A Reflection on Musical Experience as Existential Experience: An Ontological Turn

Author(s): Frederik Pio and Øivind Varkøy

Source: Philosophy of Music Education Review , Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 2012), pp. 99-116
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/philmusieducrevi.20.2.99

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A Reflection on Musical
Experience as Existential
Experience
An Ontological Turn
Frederik Pio
University of Aarhus Denmark
frpi@dpu.dk
Øivind Varkøy
Norwegian Academy of Music
Oivind.Varkoy@nmh.no

In the current world of education, politics and public opinion, musical experi-
ence is increasingly threatened. It is designated ever more as an expendable
luxury. This kind of general trend has hardly left the thinking in the field of
music and music education untouched. Inspiration comes from the technical
rationality of our time. This rationality affects an oblivion of ontology. In this
article we discuss this trend related to Martin Heidegger’s thinking concerning
the human existence in the world, artworks and notions like “being” (Sein) and
“oblivion-of-being” (Seinsvergessenheit). We think that it is possible to see this
“oblivion-of-being” in relation to the trend in cultural and educational politics
as well as in music educational thinking to focus on the instrumental useful-
ness of learning music.

© Philosophy of Music Education Review, 20, no. 2 (Fall 2012)

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100 Philosophy of music education review, 20:2

The Need for an Ontological Turn

In this article we reach for an existential theme that connects to Heidegger’s
phenomenology, which he presents as ontology.1 We choose this perspective to
uncover and safeguard the fundamental importance of musical experience in
human life today. In the current European world of education, politics, and pub-
lic opinion, musical experience is increasingly threatened by being designated as
an expendable luxury.
This general trend has not left the field of music education untouched,
since this field embraces the objectivizing, technical rationality of our time. It
is precisely this rationality that affects an oblivion of ontology. Examples of such
oblivion are the objectivization of musicality as a measurable object;2 the ten-
dency of music teaching to focus on the outer, technical layers of the musical
work;3 the influence of the “hard,” quantitative research of psychology of music
(as science), that has inoculated the field of music education against ontological
reflection;4 and instrumental thinking within music education.5 The cultivation
of modern subjectivism runs through all four tendencies, which together illus-
trate that music education has only to a limited extent disengaged itself from
the paradigm of Descartes. The Cartesian subject observes the world (including
aspects of music education) as an object, which at a distance can be controlled
and mastered by virtue of the theoretical knowledge the subject holds about that
object. This is why this article takes the multifaceted life-world of music as a
starting point.

Music as a Multifaceted Life-world

Frede V. Nielsen claims that the musical object constitutes a whole life-world
in the form of a wide spectrum of experiential possibilities. He divides music into
various layers: acoustic, structural, bodily, tensive, emotional, and existential, and
he understands these layers of meaning as corresponding to comparable layers
of human consciousness. So it is that the layers of meaning in music can only
be found as possibilities, as potentials to be realized through their conjunction
with experience. Music education’s main concern is to further communication
between music and humans. The music education focus is, however, not always
clear in all the conjunction between music’s layers of meaning and conscious-
ness. There is an inclination to look away from profound perspectives on musical
objects, and much educational activity appears to concentrate on bringing pupils
into contact with the “outside of music,” or that aspect of music which can be
described technically and manageably.
We are very much aware that to use expressions like “outside music,” and
“non-musical values of music (education),” and, then again, the “intrinsic value

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 frederik pio & Øivind varkØy 101

of music” is to expose ourselves to accusations of romanticism. But to level such

accusations would be to jump to wrong conclusions, and involve a fundamental
misunderstanding. We think that if we, as philosophers of music education, are
no longer able to relate to the idea that music has value in itself in music educa-
tion, and if we are no longer able to think that there are some outcomes of music
education that have to be labeled “non-musical,” we are in fact throwing away
some very potent weapons of resistance against technical rationality, instrumen-
talism, and a commercial way of thinking that embraces all fields of life. Indeed,
to accept such criticisms would be to participate in the modern obeisance to
instrumental reason and technical rationality.
In line with Hannah Arendt,6 who was a student of Martin Heidegger and
was in many ways inspired by him, we think that such an attitude can all too
easily lead to a denial of human freedom, and even to totalitarian pedagogical
and educational ideologies. From our point of view this is exactly what is hap-
pening, at least in our part of the world. Not long ago, when the former minister
of education in Norway discussed closing down the subjects of music and art in
general education in favor of another called “creativity,” he spoke about the value
of this new subject more or less purely in terms borrowed from economic and
commercial life. Since this minister represented the Left Socialist party, which
is to the left of the Social Democratic party in the Norwegian government, it
would seem that socialists as well as conservatives are in thrall of a philosophy of
education that is fundamentally based on economic arguments. Hand-in-hand
with this trend, technical rationality is dominating educational thinking as a kind
of totalitarian ideology that presents itself as the one and only way of thinking of
education, thereby marginalizing and suppressing other discourses. It would be a
pity if philosophers of music education who regard themselves as liberals or even
radicals have no way of dealing with this development.
In this context we will argue that our thinking is a form of critical philosophi-
cal thinking that has critical political potential as well. Let us develop this a little
further. We find that there is a trend in music educational thinking and educa-
tional politics to focus on the “non-musical values” of music education in the
form of the instrumental usefulness of learning music. Music educational activi-
ties are promoted with reference to the usefulness of teaching and learning with
respect to ends of a general pedagogical or political character. This means that
in education today we are in many ways dealing with music as an instrumentalist
subject; based on an understanding of music as a means, a tool, an instrument for
something other than experiencing music, making music and “musicking.”
At the same time, the dichotomy between “education in music” (music as an
end in itself) and “education through music” (music as a means) seems false and
slogan-like. In music education, as well as in the philosophy of music education,

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102 Philosophy of music education review, 20:2

these two perspectives are not only connected but indivisible. In the Scandina-
vian context, a number of thinkers and researchers in music education (includ-
ing one of the authors of this article, Øivind Varkøy) have contributed to the
deconstruction of the ends/means dichotomy, arguing that if we in music educa-
tion are wedded to the dichotomy between music as an end and music as a means
for something else, we conceal that we all are using music for “something else”
in some way or another. Such discussions even turn the idea of the autonomy of
music upside-down by claiming that musical autonomy involves some sort of self-
realization, which certainly has to be understood as a non-musical value. This
means that arguments for music as an end in itself, in a paradoxical way often
turn out to become an argument for music as a means. Music then seems always
to be some form of means. Varkøy, for instance, has argued that even the most
self-declared autonomist is likely to end up with an answer that has something to
do with quality of life and happiness. So what then is left? Must we accept that
music (in the context of music education) is always a means, either to happiness
in some sort of Aristotelian or non-Aristotelian (hedonistic) way, or social skills
and better grades in mathematics? Is a term like “the value of music in itself” dis-
solved as a meaningful concept in the music educational context?7
There is a need for re-thinking the term “values of music in itself” in the con-
text of music education. In this context we find Arendt’s way of thinking about the
different human activities of labor, work and not least action, very fruitful. The
first form of “vita activa,” labor, is cyclical, and has no beginning and no end. We
always have to work, for instance, to produce food, and so on. The second form of
“vita activa,” work, uses means to achieve an end, and has in this way both a be-
ginning and an end, as is the case for instance when a carpenter produces a chair.
The third form of “vita activa,” however, action, certainly has a beginning, but it
has no clear or predictable end. Actions are social activities, things people do to-
gether with other people. While things produced by labor and work have no end
in themselves, they are means, while actions can be characterized as being ends
in themselves. The modern understanding of the field of vita activa, however, is
according to Arendt reduced to more and more focused productive work—labor
and work—thereby forgetting the form of activity which Arendt calls action. In
modernity, solely the activity that produces a product is seen to be important. It is
useful. If an activity does not give rise to a product it is deemed useless. This kind
of thinking holds, for Arendt, an anti-humanistic tendency. It does not take into
account any activity that has no end beyond itself—any activity which is free and
unfettered and which therefore expresses human freedom. Modernity’s tendency
to deny human freedom is, according to Arendt, a cornerstone of totalitarian
ideology.
In the light of these worrying tendencies, it seems important to re-think terms

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 frederik pio & Øivind varkØy 103

like “values of music in itself” and “music as an end in itself.” One way of doing
this could be to think in terms of Arendt’s concept of action. Arendt understood
the creation of art as a form of work, which means that works of art are to her
means, and not ends in themselves. We will, however, take this one step further
by understanding music as action, so as to bring the term “musicking” into line
with Arendt’s thought. Rather than thinking of music as just a work of a compos-
er’s production, Christopher Small uses the term “musicking” to mean any form
of musical participation, be it on behalf of a performer, listener, practitioner,
composer or dancer, even the ticket seller or cloakroom attendant. “Musicking”
means music “primarily as action rather than as thing . . . .”8
According to Arendt’s critique of modernity, thinking of life in terms of labor
and work only, produces an experience of life as an unending chain of means.
One is unable to distinguish between utility and the meaning of that utility. This
points toward the dilemma of meaninglessness in the modern age. Everything
is useful for something else. Even activities that traditionally have had intrinsic
value are given instrumental functions. In contrast to such reductionism, Arendt
emphasizes the value of forms of activity that have their ends in themselves: prac-
tical action; social activity. The end of action is nothing more than the activity
itself: to realize ourselves through action and speech.
However, what does this “to realize oneself in action and speech” mean? Is
this not an activity which is quite clearly end-means-oriented, wherein the end is
to produce “individuality” with action as a means? No, not according to Arendt.
She insists on the idea that actions are ends in themselves. It is simply a sort of
failure of thought to thing about action as if it is labor or work. By not taking
into account the specific freedom of action as an end in itself, many of us have
assumed that all talk about “music as end” and “the intrinsic values of music,”
implies that music is nothing more than a means towards self-realization.
Now we turn our attention back to Nielsen and his suggestion that the music
education focus on the existential layer of music is not always clear. We will
discuss musical experience as existential experience, and relate this discussion
to Heidegger’s thinking about human existence in the world, artwork, “being”
(Sein) and the “oblivion-of-being,” for these terms can illuminate discussions of
the tendency in music education to lack focus on the existential layer of musical
experience.

Musical Experience as Existential Experience

When we talk about musical experience as “existential experience,” we mean
to say something about musical experience in relation to what we call existen-
tial questions. The question of meaning is relevant here, as are thoughts about
human dignity, the problems of suffering, hope, time, death, belonging, and co-

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104 Philosophy of music education review, 20:2

herence—individual existential experiences that clear the ground for a renewed

contact with our own being. Having an experience generally means to be hit,
shaken up, or affected in some way. Such experiences go beyond customary
boundaries, shake us out of our usual patterns, and cause us to know our own
subjectivities from unfamiliar angles. Hans Georg Gadamer writes that the real
experience is one in which a person becomes aware of his/her own finiteness.9
Every single experience, therefore, becomes a kind of painful experience. In this
way we are brought into contact with significant dimensions of being human,
into the realization of our limited control over the world.
But what place does music have in this? Musical experience seems to be
particularly well suited to bringing us into contact with the basic conditions of
our lives, such as dependency, vulnerability, mortality, the fragility of relations,
and existential loneliness; in short, our lack of control. These are the frames of
human existence, and as we shall show, this being is opened up by the artwork,
because artworks are among the things that, according to Heidegger, have the
ability to arrest us in our daily instrumental concerns with things that exist rather
than things which have “being in themselves,” as do “angst” (fear/anxiety) and
boredom.10
We live in a culture that values individual mastery, authority, and achieve-
ment above all else. Everything that reminds us of dependency, vulnerability,
mortality, and so on, is regarded as unwelcome, as a source of discomfort, and
therefore as something to be defeated. However, musical experience as existential
experience involves putting aside the tendency to conceal problematic human
basic conditions, by breaking through the outside of being to bring us into the
presence of its inside, or, in Heidegger’s terms, it brings us from the realm of
mere “ontic” appearances to an ontological “rootedness.”
When we feel shivers down our backs, when our hairs stand on end, when
we go alternately hot and cold, when our pulse races, when our moods change,
then music has brought us into contact with one (or several) of the basic condi-
tions of being mentioned above. This is no mystery, but the experience of having
something happening to me that is beyond my control. Music can pull us into
ontological awareness. The moment we are wrenched away from what is usual,
controlled and controllable, chosen and planned, we become aware of our own
vulnerability and smallness in the world, and therefore of our general depen-
dency, vulnerability and mortality, our loneliness and the fragility of our relation-
ships. We are reminded of our own existential situation as human subjects, and
are thrown into a sort of forgotten depth of the world, of being. Seen from this
point of view a philosophical focus on our existential situation is a fundamental
aspect of a critical philosophy that holds the potential for political thinking and
acting, not least in the thinking of Arendt.

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 frederik pio & Øivind varkØy 105

It is most important at this stage to make clear that only the music to which
we are sufficiently open and receptive can reveal its potential. Music’s potential
to affect us must be matched by our own ability or will to be affected. The existen-
tial experience of a piece of music does not come about automatically but only if
we are receptive to it. Neither is theoretical or conceptual schooling of any help
to such musical experience. It is because this kind of musical experience clearly
evades language that we will, in the following, link our thinking to Heidegger’s
universe of terms as tools to open up the ontological dimension.
We lay such emphasis on the existential nature of musical experience in order
to counter the educational, cultural, and political tendency toward a reductive
conception of musical experience. A reductionist tendency within the field of
music education research, at least in Scandinavia, is manifest in a lack of focus
on the existential role of music in people’s lives. As we have said above, this lack
is connected to Heidegger’s claim that our epoch is marked by an “oblivion-of-
being.” We think that it is even possible to see this “oblivion-of-being” in relation
to the trend in music education thinking and educational politics to focus on the
non-musical values of music education, and most especially on the instrumental
usefulness of learning music.
When Heidegger, in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (The Origin of the Work
of Art), emphasizes how a work of art holds the potential to throw human beings
back into a new sensitivity to the world and to the basic conditions of life, it is as
if the intrinsic value of the artwork is closely connected with its world-opening
force, and its potential to realize the truth of being. According to Heidegger works
of art have “thingly” properties but are not things of use but works—artworks
that cannot be used for anything. They are things people have made that oppose
use. Useful articles have a tendency to disappear in their use. They withdraw
themselves in their application. For instance, we do not really think about the
hammer when we are hammering. Works of art, however, are in possession of a
sort of stubbornness which makes them come forward. Therefore they do not let
us pass by unconcerned. When works of art appear in this way, it is not just the
artwork that becomes visible to us, but the entire world of which these works of
art are parts, and to which we belong. The world becomes visible to us as such.
Heidegger then is critical of the modern idea of the self-sufficiency of art. In his
line of thinking the work of art is not related primarily to itself, but to the world.
So the intrinsic value of art could be said to be that it enables us to stop and re-
flect on our being-in-the-world. In so doing works of art help us to realize aspects
of our lives that we often do not notice, or in other words, they enable existential
experiences.
When Heidegger speaks of “works of art” he inevitably provokes the modern
reader used to the critique of the Western focus on art as works or objects. Ques-

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106 Philosophy of music education review, 20:2

tions arise concerning musical contexts wherein the idea of music as an object
is less important, and wherein music is a verb as well as a noun. Small’s term
“musicking” is fundamental to such critiques of our traditional, object-focused,
Western concept of music. To this we address one comment. In his afterword
to Heidegger’s Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, Gadamer discusses Heidegger’s
focus on the inner being of art as poetic activity. For Heidegger “the object is
objecting,” and it is this that constitutes its objectivity. Consequently, it would
be fundamentally wrong to interpret Heidegger’s concept of the “work of art” as
referring to “a dead object/thing” separated from “the living subject.” This kind
of critique of Heidegger’s object-focused thinking concerning the artwork does
not take into account his fundamental critique of the Cartesian idea of an inner
consciousness that stands over and against an outer world that is essentially differ-
ent from that of consciousness.
Heidegger criticizes the modern understanding of art which focuses on aes-
thetic experience. Art is dying, he says, if it’s only function is to provoke super-
ficial experiences that do not bring us into the presence of being. If we are to
relate to Heidegger’s thinking about art, the idea of the intrinsic value of art then
has to become linked to its potential as reflection and thinking. This sounds
paradoxical. Is it possible to say that the value of music in itself is reflection and
thinking? Does music not become a means or instrument in this context—an
instrument for philosophical knowledge or something like that? We think not, for
if we understand the intrinsic value of music to be the unique potential of music
in human life, it becomes possible, with Heidegger, to focus on the intrinsic
value of music as reflection and thinking about being and truth. In this way, the
term “value of music in itself” become associated with music (and musicking)
as a meaning-creating reflection. The intrinsic value of art is not then limited to
the artwork as a personal expression of the artist, or as the object of superficial
experiences, but it is linked to the importance of art for everyone as stimulating
reflection.
However, this discussion has to take into account Heidegger’s thinking con-
cerning artworks, along with Small’s term “musicking.”11 We think that terms like
“the intrinsic value of music” or “the value of music in itself” cannot be linked
to music as a product, but rather to musicking as a process of meaning-creation.
A musical product (a composition, a score, or a CD-production) does not have
any value in itself. It is when products meet people, when music becomes mu-
sicking, that value occurs. If we think about musicking as “action”12 it is possible
to reconstruct or re-think the value of “music in itself.” As said above, we even
think that such a reconstruction is necessary when, in both educational and cul-
tural politics, music is increasingly understood as a means, a tool, an instrument
for something else other than its experience. Reconstructing the term “value of

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 frederik pio & Øivind varkØy 107

music(king) in itself” is important if music educators want to be able to resist

modernity’s worship of instrumental reason, which, according to Arendt, holds
an anti-humanistic tendency when it does not take into account any human ac-
tivity that has no end beyond itself, any activity which is free and unfettered, and
which therefore expresses the distinctive qualities of human freedom. The wor-
ship of instrumental reason and technical rationality has to be seen as a denial of
human freedom, and this denial should be seen as a cornerstone in the building
of a totalitarian educational ideology.
We will now look at Heidegger’s Dasein-analysis of “human existence in the
world,” because the determination of the artwork can be shown to have a central
function in the analysis of the relation between person and world. But before we
can advance towards bringing out the Heideggerian consequences for such an
understanding of the musical artwork and for reflections on music education, we
will first have to clarify a few of Heidegger’s most famous ideas.

Heidegger’s Existentialism
Existential thought, going back to Søren Kierkegaard, is characterized by
turning away from a very long Western tradition, a tradition considering the
neutral, theoretical outside-gaze on the world as the primary means to aspire to
truth. Heidegger, writing in the 1920s, picks up this inspiration from Kierkegaard
in his concern for the question of being. Instead of “man” Heidegger speaks of
“Dasein,” meaning “being-there.” Dasein-analysis argues that our ways of under-
standing the world provide the basis for understanding ourselves,13 which implies
that there is no self prior to the world. As human beings we are, according to
Heidegger, characterized particularly by our relation to “being” (Sein), but since
that which we are is constituted by our Da-sein, our relation to “being” (Sein)
also becomes a relation to that which we ourselves are (that is, our Da-sein). Thus
Dasein is characterized by having an essential relation to itself. Being and time
thus emphasizes the committed and involved character of Dasein. The structures
that constitute the concrete existence (Existenz) of the individual are designated
Existenzialität.14 In Being and Time Heidegger is concerned only with the on-
tological level of these trans-cultural and a-historical structures that determine
concrete, individual existence, and not with how individuals shall conduct their
lives. Later in the 1930s Heidegger abandons this quasi-transcendental stance.15
Before we go into the concept of “being” we should begin by noticing Hei-
degger’s claim that the being that constitutes us has been forgotten or obliter-
ated. One of the symptoms of this amnesia of being is our Western inclination to
consider the distanced neutrality of theoretical knowledge as having the highest
claim to truth. The belief in this neutrality of theoretical knowledge rests on the
assumption that the subject in its inner core of consciousness can create mental

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108 Philosophy of music education review, 20:2

representations of the outer world, representations that rest on a correct corre-

spondence between the subject and the outer object (-world). For Heidegger
there is no neutral, theoretical position to attain, for man is always-already thrown
(Geworfen) into the world in which he or she belongs.16
More specifically, Heidegger claims that the neutral matter-of-fact, theoreti-
cal approach to the world of modern man is made possible entirely through a
different and more fundamental way of coping with the world. A way of coping
that comes before any division between subject and object. He calls this way of
inhabiting our world Sorge (care).17 Heidegger claims that any attempt to com-
prehend the world theoretically (with discourse, intellectual reflection) must al-
ways be conditioned by the pre-reflexive, fundamental Sorge (care) of man as a
world-inhabiting being.18 This Sorge reflects on what we are rather than what we
know in a cognitive sense. Sorge (the care-structure) constitutes the engagement
with which we do all kinds of coping: ensuring, looking-after, taking-care-of, pro-
viding, fixing, musicking, and so on. The structure of this care is the typically
human way in which we attend to this and that. This is the aspect of human life
that is more fundamental than our theorizing and conceptualizing activity. The
care-structure constitutes a knowledge that cannot be summarized and set out
explicitly in an exhaustive cluster of theoretical premises.19

Heidegger’s Ontology
Heidegger’s relevance to music education lies in his point that an essential
part of our everyday, cultural practices (all the ordinary mayhem stuff people
cope with in general) roots us deeply in the world. This unity just happens—all
the time—as part of that being which we are, as we shuffle down that road. This
being-in-the-world is not intentionally chosen by us. It is not something we have
consciously selected as subjects by means of an explicit, mental, analytical pro-
cess. Essential parts of the account we have to settle with the world, in the sense
of a “lived-world,” on the contrary belong to something pre-reflexive, something
non-discursive, un-thought. This “being-in-the-world” is something that is not
mentally controlled by the individual subject. We are entrusted with the world in
a way that to a large extent cannot be calculated or rationalized. There is a world
out there, and we feel it when it suddenly shoves back at us. Quite unexpectedly,
we meet external resistance and, for a moment, know that we are not in control.
More than a few crucial situations in our lives are characterized by the fact
that they tend to leave us powerless, naked, humbled. These experiences make us
feel small in the world to which we are exposed as something larger than we are.
This can most certainly take us into distress, but, paradoxically, we need to feel
the world shoving back at us—exercising an existential pressure on us. We need

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 frederik pio & Øivind varkØy 109

to experience ourselves yielding to this pressure of the world to be able to gain

experiences of high intensity that can have a lasting influence on our lives.
Not least, this experience of world-yielding resistance seems to be an essential
motivational factor for learning and understanding. Growing as a human being
means exposing ourselves to situations wherein we at some point reach some
kind of limit. We reach a boundary that somehow cuts us off. This delimitation
has to do with the experience that what we are is not sufficient to get us where
we need to go. As a consequence we have to become more, to advance ourselves,
move forward in ways where we modify the knowledge and skills at our disposal.
In this way we can create a situation in which we at some point will be able to
reach the goals we have set before us. In other words we need something outside of
ourselves. We need to get in contact with the world as an ontological condition,
as something that was there long before anybody had thought about us and our
generation, that is, something into which we are thrown. We have to return to a
fundamental contact with the world as the “primary first” (das wirklich Erste) in
our life.20 That is what Heidegger’s ontology is about.
In contradistinction to the ontological level there is the level of epistemology
(the ontic). This is what Heidegger is turning away from.21 A principle problem
with the epistemological perspective is that a contended meaning potentially can
be rather freely reversed. Viewpoints can be pulled back because it is a result of
a selected perspective that has been subjectively applied and constructed accord-
ingly. We construct and re-construct meaning and significance in the process of
designing our own subjective self. In relation to these perspectives applied and
constructions made there is a risk that they perhaps to a certain extent become
marked by a casual non-committal? What should prevent a given social construc-
tion from being freely reversed or modified at leisure? The epistemological per-
spectives and constructions we so carefully establish should find a way to protect
a core of commitment, so that a position cannot just be reversed and a new one
applied. The epistemological knowledge we have of the world originates to a cer-
tain extent from the subject and its consciously selected strategies, methods, in-
terests, and values that have been carefully picked out and thought through. Ac-
cording to the ontological turn in Heidegger we have to consider knowledge not
as the product of a self-sufficient subject reshaping the world in its own image.
Knowledge must be accepted as something that opens up to something outside
of ourselves—something that exhausts the subject’s belief in its own autonomy.
In other words the ontological turn is about exceeding the logical and analytical
processes inside the mind of the individualized, mental subject. Knowledge is
yielded through the analytical cultivation of the vast domain of pre-reflexive,
non-discursive being-in-the-world as the un-thought point of departure for any

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110 Philosophy of music education review, 20:2

insight into the human condition. The uncovering of this being-in-the world is
what Heidegger’s ontology (again) is about.
According to Heidegger, what defines us as humans are the cultural prac-
tices wherein the bond between the individual and the world is suspended into a
lived unity. Much of that which we are dealing with on a daily basis is anchored
in implicit meanings and understandings. This implicit level is built into the
bodily patterns in which we routinely respond to the world. Much of this lived
experience belongs to something so natural, obvious, and close to us, that it has
probably never been explicitly lifted into language with a view to analytical re-
flection. A large part of this lived experience has never been conceptualized by
theory. This pre-reflexive way of being-in-the world concerns how we are deeply
rooted in background understandings and bodily inhabited cultural practices
which are neither subjectively intentional nor consciously selected. This un-se-
lected “something” Heidegger calls “being.” It comes from somewhere else other
than our own consciousness. In other words, we are always thinking “through”
something. And this “something” through which we are thinking is something
we have not necessarily thought about. Much of the lived background resources
with which we think never becomes objectivized as an explicit item for critical
self-reflection.
That with which we are thinking is the horizon of being (Sein) in which we
are rooted in our Dasein (being-there). This being is that background horizon
that maintains and constitutes that which we are. One’s subjective manner and
one’s style (including views, frames of mind, values) are inscribed in such a back-
ground-repose. All things and matters appearing in the world are brought about
against such a background of cultural practices. In other words a lived familiarity
with one’s world—a style, a temperament, a mood—is a necessary condition for
any further acquisition of knowledge to take place. Without a “rootedness” in the
world and without belonging in a cultural community we are unable to make
sense of the world, and are thus unable to transcend ourselves to become more.
It is the human significance of these lived background-practices that Heidegger
is exploring by addressing the question of being. His phenomenology thus comes
forward as ontology.

The Musical Artwork

Heidegger’s Ontology of Art. For Heidegger, music is a priviledged escape
hatch to being, a being that, as mentioned above, has become increasingly dis-
torted or forgotten. More specifically Heidegger perceives the artwork as a prism
for the being to which man has a relation. One of the artworks with which Hei-
degger illustrates this point is Van Gogh’s famous painting of a pair of peasant’s
shoes.22 For Heidegger this painting opens up that world (or that being) which

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 frederik pio & Øivind varkØy 111

makes it possible for these shoes to be what they are, which is to say a trivial and
everyday piece of equipment. That which makes these peasant’s shoes into what
they are, is their embeddedness into that being which is the entire context of
practices that constitute the everyday world of the peasant.23 In other words: her
care-structure. The ontology of this painting is thus about disclosing the Dasein
of the peasant. It is in this way that the artwork opens up an experience of being.
In this painting a world is opened up that joins the shoes with their meaning.
In relation to the lived world of the peasant this artwork has a gathering func-
tion. It is a prism for the cultural paradigm that yields meaning and significance,
even to such a trivial piece of everyday equipment as a pair of shoes. With this
example Heidegger illustrates how an artwork can articulate that understanding
of being that characterizes a given culture. When he talks about the ontology
of the artwork, he is referring to it as a condensed manifestation of that cultural
comprehension of being in which it is rooted.24 The artwork gathers and centers
our self-perception. It gathers and articulates what this being is, so that it can
be perceived as the collective background-understanding that applies to a given
culture or a regional community. When we understand our communities and we
embody the essential cultural practices attached to these communities, then we
understand ourselves. That is why artworks are important.
From this perspective what will be experienced as important and meaningful
in musical works is connected with a conspicuous experience of encountering
the lived world or being of a given community. Being is the essential atmosphere
of a community, or the frame of mind or style of life of a culture. Heidegger men-
tions a classical Greek temple as an example of this: “The temple thus gave things
their look and men their outlook on themselves.”25 So the Greek person received
something. There was a world exercising a pressure that could not necessarily be
reflected on or controlled by classical Greek men and women. To understand
how the artwork can have anything to do with Heidegger’s notion of being, we
must make a difference between the outside of music (the epistemological, the
ontic) and the inside of music (the ontological). The clarification of this point is
better made by means of another distinction. Thus we will distinguish (i) “social
relations” from (ii) “cultural background-practices”:

(i) “Social relations” signify what Heidegger calls the ontic level.
This is the subjective choices and the private selections we con-
sciously exercise when we position ourselves in social spaces
and interactions. It is our private, mental, calculated attempt
to regulate the spaces of relations in which we find ourselves.
Here “social relations” are the product of reflexive contingent
subjects socially constructing a consensus in time and place.

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112 Philosophy of music education review, 20:2

(ii) “Cultural background-practices,” on the other hand, signify

the ontological level. This concerns an existential dimension
which the subject has not selected as something consciously
intended. This ontological level weaves in the pre-reflexive
familiarity with the cultural background-practices through
which the individual person inhabits her world. The ontologi-
cal “being” Heidegger addresses does not stem from the inner,
mental consciousness of the reflexive subject. His ontology is a
description of the shared patterns of cultural practices in which
the world appears as a lived world.26

The question now arises as to how the musical artwork has anything to do with
the ontological background-practices in (ii) ?

The Musical Work. Heidegger’s perspective makes it possible to see how

musical works from our time, such as for instance Imagine (John Lennon) or
Thriller (Michael Jackson) are characterized by having communicated directly
and unmediated to entire generations of people, and in some cases on an almost
global scale. Musical works like these are characterized by the ways in which they
gather people together around a unique moment, when the world suddenly, and
all in a moment, seems to hold the promise of a new beginning.
A hope of encountering the world anew was woven into the musical experi-
ence of these works. As examples, one can point towards other important events
(Ereignis) connected with the live performances of important musical works or
songs. People fly across continents to witness major Wagner-performances (Mikel
Dufrenne has written on this27). During the 1960s the guitar-music tied to the
name of Jimi Hendrix (such as his overdrive version of the American Anthem)
became a strong prism for the young flower-power generation and its belief in a
new world. The flower-power generation as well as the Wagner followers men-
tioned above are just examples of how music is essentially involved in peoples’
very different drafts for a new understanding of being. In Richard Wagner a world
was called for of myth, heroism, wonder, and supreme redemption. In Jimi Hen-
drix and John Lennon a world of brotherhood and transgression into ecstasy was
called upon as a key to a new hope for the world. The music mentioned here was
originally an attempt to summon and redefine what is important and beatiful in
human life. And in the same way the overall mood and sentiment of our time
has a soundtrack, or multiple soundtracks. But it is important to emphasize that
our understanding today of what makes the music mentioned here meaningful
and intense is closely tied to the plateau where we are overtaken by Heidegger’s
notion of being.

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 frederik pio & Øivind varkØy 113

In the section on the care-structure it was emphasized that a culture or re-

gional community cannot carry out an exhaustive outside-gaze on its own under-
standing of being. Thus, a cultural paradigm cannot set out explicitly the premises
for the way it puts the world in order and understands it.28 A culture or a com-
munity is unable to make sense of the world on the basis of theory, principles,
and rules only. In the light of this condition the musical artwork as event—or as
improvised emergence in a culturally shared space—attains the character of a
prism, in which the frame of mind and the projection of being characterizing a
given culture can see itself summarized in a soverign manifestation. From this
perspective the music appears as a holistic, unfractured articulation that gathers
us around moods of humility, joy or fascination.
A regional community, according to Heidegger, cannot rationalize itself in
terms of a system consisting of underlying theoretical principles. Theory can only
happen on the basis of enacted cultural practicies (Sorge). In this light the musi-
cal work as an event constitutes a space in which the background understandings
of a culture can be mirrored and assembled in some kind of collective mood or
atmosphere. This is why music should be a compulsary subject in general educa-
tion. For it is in this subject that a student can come into contact with what he
or she comes from: her Dasein, or her experience of herself as part of something
non-individualized. From this perspective the encounter with the musical work
or song is not purely a private, psychological experience. On the contrary in the
ontology of musical experience the self is pulled into a new sensitivity of what his
or her world “is all about.”
How music is music thus becomes a question of how the world is opened
for our musical Dasein. And this has nothing to do with making students into
musicians. The musical artwork situates man in the world anew, as the artwork
becomes a key to a renewed sensitivity to the given lifeworld that has shaped the
individual self in question.29 Here we see that the committed ways in which we
inhabit our world are closely connected to musical artworks. Paradigmatic musi-
cal artworks invite us to be a part of a shared world–to vindicate a certain style of
life. The enacted musical artwork puts forth a shared belonging to a set of cultural
practices whatever that might be (patriotism, honor, the sacred, transgression,
underground-authenticity, erotic sensual pleasure, and so on). In other words, a
community is directed. A certain mood is installed for all participants to share. A
collective way of making sense of the world suddenly appears in and around the
manifestation of this music in the event of its realization and emergence on the
radar of the people in question. Music is thus a cathedral in a suitcase, within
which oppositions are reconciled and a stronghold created that excludes those
who do not belong in this given community.
For example the Manhatten songbird Ella Fitzgerald thus gathered the mid-

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114 Philosophy of music education review, 20:2

twentieth century US-American consumer around the dream of the shimmering

possibility: prosperity, love, and romance waiting just around the next corner for
the average American to discover. Or take the techno artist Fluke and his track
“Zion” as an epitome of the digitalized ritual of the underground techno-rave.
This is an improvised “spread-the-messsage” and “crawl-through-the-hole-in-the-
fence” kind of event, though only for those with sufficient symbolic capital to be
“in-the-know” that particular night. Also, here music emerges in the workings of
a new fresh world disclosed as it comes forward, swept in new sensual input. In
this techno-soundscape of a parallel world beside the world the subject is mo-
mentarily dissolved. It invites us to “kiss that frog”30 and jump into this sonorous
timbre enmeshed with synchronized backbeats that drive the entire rave towards
Dionysian frenzy.31
Richard Wagner, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Ella Fitzgerald, Michael Jack-
son, and Fluke present examples that are saturated with the message that when
music connects with its ontology, it is experienced as a kind of prism that works to
summarize the attunement of a given community.32 Their world is made sense of
in the enactment of this music in a way that transgresses what aesthetics is about.
The enactment of this music thus rather comes to revolve around an experience
of truth (rather than beauty per se). This music attains a hidden presence, for
everything that is said and done within the community in question. It is precisely
that quality that makes such music art for Heidegger. That which is beautiful
in life and worth believing in—the projection of truthfulness characterizing a
given community—is gathered in the music as a work or event. This ontologi-
cal turn does not come about through the above mentioned category of ontic
“social relations.” The significance of the musical artwork, as described above,
has only very little to do with constructions made through consciously analyzed
selections executed by a mental proces in a subject. Rather, what we pursue hap-
pens through the above mentioned category (ii): human Dasein rooted in those
unintended, “unselected lived background practices” that Heidegger designates
as “being” (Sein).
When the ontology of this music mentioned above is uncovered, the possibil-
ity arises for music to become a compass—a cornerstone of authority—for our
lives. The horizon of our life is thus sustained in the experience of music. When
we let ourselves in for an experience of a song, a musical work, or event, this
act elucidates that we as human beings are standing out of something that over-
shadows what we are as individuals. The musical experience is an opening of the
“rootedness” of our Dasein in being (Sein). And this “being-in-the-world” cannot
be described as subjectively generated, selected social constructions. It is rather
the ontology of the music itself we are uncovering. To clarify what the ontology
of the musical work is about, it becomes necessary to address one’s own being-in-

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 frederik pio & Øivind varkØy 115

the-world. To recognize that musical experience as existential experience takes

us beyond our self-enclosed, self-satisfied, superficial happiness is the first stage of
allowing a questioning of one’s own ontological “rootedness” in the world. This
situation invites us, however, back towards an ontologically oriented reflection.

Notes
1
Substantial critique has been launched against Heidegger owing to his disastrous con-
nection back in the 1930s to the German NSDAP Nazi-party. The psychological subject
“Herr Heidegger” was seduced and this human fault must be dealt with in the open.
But this regrettable attachment does not mean that Heidegger’s philosophical oeuvre and
his incontrovertible significance for 20th century thinking should be ignored. The Nazi
affiliation has received a balanced exposition in Safranski, R. Ein Meister aus Deutsch-
land (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Verlag, 2007). Another recommended source on this issue
is Thomson, I. Heidegger on Ontotheology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005).
2
Frederik Pio, “Kan man med en test måle et menneskes musikalitet?” Kognition og
Pædagogik, 18 årg., nr. 70 (2008): 18–30.
3
Frede V. Nielsen, Almen musikdidaktik (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers’ Forlag,
1994).
4
Karl Heinrich Ehrenforth, “Wahr-Nehmung und Methode. Zum Problem einer
Methodik der didaktischen Interpretation von Musik,” in Schmidt-Brunner (Hrsg.): Meth-
oden des Musikunterrichts (Mainz: Schott, 1982), 263–274.
5
Øivind Varkøy, “Instrumentalism in the Field of Music Education: Are We All Hu-
manists?” Philosophy of Music Education Review 15, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 37–53; and
Wayne Bowman, “Music Education in Nihilistic Times,” Educational Philosophy and
Theory 37, no. 1 (2005): 29–39.
6
Hannah Arendt, Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (Chicago: The University Press
of Chicago, 1958).
7
Varkøy, Musikk—strategi og lykk (Oslo: Cappelen Akademisk Forlag, 2003), 113ff.
8
Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middle-
town: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 138.
9
Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Metode (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960).
10
Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Frankfurt A.M.: Vittorio Klos-
termenn, 1935/36).
11
See Small, Musicking.
12
We use the term “action” according to Hannah Arendt.
13
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1927/2001), 15–16.
14
Op. cit., 12.
15
Heidegger, in Brief über den Humanismus (Frankfurt A.M.: Vittorio Klostermann,
1949/2000).
16
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 135–136.

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116 Philosophy of music education review, 20:2

17
Op. cit., §41.
18
Heidegger, Brief über den Humanismus, 53.
19
Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 59; also Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the connection
between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics” in C. B. Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 289–316.
20
Cf. Karl Heinrich Ehrenforth (2001) “Lebenswelt–das ‘wirklich Erste’” in (Hrsg.)
K.H. Ehrenforth, Musik unsere Welt als Andere (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann),
33–58.
21
Cf. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klos-
termann 2003), 94.
22
Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt A.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950/2003), 18ff.
23
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §17.
24
Heidegger, Holzwege, 19.
25
Ibid., 29.
26
This distinction is made to support the claim that descriptions of peoples’ being-in-
the-world need not necessarily embrace a social constructivist position.
27
Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Evanston: Northwest-
ern University Press, 1973), 11–12.
28
Hubert Dreyfus (2008): Heidegger on Art, p. 10. Manuscript retrieved July 2009
at: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/189_f08/pdf/Heidegger%20OWA%20sept13_
08.pdf A shortened version of this text can be found in the Blackwell companion to
Heidegger.
29
Heidegger, Holzwege, 59.
30
Cf. Peter Gabriels record Secret World Live (1994), track 8.
31
Cf. the rave-scene in the motion picture The Matrix, part 2: “Reloaded” (2003).
32
Elsewhere an exposition of this idea has been given in terms of an analysis of “the
un-heard” dimension of music. This as part of the fourfold: (i) the hearable, (ii) the heard,
(iii) the over-heard, (iv) the un-heard. Cf. Pio, (2007): ”Om det uhørte.” in Frede V. Niel-
sen, et.al. (eds.), Nordic Research in Music Education Yearbook, Vol. 9 (2007), 121–152.
Heidegger talks of a similar fourfold (das Geviert) in Martin Heidegger, Vorträge & Aufsä-
tze (Stuttgart: Neske 1954/2000), 144.

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