Submitted Abstract
The naive conviction that language and music are two clearly distinct forms of expression is the offspring of a “physico-mathematic” approach on language and music, which reduces linguistic and musical phenomena into purely analytic elements. Against this disconnection of language from music, I will propose an alternative description of meaning in language and music. On the lines of M. Merleau-Ponty, C. S. Peirce, and L. Wittgenstein, I will examine the phenomena of auditory perception under a holistic framework, the latter which the “microgenetic school” has suggested as a tool to explain the developmental aspect in linguistic forms. In this respect, I will further suggest that various forms of symbolization share a common functional ground upon which they intertwine.I believe that the dynamic synergy between linguistic and musical forms in a piano masterclass environment is a case which proves the limitation of physico-mathematic semiotics. I will focus on both the internal and external dynamicity of language and music in this environment. By internal dynamicity, I refer to the intrinsic mode-switching (i.e., the cognitive process of [pre-reflective > metaphoric/synesthetic > reflective]) in each symbolic forms, and by external dynamicity, I refer to the transmodal process between different forms and its synergic effects. Note that this project starts from the whole to arrive at its parts. In other words, the object in question is the piano masterclass construed as a holistic lived musical experience, only through which its two formal parts (i.e., language, music) may subsequently emerge. The framework of this lived experience which I will call “a synechistic mediation of lived musical experience” is therefore a mixture of Peirce’s synechism (continuity), Merleau-Ponty’s corps propre (one’s one body), Wittgenstein’s Abbildung (projection). In time, it will inspire a new horizon of reading Peirce as a phenomenologist.