About

This project investigates the Romantic lied through a phenomenological lens, adopting, in particular, the ideas of Merleau-Ponty. I argue this framework renews a musical knowing that rectifies the tendency of some contemporary musicology to turn music into ‘empty trucks for the carrying of semantic freight’ (Johnson 2020: 9). The lied, a quintessential medium for Romantic subjectivity where the personal and the social, the somatic and the semantic are in constant dialogue, resonates with Merleau-Ponty's body-oriented ontology, formulated through concepts such as silence, depth, enlacement, the imaginal, felt solidarity, singing the world and 'the flesh of the world'. These concepts, when used as analytical tools for musical emergence, dismantle the gulf between subject, object and predicate, providing a new paradigm of musical meaning that reshapes the debate between music as 'music' (Hanslick, Zangwill) and music as 'discourse' (Wagner, Kramer). This thesis draws on existing literature on Romantic song/subjectivity/philosophy, performance studies, musico-textual analysis and carnal musicology while adding a phenomenological dimension. It opens onto a nuanced existential conception of song that is beyond rigid binaries by exploring the ‘fleshly’ intertwining of musical personas (composer, singer, pianist, listener) evoked through song and how easily boundaries between hearing, sensing, seeing and thinking dissolve. Each section of the thesis explores an existentially evocative concept central to a Romantic-phenomenological worldview: Silence, Distance, Fragment, Illusion, Catastrophe, God. To vitalise theoretical language under the rubric of synaesthesia, the style of the thesis takes inspiration from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. I include a marginalia of figures, impressions and dispersions, from personal reading, listening and viewing, alongside the main text. The addition of this personal, 'auto-ethnographic' layer also demonstrates how the Romantic lied expresses themes that are still compellingly relevant today. I hope ultimately, to show ways in which music inspires philosophy, not just the other way around.