’s meaning is something that
might be embraced—reflexively absorbed into its usage. ‘Consciousness’ (and for
that matter ‘music’) is a sign: not a pre-ordained, already delimited object or con-
cept waiting to have a label stuck onto it; but an idea which comes into being in the
very act of signifying it. And the ways we choose to signify it, the ways in which we
relate this signifier to other signifiers and other discursive networks, are (pace
Saussure) far from arbitrary. Slavoj Žižek (1989: 87–8) makes an analogous
point with reference to the signifier ‘democracy’: although, theoretically speaking,
the signifier might exist in a ‘pre-ideological’ moment, when it circulates in a free-
floating discursive network, the moment any group (liberals, socialists, commun-
ists) actually uses it for an interested purpose it becomes pinned down, in the
process fixing an ideological field around its own nodal point. So too with con-
sciousness. Each discipline (or subdiscipline) will want to stitch ‘consciousness’ into
its own discursive quilt of signifiers, each producing its own ideological field.
This plurality of definitions, and hence ideologies, is a condition of multidisci-
plinarity, and our aspiration for the volume was not to resolve these manifold
perspectives into some kind of unified account, but to allow them to speak to
one another and to open up still further dialogues with other constituencies. On
the one hand, then, our book extends an invitation to other disciplines across the
arts, humanities, and sciences. On the other, it also represents an inner multidisci-
plinarity, pointing to new possibilities for conversations within musicology,
broadly defined. If bringing music into discursive relation with the study of con-
sciousness does not miraculously clinch definitive solutions in either field, it has
nevertheless generated a new intellectual formation around both of them—which
leads to the question of where next?

Future directions
At the time of writing, we are preparing a second international conference, to be held
in Oxford in April 2015 (this time with an additional collaborator, Ruth Herbert,
who also contributed to the Music and Consciousness volume). Because we will base
the programme on an open call for papers, it remains difficult to predict the exact
directions in which the debate might turn—whether we will find tangible continuities
with the previous conference and the book, or whether, given a new set of contin-
gencies, discontinuities will be more in evidence. Nonetheless, we will attempt to
ensure that at least some of the so far under-explored areas of the landscape are
addressed. Salient for the present context, these are territories on which the huma-
nities more widely have a legitimate claim, but also raise the question of how huma-
nities researchers might relate to those in other fields—in particular, science.
For example, one topic ripe for investigation is music and unconsciousness.
While this might seem to be a perverse negation of our topic, it could be argued

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86 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 13(1–2)

as its essential underside—paradoxically an aspect of consciousness even as con-

sciousness occludes it. From a musical standpoint the workings of the unconscious
are evident on many fronts, from compositional decision making to the irrational
workings of opera plots. While the latter has already been seen as offering rich
pickings for those interested in the links between music and psychoanalysis, it is in
examining questions such as the role the unconscious plays in performance and
listening that music studies might productively work in conjunction with the cog-
nitive sciences and neuroscience. Just what is going on in the brain and body, say,
in the living presence of the improvised musical moment, where performers’ actions
leap ahead of conscious deliberation—even transcend it? Or what of those hardly
conscious judgements about musical style and cultural identity that recent research
shows we can pick up from less than half a second of musical sound, and the
cultural empathy or alienation that may follow? And yet, the mixed terms of
such questions point to fundamental differences between investigative epistemes
as much as they invite their collaboration. While ‘brain’ and ‘body’ signify objects
that science comfortably has the wherewithal to investigate, it would perhaps
baulk at notions such as ‘living presence’, ‘transcendence’, ‘unconscious judge-
ment’, ‘empathy’ or ‘alienation’—or seek to translate them into its own
metaphors. And what, in any case, is a ‘moment’? And why ‘brain’ rather than
‘mind’? In other words, we are again reminded of the role of discourse in the study
of (un)consciousness—the way the different connotations of the different words we
use establish different (and frequently incommensurable) sensibilities and values.
‘Brain’ and ‘mind’, then, do not just innocently signify objects: they construct
them—in different ways and with different disciplinary ramifications.
Our intent would not be to argue for a rigid discursive apartheid, however. It is a
positive aspiration, for example, to share a debating table with neuroscientists at our
forthcoming conference, though in seeking a more extensive, richer dialogue next
time around we are certainly not planning to give up the territory of consciousness
studies to the scientific sphere. The field needs the distinctive discursive formations of
the humanities precisely because the claims of science far from exhaust understand-
ings of consciousness. Paradoxically, while science is self-evidently a distinctively
human discursive formation, and consciousness is distinctive to our humanity, there
is no simple mapping between those domains. It is in that open space that the
humanities—and music among them—rightly stake their claim, a claim that need
entail no hostility towards fellow prospectors in other disciplines. The trick will be to
let neither the predilections of successive neoliberal governments and their funding
priorities nor the exclusivist claims of a fundamentalist scientism, nor yet the antag-
onism of anti-scientific dogma, spoil the party.

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Author biographies
David Clarke is Professor of Music at Newcastle University. He is a music theorist
with a wide range of research interests, encompassing analytical, philosophical,
cultural, and critical approaches to music. With Eric Clarke he is co-editor of
and contributor to Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and
Cultural Perspectives (OUP, 2011); and he has published widely on the composer
Michael Tippett, including a monograph, The Music and Thought of Michael
Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics (CUP, 2001). He has also investigated
issues around cultural pluralism, one aspect of which is his more recent turn to
the study of North Indian classical music, in both theory and practice.

Eric Clarke is Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and a

Professorial Fellow of Wadham College. He has published on issues in the psych-
ology of music, musical meaning, and the analysis of pop music, including
Empirical Musicology (OUP, 2004, co-edited with Nicholas Cook), Ways of
Listening (OUP, 2005), The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (CUP,
2009, co-edited with Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink),
Music and Mind in Everyday Life (OUP, 2010, co-authored with Nicola Dibben
and Stephanie Pitts), and Music and Consciousness (OUP, 2011, co-edited with
David Clarke). He is an Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for
Musical Performance as Creative Practice (2009–14), is on a number of editorial
boards, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

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