Abstract
Susanne Langer’s idea of the primary apparition of music involves a dichotomy between two kinds of temporality: ‘felt time’ and ‘clock time’. For Langer, musical time is exclusively felt time, and in this sense, music is ‘time made audible’. However, Langer also postulates a ‘strong suspension thesis’: the swallowing up of clock time in the illusion of felt time. In this essay, we take issue with the ‘strong suspension thesis’, its philosophic foundation and its implications. We argue that this thesis is overstated and misdirecting insofar as it purports to describe what we experience when we hear music with understanding, and that it rests on a contested presupposition concerning the conceptual primacy of memory-time.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 35-56 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | Estetika : The Central European Journal of Aesthetics |
| Volume | 58-59 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Tenth Annual Conference of the European Society for Aesthetics, which was held at Alma Mater Europaea, Maribor (Slovenia) in 2018, and at the Seventh Conference of the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group, which was held at King?s College London in 2019.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s).
Keywords
- Langer
- Memory
- Music
- Time
- Tonality
- Wittgenstein
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Visual Arts and Performing Arts
- Philosophy
- Literature and Literary Theory